SEGA President Says SEGA Is The “Rock & Roll” To Nintendo’s “Pop Music”

Although Nintendo and SEGA are now frequent collaborators, there was a time where the two companies were fierce rivals, adopting clashing approaches to developing videogames and marketing their videogame consoles.

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, SEGA’s current president Shuji Utsumi reminisced about the relationship between SEGA and Nintendo, describing SEGA as the “Rock & Roll” to Nintendo’s “Pop Music”. Presumably, Utsumi was referring to how SEGA always tried to be more daring and against the grain, while Nintendo had more broad appeal. He also explained that SEGA was attempting to revive some of that magic in the current day, with Sonic The Hedgehog as well as other IP revivals they have in the works.

Sega somehow invented – if you compare the game business to music business – Sega’s role was to invent rock & roll, compared to Nintendo. Nintendo’s like pop music, good music, jazz…

Sega had that kind of style [back then]. Sega’s position was like, ‘If you have attitude, Sega’s the company for you, rather than Nintendo’, because of the games, because of the style, because of coolness or the kind of attitude. We have such beautiful content value in Sega, and some other IPs, so we’re trying to revive it with a little bit of the flavour of hip-hop now.

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