SEGA Considers Itself “Rock ‘N Roll” or “Hip Hop” to Nintendo’s “Jazz”

Allow us to ask you a very honest question: How do you view yourself? You can take this in many ways, obviously, but we’re asking about how you would reference yourself if someone asked you to compare yourself to something. Would you reference a celebrity? Or a certain kind of product you love to use? Would you go for simple descriptors so that things don’t get “lost in translation?” While there are no true “wrong answers,” that doesn’t mean that there aren’t weird ones, and SEGA has proven that in a brand-new interview, where its President claims that the company is like “rock ‘n roll.”

Speaking to Eurogamer, company president Shuji Utsumi was talking about the company trying to revive older IPs and likened how that was how the publisher got into the console market:

“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’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 flavor of hip-hop now.”

There’s plenty to unpack there, including the “dig” at Nintendo for being like “pop music or jazz.” However, if you recall the birth of the publisher in the console market, it was incredibly rocky because it didn’t have its own identity. Nintendo had Mario and a bunch of other ips that were system-sellers, and so while SEGA’s early systems were powerful, no one bought them because they didn’t have characters like Mario.

That’s why Sonic The Hedgehog was born and crafted to be the “anti-Mario.” Even the company’s marketing strategy was done to reflect the “rebellion” era of the 90s when you needed to have an “edge” to yourself to be “cool,” which is what Sonic was.

The twist, though, is that much like rock ‘n roll in general and the “attitude era” of the 90s, things evolved and changed, which is why Nintendo was able to use its “jazz vibes” to keep things rolling, evolve where it needed to, and keep gamers happy. Meanwhile, its rival struggled mightily due to wanting to “steer away” from the “rocker” mentality that worked from it.

Still, SEGA is doing better now, and it’s clear it wants to keep “rocking” into the future.