Kazutoshi Miyake at Sega Europe: the executive who kept Sega fighting in Europe

By the time Kazutoshi Miyake was helping steer Sega Europe through the mid-1990s, Sega was already a company with one foot on the accelerator and the other on a banana peel. This was Sega at its most Sega: loud, inventive, restless, brilliant, and occasionally so self-destructive that you wanted to take its car keys away. The company that had given Europe the Mega Drive swagger was now heading into the most dangerous period in its history. Sony was coming. Nintendo was still Nintendo. And Sega, in classic Sega fashion, seemed ready to fight everyone at once, including itself. Miyake’s time at Sega Europe, from 1994 to 2001, covered the company’s last two major console launches in the region: the Sega Saturn and the Dreamcast. Those years took Sega Europe from hope to panic, from ambitious marketing to painful retreat, and from the belief that Sega could still beat Sony to the grim realization that the hardware war had become too expensive to survive. It was either a heroic last stand or a very costly lesson in what happens when great games meet bad timing. Most likely, it was both.

The Saturn problem

Miyake’s early years at Sega Europe were dominated by the Saturn, a console that had some of the ingredients of a serious contender but not, unfortunately, the ones the market wanted most. The Saturn could be powerful, especially with arcade-style games and 2D titles, but it was difficult to explain, difficult for many developers to master, and difficult to sell against the clean, confident message of Sony’s PlayStation. Sega had heritage, attitude and loyal fans. Sony had momentum, money and a machine that made gaming feel modern, stylish and adult without making it boring.

In Europe, that mattered enormously. The PlayStation did not simply arrive as another console; it arrived as a cultural shift. It had Wipeout, Tekken, Tomb Raider, nightclub aesthetics and marketing that made games feel like part of youth culture. Sega, meanwhile, was trying to persuade players and retailers that the Saturn deserved their faith, even as the company’s wider global strategy looked confused. The Saturn was not without good games, but the market had changed. Players wanted 3D worlds, developers wanted simpler tools, and retailers wanted a clear winner. Sony gave them all three. Sega gave them the Saturn and, in many cases, a headache with a power cable.

The result was painful. Saturn sales in Europe lagged badly behind PlayStation, and Sega’s confidence from the Mega Drive era began to drain away. For Miyake and his team, this was the bad part of the story: they had to sell a machine that had already been damaged by global decisions, internal confusion and Sony’s extraordinary timing. Regional executives can market a console, support retailers and push software, but they cannot redesign the hardware or rewrite the launch strategy after the damage is done. Sega Europe was fighting uphill, in the rain, with Sony already halfway to the trophy ceremony.

The bigger Sega dream

The Miyake years were not only about consoles. Sega also wanted to become a broader entertainment brand, and nothing captured that ambition better than SegaWorld at the London Trocadero. It was big, noisy, futuristic and slightly mad, which is to say it was exactly what you would expect from Sega in the 1990s. On paper, it was a bold attempt to turn Sega into a destination, not just a logo on a box under the television. In practice, it was expensive, difficult to sustain and another example of Sega having the right kind of imagination attached to a very dangerous spreadsheet.

Still, SegaWorld matters because it reveals the mindset of the period. Sega Europe was not trying to quietly manage decline. It still wanted spectacle. It wanted presence. It wanted Sega to mean arcades, consoles, technology, music, football, youth culture and the future, preferably all at once and preferably with flashing lights. That ambition was admirable, but it also showed one of Sega’s recurring weaknesses: the company often had thrilling ideas before it had the stable business structure needed to support them. Sega could see the future. It just sometimes forgot to check whether the future had paid for parking.

When Dreamcast gave Europe one last charge

If the Saturn was the hangover, the Dreamcast was the miraculous second wind. Launched in Europe in October 1999, the Dreamcast was everything the Saturn had struggled to be: cleaner, friendlier, more developer-friendly and easier to love. It had a strong identity, a built-in online vision and a software library bursting with personality. Sonic Adventure, Soulcalibur, Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and Phantasy Star Online gave the machine a flavour no rival could quite copy. It also had the VMU memory card with a tiny screen, because Sega could never resist adding one charmingly strange idea too many.

Sega Europe threw itself into the launch with energy. The marketing was confident, loud and culturally sharp. Football sponsorships helped put the Dreamcast in front of mainstream audiences, including people who might never have read a games magazine but absolutely knew what was on a football shirt. That was smart. In a pre-social-media world, football visibility mattered. Sega understood that if it could not outspend Sony everywhere, it could at least try to outflank it in places where European culture was already looking.

For a brief period, the plan worked. The Dreamcast had buzz. Early sales were strong. Reviewers liked it. Players loved it. Retailers had something exciting to sell again. Sega fans, still bruised from the Saturn years, suddenly had a reason to speak with confidence rather than the haunted optimism of people defending a doomed submarine. Dreamcast felt fast, fresh and alive. It felt like Sega had rediscovered its nerve.

The good

The best thing about Sega Europe under Miyake was that, with Dreamcast, it made Sega feel exciting again. The European campaign had urgency and personality. It sold the console not merely as another games machine, but as a glimpse of online console gaming before online console gaming was normal. That was genuinely forward-looking. At a time when many households still treated the phone line as sacred family infrastructure, Sega was trying to convince players that the future of games would be connected. The modem noises may have sounded like a robot being pushed down the stairs, but the idea was right.

The Dreamcast also showed that Sega still knew how to make and support brilliant software. In Europe, the console became a cult object almost immediately because it offered games that felt different from the increasingly dominant PlayStation style. It was arcade energy in a home console. It was colourful, odd, fast and sincere. Even now, the Dreamcast’s reputation survives because people remember not just the machine, but the feeling around it. It felt like the last burst of the old Sega spirit: risky, inventive and a little too beautiful to last.

The bad

The bad news was Sony, again. The PlayStation 2 did not arrive like a normal rival console; it arrived like a big bang in the entire gaming industry. It had the PlayStation name, enormous hype and a DVD player at a time when DVD players were still expensive enough to make the feature feel genuinely useful. Sony did not only sell a console. It sold inevitability. That was lethal for Sega, because Dreamcast needed people to buy now while Sony could persuade them to wait.

That waiting game hurt Sega badly. A customer who might have bought a Dreamcast in late 1999 could decide to hold out for the PS2. Retailers could hedge their bets. Publishers could shift attention. Every month of hesitation cost Sega money it could not afford to lose. The Dreamcast had great games and strong early momentum, but it was trying to rebuild trust at exactly the moment Sony was asking the world to believe that the real future was just around the corner.

The ugly

The ugly truth is that the Dreamcast was not a simple failure. That is what makes the story so painful. It had fans. It had great software. It sold respectably in Europe. It restored some pride to the Sega name. But the business behind it was already wounded. Sega had spent heavily on hardware, advertising and distribution. The Saturn had weakened its position. The cost of competing with Sony had become enormous. Dreamcast could win hearts and still lose money, which is a familiar problem to anyone who has ever opened an independent cinema, a record shop or, God help them, a board-game café.

By 2001, Sega made the decision that changed everything: it would stop making consoles and become a third-party software publisher. For longtime fans, it felt almost impossible to process. Sega games on Nintendo machines? Sonic on PlayStation? The old console wars suddenly looked less like eternal combat and more like a school fight where everyone eventually grows up and ends up working in the same office. Miyake left Sega Europe’s board that same year, making his departure feel like part of a wider closing chapter. His tenure had covered Sega Europe’s final two console launches: one that struggled to take off, and one that flew beautifully before running out of sky.

What Miyake got right

It would be unfair to judge Miyake’s Sega Europe years only by Sega’s exit from hardware. Regional leaders do not control everything. They do not design the console architecture, set every global price point, repair the parent company’s finances or decide whether Sony gets to launch one of the most successful consoles ever made. Miyake and Sega Europe were operating inside a global Sega machine that was already under pressure from internal missteps, financial losses and strategic confusion.

What Sega Europe did manage, especially with Dreamcast, was impressive. It made Sega exciting again in a market where the company could easily have looked finished after Saturn. It backed a bold launch. It used football and youth culture intelligently. It pushed online gaming before most of the console market was ready. It helped give European players one of the most beloved libraries in gaming history. That is not nothing. In fact, it is quite a lot.

What went wrong

The problems were bigger than Europe. Saturn had damaged Sega’s credibility. PlayStation had changed the rules. Dreamcast arrived with better hardware, better messaging and better energy, but Sega no longer had enough financial strength to fight a long war. Sony’s PS2 was not merely competition; it was a cultural steamroller with a DVD drive. Sega could still create excitement, but excitement alone could not carry the balance sheet.

This was the pattern that haunted Sega in the 1990s. The company could predict parts of the future with uncanny accuracy: online play, arcade-quality home experiences, connected entertainment and games with global style. But being early in technology can look a lot like being wrong until someone richer arrives later and gets all the credit. Sega found the door to the future. Sony walked through it with a bigger suitcase.

The legacy

Kazutoshi Miyake’s Sega Europe years were messy because Sega was messy, exciting because Sega was exciting, and painful because the wider business had become almost impossible to sustain. But those years also gave Europe some of its most memorable gaming moments. The Saturn may have struggled, but it still had loyalists. The Dreamcast may have died young, but it became legendary. In gaming, as in rock music, dying young with a strong back catalogue is one way to guarantee eternal cool.

Miyake’s later career across the wider games and technology industries suggests that his international experience remained valuable after Sega left the hardware business. He had been there at the end of an era, helping steer one of gaming’s most charismatic companies through its most dangerous waters. The good was Dreamcast’s vision. The bad was Saturn’s collapse. The ugly was the financial reality that Sega could build something brilliant and still be unable to survive it.

That, in the end, is the Sega Europe story under Miyake. It is not simply a tale of failure. It is a story of imagination under pressure, of brave ideas trapped inside a wounded company, and of a console that burned so brightly that people are still arguing about it more than two decades later. Sega lost the hardware war, but for one brief, beautiful moment, the Dreamcast made it feel as though the underdog still had one last punch left.