Dreamcast: Peter Moore's Tale of Dreamcast's Halcyon Days

[nz17]

Via Peter Moore's Official Blog:

And what a launch line up we had. 18 titles was probably 3 or 4 too many, but we had all genres covered, featuring classics such as Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, NFL 2k and Ready 2 Rumble. All were brought to glorious 3-D life through the Power VR graphics chip. The "biggest 24 hours in retail entertainment history" occurred on 9/9/99, with day one sales totaling just under $98m To support this outstanding portfolio of games, and the need to explode out of the blocks at launch with the console, we knew we needed a disruptive, attention-grabbing campaign that would get gamers talking and drive anticipation. Thus was born the "It's Thinking" campaign, where we urged you to "Not think out loud, it might hear you" informed you that "Outsmarting it will only make it smarter" and warned you that "You know it's alive. Worse. It knows it's alive" Quirky and slightly dark, the ads generated more PR than the media spend - always the metric of a successful campaign...The media plan came to a crescendo on launch night as we debuted " " during the MTV VMA's, still ten years later one of the more dramatic and lavishly-produced video game commercials.

Full story: 9/9/99 Ten Years After