Four words I did not expect to hear from former Xbox 360 boss Peter Moore when we spoke recently were: “I was Ken Kutaragi.” As in, Ken Kutaragi, the widely acknowledged ‘father of PlayStation’ – the engineer and businessman who designed the original PlayStation consoles and led Sony Computer Entertainment, until Kaz Hirai took over later in the PlayStation 3 era. But those four words were the words Peter Moore said.
He was referring to a role he played shortly before Xbox 360 launched, when Microsoft executives tried to put themselves in Sony’s shoes, so to speak, and figure out what the company’s plans were for PlayStation 3 – the console they’d be up against. This involved closing themselves away in a hotel room and pretending they were Sony executives coming up with a PS3 plan.
“We spent three days war-gaming prior to the launch of Xbox 360 pretending to be the other guy to understand what we needed to do,” Peter Moore told me in part two of a large Xbox 360-related interview.
“I was Ken Kutaragi, and I took the role of PlayStation and what would I do? This was a fascinating process where we war-gamed; locked ourselves in a hotel conference room for two, nearly three days, if I recall, and played out scenarios almost like it’s in the Situation Room [in the White House] and we’re figuring out… And it surfaced some of the strategies and tactics that we then deployed which became successful for us.”
That Xbox 360 era for Microsoft was characterised by Moore and his fierce challenger-brand mentality, in which Xbox took the fight to PlayStation in order to chip away at its dominant market share – which it did. This involved securing huge licenses for the platform, such as Grand Theft Auto 4, and stoking the fires of what we now know as the console war. As Moore said in a story we wrote yesterday, he was brought in especially to “start throwing punches”.
But play with fire and you might get burnt. “If you’re going to stick your chin out you’re going to get punched,” said Moore. “I got a lot of abuse, a lot of criticism. Still do, to this day, all the way back to the Sega days. People will sometimes write vile things.”
Moore famously also launched the Dreamcast at Sega, a beloved console that also resulted in Sega backing out of the console hardware business. And some people blame Moore for that – still. “I celebrate nine, nine, ninety-nine every year, the launch of the Dreamcast, and I do it because it was an amazing time in my life personally and I worked with so many great people,” he told me. “I still think the Dreamcast broke some barriers and it passed the baton to Xbox, bluntly, to build Xbox Live. There was SegaNet before there was Xbox Live.
“But there’s this internet myth that somehow I killed the Dreamcast, or I used the Dreamcast as a career stepping stone to go to Microsoft, and nothing could be further than the truth. But I will – even this last time, September 9th of 2025 – still get comments from people, who I think are old enough to know better now, of just disgusting personal attacks.”
Perhaps that’s the price of leadership, he mused. And he’s hardened to it. He’s had to; after all, he spent years leading EA. “And nobody took – and still takes – more abuse than EA,” he said. “Fine.
“But people don’t know what it takes to bring a game to market, to create these things. How much love and sweat and tears go into creating these magnificent interactive experiences. It’s always a shame; I always feel actually sorry for the people who feel compelled to type these letters on a keyboard, personally attacking developers and publishers and going after people. It’s kind of sad.”
Peter Moore has since moved on from video games. Most notably, he was CEO of Liverpool Football Club for three years, highlighting his lifelong passion for sports and in particular football. He now owns a football (soccer) team in America, part-owns a football team in Poland, and advises the football club that actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney took over a few years back: Wrexham. All of this – his whole career – he recently put down on the pages of an autobiographical book called Game Changer, which has just been released.
Parts one and part two of our big Peter Moore Xbox 360 interview are both now available on the site to read.
