Former Nintendo of America vice president of sales Bruce Lowry has said that leaving the company to help form Sega of America in the mid 1980s was "probably the biggest mistake" of his career
"To this day, I look at it as probably the biggest mistake I ever made," the former exec who helped launch the NES told Time Extension. "It was a difficult decision. I had been pursued by [Hayao] Nakayama, the Japanese president of Sega, because they wanted to come to the U.S."
Sega had apparently been contacting Lowry for over a year with the exec showing little interesting in leaving the moustachioed plumber for his blue rival. But, then, he had a thought. "'Do you think you could do it again, or were you just lucky?'" The question "ate" at him, so Lowry decided to test his luck.
"It was not an easy decision," he contined. "Like I say, to this day, I wish I had never made that decision. That will always haunt me that I made it. But I moved down to San Francisco and was basically a company of one person. Sega already had the arcade division in San Jose, but I became the founder and president of Sega of America. I hired everybody, set everything up, and it was ready to go and attack Nintendo. And it was basically the same marketing plan I'd used at Nintendo."
From there, work on bringing the Sega Master System to US retailers started almost immediately, and Lowry had no trouble getting the hot new console on store shelves since he already knew all of the buyers. He sold them on the NES, after all.
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