Thu, Sep 18, 2008 | 11:39 BST
Peter Moore: My words on RROD were “twisted so that it looked like I didn’t care”
Peter Moore has claimed that comments made him during the peak of the RROD 360 furore were twisted by the press.
“A year and a half ago we had a very difficult time with Xbox 360, with the hardware issues, and there are things that I’ve said that have been immortalized, and you try to say, well that’s not what I meant,” he said.
“Infamously, a guy called Mike Antonucci of the San Jose Mercury news interviewed me and was really pushing hard, and of course when you’re dealing with something as sensitive as defective hardware, you’ve got to be very careful what you say, not only about messaging but it’s about legal issues. If you say things out of line on behalf of a company, you’re exposing the company to lawsuits, people will take what you say and use it in a court of law – and Microsoft knows that very well.
“But I was focused at that time on trying to get customer service up and running to take care of some hardware problems, and I said, ‘You know, things break’, and then I was called Marie Antoinette – let them eat cake. But the context I was using wasn’t flippant, the sentence was, ‘things break, but our job is to go fix it for you’. So what I said was twisted to that it looked like I didn’t care.”
Moore was speaking in the fourth part of an ongoing Guardian interview. Take a look. There’s loads “Moore” there.
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Posted in: Microsoft, Trade, Xbox 360
Tags: peter moore
11 comments
#1
that_happy_cat
18/09/08, 11:41 am
Interestingly I think Marie Antoinette’s words were twisted too. She actually meant her famous expression as a genuine offer of an idea to help…
From Phrase Finder:
“The original French is Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. It has been suggested that the speaker’s intention wasn’t as cynical as is generally supposed. French law required bakers to sell loaves at fixed prices and fancy loaves had to be sold at the same price as basic breads. This was aimed at preventing bakers from selling just the more profitable expensive products. The let them eat brioche (a form of cake made of flour, butter and eggs) would have been a sensible suggestion in the face of a flour shortage as it would have allowed the poor to eat what would otherwise have been unaffordable. It’s rather a mouthful, so to speak, but if the phrase had been reported as ‘let them buy cake at the same price as bread’ we might now think better of the French nobility. ”
The victor writes history. If Peter had left the industry after that comment then he would have lost and it would have been his legacy.
Just thought that was an interesting aside
#2
patlike
18/09/08, 11:43 am
#3
patlike
18/09/08, 11:44 am
If we had an “approve” comments button, that would have got one from me.
#4
Blerk
18/09/08, 11:44 am
I’m going to read this whole thing over lunch.
#5
that_happy_cat
18/09/08, 11:45 am
Thanks Pat
#6
Tonka
18/09/08, 12:52 pm
Things break. Sounds better. Goes well with his evil grin to
#7
Blerk
18/09/08, 12:56 pm
Really great interview – can’t quite believe it took me this long to get around to reading it!
#8
BraveArse
18/09/08, 1:10 pm
I assume there’s another tomorrow? Will be interesting to hear his plans for EA Sports… don’t know if it’s a coincidence or down to his influence already but I’m hopelessly addicted to NHL09. And that’s the first time an EA sports game has gripped me for well over a decade.
#9
El_MUERkO
18/09/08, 1:22 pm
he should save all these titbits for his biography
#10
No_PUDding
18/09/08, 1:24 pm
Shit, it’s an awesome thought that the industry is getting so big that we will one day have biography’s of great game developers.
I’d love that.
My dibs on Will Wright first.
#11
Quiiick
18/09/08, 1:38 pm
The most interesting sentence in the whole interview is when Peter Moore says: “No, I never said what I wanted to say.”
In other words: We will never ever hear what really happens behind the scene. From no one.
So we might as well stop reading all these videogame related sites and blogs …