The board I can understand, the guys having worked at SGI before and seeing how much more you could extract of the arch by having total control over the hardwar

The board I can understand, the guys having worked at SGI before and seeing how much more you could extract of the arch by having total control over the hardware (minus the CPU, obv). Essentially building customer-oriented x86 SGI machines, branching out of the gaming market and challenging workstation vendors. A 64 bits Opteron+Voodoo based Windows machine would have been something to behold. But the Sega thing probably torpedoed the funding that would have been required for them to become independent of graphic card vendors. They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.