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As Sonic turns 25, former Sega boss Tom Kalinske looks at gaming’s past and future

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 17 min

Maybe we can learn about gaming’s future by looking at its past. That’s why we’re excited to announced that our closing speaker at our GamesBeat 2016 event in Los Angeles next week will be Tom Kalinske, the chairman of online game firm Gazillion and the former president of Sega of America. Kalinske is best known for introducing Sonic the Hedgehog to the U.S. during his stint running the Japanese company’s U.S. operations.

You can register for the event here. Check out the new agenda here.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.