Most notorious was a late 2009 comment he made that seemed to cement his position as more Vader thank Luke. No, he said today, he didn't mean to sound like, his words, "a dick".
In September he had told a group of investors: "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."
Today, he said, after describing Activision as a company striving for greatness, "Sometimes that commitment to excellence, well, you can come across as being like a dick. And when I say things like "taking the fun out of making video games," it was a line that has been often-quoted lately, but it was a line I used for investors. It was mainly because i wanted to somehow come across in a humorous way that we were responsible, in the way we made our games in that it wasn't some wild west, lack of process exercise and that we really did give some thought to the capital being used to provide a return of investment to shareholders. So I say things like 'taking the fun out of video games' knowing full well that all we're actually trying to do is keep the fun in the process because, as most of you know, when you're getting into crunch time it becomes really difficult to meet those milestones or get things polished the way you would like, that isn't a lot of fun. That is not what I meant by it."