Turns out vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is a gamer

Or was, before he had his Sega Dreamcast taken away

Office of Governor Tim Walz

Tim Walz, running on current Vice President Kamala Harris’ ticket as candidate for vice president in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, is a pretty big Sega fan. Or he was in the 1990s, anyway, so much so that his wife Gwen Walz had to take his Sega Dreamcast away to keep him from spending too much time with it.

The little tidbit about Walz’s personal hobbies comes from a lengthy New York Times piece about the Minnesota governor’s time as a high school football coach. The Times says that, while in this role, he developed a reputation for kindness, optimism, and what his former students said was a habit of believing in, and bringing out, the best in his teams. 

Walz voluntarily stepped down from his position at Alliance High School in Nebraska in 1995, after driving under the influence and pleading guilty to reckless driving. In 1996, he took up a coaching position at Mankato West High School in Minnesota, where he earned the trust of his new students by finding common ground – a love of video games.

“He regaled players with stories they found unusually relatable, like the time his wife had seized his Dreamcast, the Sega video game console, because he had been playing to excess,” the Times piece reads.

It goes on to tie his tactical knowledge and understanding of human nature to his success as a politician, which is all well and good, but what it doesn’t say is what game he loved so much that he had to have his Dreamcast confiscated. Was he a Shenmue buff? Sonic the Hedgehog fan? Did he get lost in the clunky, early online wonderland of Phantasy Star Online? What are his thoughts on Sega dropping hardware development? Okay, it was probably NFL 2K, but still.

These and other such important questions, you can safely assume won’t make their way into the pile for upcoming vice presidential debates, assuming there are any. Maybe one for the next rally or press conference, eh?