Ah, I finally got to hear the first talk properly, even though the background noise level was pretty high.
And it strikes me that their goals were a bit conflicting, but that their infectuation(sp?) with their hw ideas probably got the better of them: They try to fit the game console into 32K, but the sound has no fancy ways of reducing memory use except from handcrafted small samples. And hw sprite re-use needs to use the blitter for animation.
20/20 is unfair though.