Collection essentials #114: Sega Genesis / Sega Mega Drive

Since Nintendo’s Famicom was the first big home console in Japan, and because the NES single-handedly revived the dead home console market in America, Nintendo in the 1980s found themselves with a near-monopoly over the business. While the NES was a legitimately great console, monopolies are never a good thing. Nintendo was a bit of a bully at times due to their monopolistic power. For example, they had policies with their third-party developers that forced them to keep their games exclusive to the Famicom and NES. If they wanted to make games for another company’s console, Nintendo wouldn’t allow them to keep making games for them as well, and since Famicom and NES were so big, developers often had little choice but to comply. In America Nintendo even found themselves locked in an antitrust lawsuit filed by Atari Games at one point. For the long-term good of the industry, somebody else would have to find a way to break through and knock Nintendo down a peg.

In Japan, a console called the PC Engine wound up being the first competitor to eat into Nintendo’s market share. The PC Engine did come to America, but for various reasons (a delayed launch, poor advertising, smaller game library than in Japan) its American equivalent, the Turbograx-16, flopped. It would have to be someone else to start attracting the youth of America, and that someone was going to be Sega.

Sega wasn’t new to the video game industry in the late ‘80s. They had been an arcade developer for a long time, and they even had been making home consoles for as long as Nintendo. But their SG-1000 was soundly defeated by the Famicom in Japan. Their second console, the Sega Master System, was released worldwide and directly competed with the Famicom and NES. While the Master System saw notable success in some parts of the world, notably Brazil and parts of Europe, it was utterly trounced in North America. 

But then came the Sega Genesis. This machine was much more powerful than the NES or the Master System. The graphics were much nicer, the audio was better, the game cartridges could hold more space, and the improved power of the console meant that it could handle a lot more action happening on the screen without compromise. It was a lot closer (though not 100%) to the cutting edge arcade games that were coming out at the time. The console first launched in Japan in 1988 under the original name, the Sega Mega Drive, and launched in North America as the Sega Genesis a year later.

The Genesis was not an immediate hit. It took a couple years, but then it started to gain serious traction, and all of a sudden Nintendo found themselves neck and neck with Sega. There are various factors that contributed to the Genesis’s rise. One was the console’s sports titles, which were probably the best anyone had ever seen at the time, and Sega won endorsements from professional athletes and got their names in the titles of the games, making them much more marketable. Speaking of marketing, Sega unleashed a brilliant advertising campaign, with TV commercials that coined the effective and memorable catchphrase “Genesis does what Nintendon’t.” But of course, the absolute greatest boon to the Genesis and its rise to success was the arrival of a game featuring a certain blue hedgehog that would go on to be one of the most recognizable mascots in all of pop culture, a true rival to Mario. And with help from their marketing and said blue hedgehog, Sega successful targeted a slightly older demographic, selling the Genesis as a “cooler,” more mature console for teens and pre-teens. Fair or not, Nintendo saw themselves with the undesirable image of being a “kiddy” company that cool gamers grew out of, a reputation that would stick for over a decade. “Sega versus Nintendo” arguments were very common amongst kids at school. Now, Sega didn’t totally take down Nintendo, but the fact that they brought Nintendo down from a market share over 90% to being neck and neck in such a short time was extremely impressive, and important for the industry.

As for me, I didn’t own my own Sega Genesis until 2003, when I was 13, long after the console’s heyday. But despite not having my own, it was a bit part of my early childhood, because my cousins Kevin and Peter had one, and I was babysat by my aunt and uncle nearly every weekend, which meant I’d be playing Sega Genesis. It’s one of the great classic consoles with many games that will always be worth revisiting. Stay tuned in the weeks ahead to see my collection’s essential Genesis games!