It’s been a straight up Sega love fest here lately. Not sure what it is about this first week of November, but for some strange reason I’ve simply had blast processing on the brain. I didn’t even realize it until reading Ars Technica’s retrospective, but the love in is appropriately timed; the Sega Mega Drive, our beloved Genesis, just turned twenty years old. While the Super Nintendo was my only true 16-bit love, the Genesis and I had our fair share of good times as well. Now, I’ve always understood it that Sega’s failure as a hardware manufacturer was a direct result of overextension, squandering the good will and widespread success they had with the Genesis in North America, Europe, and even South America by way of releasing too many expensive add-ons for the system that no one wanted or understood. The finicky Saturn hardware, stealthily released at an astronomical price point with too few games, and the Dreamcast’s inability to compete with Playstation 2 certainly didn’t help, but the real beginning of the end was the massive amounts of money poured into the Sega CD, 32-X, and the many different combinations of the two sold alongside good ol’ Genny. But, according to Technica, flooding the hardware market wasn’t the whole reason behind Sega’s fall from grace. According to the article, Sega of Japan shot themselves in the foot, promptly cutting off all support for the Genesis in 1995 after the Saturn launched because of sour grapes over the system’s failure in Japan and success in America.
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