Sega Did What Nitendidn't

In the beginning

there was SEGA and Nintendo. Okay, I'm lying, there was also ATARI (need an explanation?), NEC (Ever seen a TurboGrafx16 ?) and 3D0.

Those existed during a sixteen-bit era of video gaming that became the talk of school yard playgrounds.

Well, mine, anyway.

In my neck of the woods, like many, we had grown tired of the Nintendo Entertainment System. It wasn't that we hated Nintendo, at first...but hey, how long were they going to milk their now ancient console (it came to the U.S. in 1985 , the year after I was born! ) and it was 1989 already.

The arcades were full of smash hits like Outrun , Shinobi , Altered Beast , and my favorite, Golden Axe . Those games were all produced by SEGA, and I've only listed a few that were quite popular.

In 1989 they dipped their toes back into territory outside of Japan, and when they prepared their second home console to battle rival Nintendo they got smart. They built a machine, dubbed The MegaDrive (to make it sound all big and techie and awesome and stuff. ) throughout most of the world, although in my home country it's entitled the SEGA Genesis . Still a cool name, and fit well in with the American culture.

This machine was sixteen-bit in all it's glory. I still don't really know what that means, or why I should care, but sixteen is twice as many as eight. Which was how many the NES had.

The other great thing? It was basically a miniature version of their arcade machine. It was going to be easy to bring the games to the house that were popular with the questing quarter by quarter crowd.

I'll be honest. My family..we're generally the type of people who are last to get new stuff. It's not that we don't like new stuff, it's just that we like eating more. However, my sister and I got a real cool gift Christmas morning of 1993 . A new (but well used) television, a little television stand (with wheels!) and........a SEGA Genesis . With a few cool games. "Haunting, Starring Polterguy ," was my favorite. But Sonic 2 was very groovy as well.

And it had to be.

SEGA had failed at creating an iconic brand for the Genesis, let alone one that gave much identity to "SEGA" it's self. But in 1991, with anticipation of the coming Super Nintendo they had to do something real quick-like to secure the market place of sixteen bitdom.

Sonic the Hedgehog was a surprise hit, due to it's speed. They called it "Blast Processing ," to make the Genesis sound wicked cool. Sorta like how the Super Nintendo clique went around late in it's life span p0wning us SEGA lovers with the fabeled contraption and marketing word "Mode 7. "

The SEGA Genesis had a lot of great ideas. You could buy a compact disc add-on, where upon you could watch some movie scenes and press a button every couple of minutes. It was called the SEGA CD . You could even use it as a portable CD player. Not bad for something that was still hundreds of dollars anyway.

There was also a couple of other contraptions made by SEGA. They introduced a six button pad in response to the Super Nintendo 's four (and left/right triggers), there was the 32X which was basically a way to upgrade the power of the Genesis and allow a whole new set of possibilities with slightly better graphics. This was actually done in response to Nintendo's Starfox , which utilized a special chip (called the SuperFX ) to achieve the same thing.

SEGA was green, they didn't want to have to build in this special circuitry with each cartridge. It was expensive.

And of course, there was my favorite innovation:

Sega Channel.

This was a service you paid to your cable company and they would come out and give you a special game that connected to a thin black magical wire that came out from behind your television.

They always had fifty games you could play at any time, all you had to do was turn on your Genesis, browse the menu system, and choose a game. Five minutes or so later, that game had been sent to you by magic fairies and placed into that special game cartridge the cable company hooked you up with.

It was...bliss. But only lasted for a few years.

The company tried a lot to break rank and file, to kill the Nintendo crowd one console convert at a time. And it worked, for awhile...then management got in the way, as it always seems to do, at SEGA .

But we'll save that for another time....