Sega - Living In Shadow.

Sega has always lived in shadow. They did have their successes but never quite made it. It was a crying shame when we lost one of the pioneers of home consoles. Atari, Amiga, Sinclair, and Sega to name but a few that have fallen by the wayside. In fact we have lost all of them with the exception of Nintendo (but that's another story for another day). The birth, life and death of Sega as a console manufacturer started with the SG-1000.

The Sega SG-1000 was launched in Japan on July 15, 1983 (the same day as Nintendo launched their Famicom system, also known as the NES - Nintendo Entertainment System). The SG-1000 wasn't a complete failure and did sell pretty well in Asia but not as well as rival systems. It went through 3 revisions while on sale and also had a 4th revision in Taiwan where it was well loved, and remembered as an iconic system. The 4th revision sold in Taiwan was most likely a modified Master System. The system was also

sold in Australia, France, Italy, South Africa, Spain and New Zealand. In the original format it was never sold in North America. The SG-1000 was a second generation console while the NES was a third generation console (8bit era). While these words are kind it wasn't a popular system and the only real success was in Taiwan.

Sega's next console was the Master System. A direct competitor to the mighty NES. I'm not going to bore you with release dates and sales figures but I will say; Sega didn't do too badly with this one. In Brazil and Europe it sold well, it was on sale and selling for around 10 years. The Master System was sold in North America but couldn't touch the NES due its popularity and game library.

I spent many an hour in my miss-spent youth playing "Alex the Kidd" and "Sonic" on the Master System[2]. Quite a few friends also had Master System's which isn't surprising considering it was popular throughout Europe. On a technical level the Sega Master system was the superior machine. Even though the Master System had the Brazilian market mostly to itself, had success in Europe and was marketed in North America it still only managed a fraction of Nintendo's global sales.

Enter the Game Gear.

The Game Gear was virtually a hand held Master System. It was an all round quality piece of kit. Instead of having a monochromatic display like Nintendo's Gameboy, the Game Gear sported a full colour LCD screen. However it wasn't the first handheld to have a full colour display, that award goes the the Atari Lynx. The Game Gear also had a good set of accessories. There was a Tv tuner which allowed you to watch full colour television and the MasterGear which allowed you to play Master System cartridges on the hand held as well as car chargers and battery boosters.

The Lynx was ahead of its time and like most things ahead of its time it failed. Both the Lynx and Game Gear had poor battery life compared to the Gameboy, they also cost considerably more. The Lynx was released about 1 year prior to the Game Gear and sold roughly 5 million units. The Game Gear did much better than that selling approximately 11 million units. Both the Lynx and Game Gear's sales added together were nothing compared to the juggernaut that was Nintendo's Gameboy. The Gameboy was an unstoppable
force with just under 65.5 million units sold worldwide (that's not including sales of the Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance or Gameboy SP).

Nintendo, the thorn in Sega's side, had done it again.

Next came the greatest success Sega would ever achieve in the console market with the Sega MegaDrive/Sega Genesis.

They never released an official sales figure for the Mega Drive but estimates range from about 30 - 40 million units. Upon release the console was ignored in Japan. To try and boost sales Sega offered a few state of the art accessories such as an online banking pherial and an answering machine. Even so, it still had no success in Japan but all was not lost. Thanks to clever marketing in North America the Mega Drive did well. At the start of 1992 Sega had the advantage with a 55% market share to Nintendo's 45%, a lower price and ten times the amount of games the Snes had.

The advertising continued to market the Mega Drive as the cooler console. Due to these marketing tactics teen age boys would not admit to owning a Snes instead of a Mega Drive. Through out the early 90's Sega and Nintendo were at war. Neither could hold a lead in the market for several years and at one point Nintendo's share even dropped to 37%. Never-the-less Nintendo did end up winning the war. As always the console was very popular in Brazil and had 75% of the market there. It was also loved in Europe and enjoyed support until 1998 and sold 8 million units. The legacy of the Mega Drive still lives on through Tech Toy (Sega Firecore, Mega Drive 3 and 4).

Following the marginal success of the Game Gear, Sega had another go at a handheld console. It was called the Sega Nomad and was released in 1995 in North America.

Though the console had an NTSC/PAL switch on the internal board it was never sold in PAL regions. It was marketed as a portable Mega Drive/Genesis but was an improved version of Japan's Mega Jet (more about the Mega Jet in a moment). The Nomad had a 3.25 inch colour screen and was completely portable. Sega originally wanted the Nomad to have a touch screen interface (many years before the Nintendo DS) but at the time that kind of technology was too expensive.

Sega's Nomad could play most Sega games without an adaptor. It suffered from poor battery life.  One on going joke is X-Men requires the player to reset the game at some point to progress. The Nomad has no reset button so it was impossible to carry on. A few compatibility issues are also noted with the sister systems add-ons: 32X and the Power Base Converter. While they did work with the Nomad, the size and shape rendered them virtually useless. Imagine a handheld with a 32X plugged into the top with a game in the top of that. The Nomad only sold about 1 million units. It was a failure and the last true handheld console Sega released.

The Mega Jet, what the Nomad was based on, was a semi-portable device. It was used for in-flight entertainment by Japan Airlines. The console didn't have it's own screen but was hooked up to a small monitor used on Japan Airlines flights.

Basically the Mega Jet was a small Mega Drive. It was released in Japan for the public to buy in 1994, prior to this it could only be found on a Japan Airlines flight.

The Saturn was released on the 22nd of November, 1994 in Japan. The rest of the world saw the release in 1995. This was the 5th generation era and things were about to change. There was a new kid on the block, Sony. Sony originally planned to team up with Nintendo to make a CD based add-on for the Snes to compete with the MegaCD. However, Nintendo pulled out. Based on Sony's dealings with Nintendo they decided to release their own console, the iconic Playstation. The Saturn was a powerful beast with 2 CPU's and 6 other processors, but this made programming for the console difficult.

The Saturn was quite a popular console in Japan. About 170,000 consoles were sold on the first day of release. In North America Sega announced it would be released on September 2nd 1995. Sony announced that the release of the Playstation would be one week later. Sega had an ace up their sleeve, however. At the E3 convention in May 1995 Sega would release the Saturn immediately. This gave Sega a 4 month head start on Sony with Nintendo no where to be seen. It was mid 1996 to early 1997 before the whole world
would be able to buy the Nintendo 64. The early launch backfired on Sega as the system had very few games to begin with. Many Japanese titles would not be imported and Sony's Playstation would be $100 cheaper than the Saturn. By the time the Playstation was released in North America the Saturn had only managed to sell 80,000 units. The Playstation sold more than 100,000 systems on release alone. The Saturn was a failure. Sega lost $267.9 million, 30% of its work force had to be laid off. Sega didn't even have much success in Europe this time. By the end of its life the Saturn had sold 9.5 million units worldwide. Sony's Playstation had sold in excess of 100 million units.

Sega it seemed, was dying. There was one last chance for Sega to redeem themselves. The Dreamcast.

Released in 1998 in Japan and '99 for the rest of the world the Dreamcast featured technology that was well ahead of its time. It pioneered features that would become standard on all consoles in the future such as an internal modem to allow online play through dedicated servers. This was a starting point for all services such as the Playstation Network and the Nintendo channel. Alien Front Online was the very first game to use in-game voice chat. There was also downloadable content for games too. It was also the first of the 6th generation consoles. It was released ahead of competitors: Xbox, Playstation 2, and the Nintendo Gamecube.

With this kind of technology and early release Sega was surely onto a winner. Sadly that was not the case.

Even though there was problems with the Japan launch, the system did well in America. In the United States alone 500,000 consoles were sold in just 2 weeks. It sold so well Sega could not fulfill some advanced orders. It took just four days for Sega to make a cool $132 million in hardware and software sales. Between July 23rd and 30th of September Dreamcast sales grew 156.5%, this put them ahead of the Nintendo 64 for volume of units sold (Nintendo's Gamecube was yet to be released). This is not surprising really as the Dreamcast was 6th generation and the Nintendo 64 5th generation. But, things were about to turn sour.

Sony's launch of the Playstation 2 was the start of the Dreamcast's demise. Sega's end was nigh. Production stopped in 2001. Sega did continue to sell refurbished systems and releasing new games until 2007. Most of the games were originally developed for Sega's NAOMI arcade hardware. Sega's last first-party Dreamcast game was released on February 24th, 2004 (Puyo Puyo Fever).

A couple of Sega's computers have been missed out of this list. Most notably the TeraDrive. The TeraDrive was basically a desktop pc glued to a Mega Drive that allowed development of games. Below is a picture of the TeraDrive.

Sega spent 28 years in the business and when production of the Dreamcast ended in 2001, a piece of history died. Sega still lives on doing what they originally did- make games.