SEGA's Megadrive/Genesis Remembered

Up until the release of the SEGA Mega Drive (SEGA Genesis in the US). Nintendo and its NES console had a vice-lioke grip on the home console and videogame market. Having failed to make any major impact with its superior 8-bit Master System,  SEGA decided to go for the jugular by releasing a substantially more powerful console, the Mega Drive. The 16bit console only sold moderately well in its native Japan, but in the US and European markets the machine went down a storm; thanks in no small part to some great coin-up conversions and polished sports sims. lt's arguable that the Mega Drive effectively forced Nintendo into bringing forward its successor to the Famicom/NES, as without any competition the Japanese giant could have sat back and let the money roll in from its still-popular 8-bit system. If nothing else, the Mega Drive showed that Nintendo was not a untouchable and its release effectively heralded the beginning of the console wars that are still raging today. 

When the Mega Drive launched in Japan in 1988, the need for more than three action buttons on the face of a joypad wouldn't have been a priority (remember, Street Fighter 2 didn't arrive until 1991). To be fair, the Mega Drive's oontroller was actually quite good - the ergonomsc design was significantly superior to that of, say, the NES or PC Engine, although it lacked the innovation and flair that Nintendos effort on the Super Famicom would later display. Sadly, as the popularity of one-on-one beat 'em ups flourished, the three button setup became increasingly worrying.

As is so often the case with firms that have enoyed rapid success in a market, SEGA began to lose its direction. As the popularity of 16-bit generation began to decline, the

erstwhile console manufacturer released a number of ill—judged hardware add-ons for the Mega Drive, including the white elephants that were the Mega CD and the 32X. Both were expensive, lacked any decent software and ultimately went on to sully SEGA’s reputation in the eyes of gamers. 

Nintendo, by contrast, handled things with much more savvy. lts Super Famicom/SNES was also suffering, but rather than go down the hardware add-on road the firm scrapped its planned CD peripheral (this would come back to haunt Nintendo, but that’s another story) and instead bolstered the quality of its games by incorporating internal chips such as the Super FX into cartridges. Sadly, SEGA would never recapture the position it had held during the Mega Drive era and, despite being loved by the hardcore gaming community, both the Satum and Dreamcast were commercial failures.