Sega Mega Drive

~ the obituary ~

The machine has two names because of a trademark. Sega released it in Japan on 29 October 1988 as the Mega Drive and sold through the entire first production run inside two days. When it reached North America in September 1989 the Mega Drive name was already claimed there, so it shipped as the Genesis, and thirty years of people talking past each other followed. Everywhere else, Turkey included, it was the Mega Drive.

Inside was a Motorola 68000 at 7.6 MHz with a Zilog Z80 next to it running sound. In 1988 that was arcade-grade silicon in a living room box, and Sega had an arcade catalog to port onto it. Europe got the console in September 1990 at £189.99.

I turned six the year it reached Europe, and Turkey took delivery later than that, through European distributors at European prices, into a market where most of the game machines in children's hands were unlicensed Famicom clones from an electronics shop. The Mega Drive was the expensive thing behind the glass rather than the thing under the television.

By January 1992 Sega held 65 percent of the 16-bit market in the United States. That was the first month since 1985 in which Nintendo was not the leading console maker in America, and it stands as the high point of the only console war Sega ever won. Lifetime sales came to 30.75 million, about 18 million of them in North America and 8 million across Europe.

~ the case file ~

~ blast processing ~

Blast processing was a marketing phrase with very little underneath it. Sega of America used it to explain why Sonic moved faster than Mario, and the technical basis was a DMA trick that pushed data to the video chip during the horizontal blanking interval. It was real and it was minor. What actually mattered was that the 68000 ran at roughly twice the clock of the SNES processor, so a game that shoved the whole screen around felt different in your hands.

"Genesis does what Nintendon't" ran beside it, and the other half of the win was legal rather than technical. Electronic Arts reverse-engineered the hardware and negotiated a licensing deal on terms Nintendo would never have offered, which put the sports catalog on Sega for years.

~ the brazil exception ~

Sega stopped manufacturing in 1997 and handed North American distribution to Majesco, which sold a stripped-down re-release into 1999 and projected a million and a half units for 1998 alone. In most countries that is where the story finishes.

Brazil is the exception. Tectoy had been assembling and selling the console under license since 1990, inside a market that import tariffs had walled off from the rest of the world, and it carried on after Sega quit. By 2012 Tectoy had shifted an estimated three million of them, and it is still making Mega Drives today. A console discontinued in 1997 has now been in continuous production in one country for longer than Sega ever sold it in all the others.

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