Sega Nomad

~ the last words ~

the sega nomad was a portable sega genesis. it shipped in october 1995 in north america only. the cartridge slot accepted the entire genesis library through a 3.25-inch backlit color lcd. it ran on six aa batteries for two to three hours per set. sega sold roughly one million units before quietly discontinuing the line in 1999.

the hardware was unusual. it was a full home genesis with a screen attached and a controller layout on the front, not a stripped-down portable variant. you could plug it into a tv through the av-out at the bottom and use it as a console, or pull it off the cable and play it as a handheld with no compatibility layer between the two modes. the design came from project venus, which sega had built earlier as the mega jet, a portable genesis sold only on japanese domestic flights.

the failure was a market timing failure. sega launched the nomad while the saturn was getting all of sega's internal attention. the game boy already owned the handheld category in north america and pokémon was a year away from making that ownership permanent. the genesis library by 1995 was a back catalog rather than a current platform. the six aa batteries cost more per gameplay hour than most kids could justify. nintendo's game boy was running on two aa cells for ten to fifteen hours.

i missed this one entirely. the nomad never reached turkey in any meaningful sense and the genesis itself was a smaller console here than the famicom and master system clones that filled the local market. by 1995 i was eleven and still a year away from my first dial-up modem. the cultural distance from "north american handheld genesis" to "ankara public school kid" was complete. the first time i heard about the nomad was in a youtube retrospective from the late 2010s, when retro tech writing started giving the failed sega hardware lineup the careful attention it had not received the first time around.

~ the record ~

~ the design ~

genesis-compatible cartridge slot up top. screen in the middle. six-button face controller on the front in the same layout as the model 2 home controller. headphone jack on the side. av-out at the bottom for tv mode. a second controller port let you plug in a friend's pad for handheld two-player matches if you both held opposite ends of the device. the ac power adapter was not included by default. you bought it separately if you wanted to use the nomad at home, which mostly negated the portable proposition.

~ what it failed at ~

battery life. two to three hours on six aa cells meant the nomad burned through about three to four dollars in disposable batteries on a long road trip. rechargeable nimh packs were not yet common consumer items in 1995. the lcd backlight ran constantly even when the game was paused. anyone who actually took a nomad on a road trip remembers the click of dead aas going into a ziploc bag in the back of the car.

~ what it inherited ~

the cartridge library. roughly nine hundred genesis titles ran on the nomad without any compatibility layer or special handheld edition. the only exclusions were the genesis add-ons: the sega cd and the 32x both required the home form factor, as did the master system power base converter. compare that to the game gear before it (which had its own library) or the playstation portable later (which used umd discs). the nomad was the rare case of a portable that played the actual home-console games of its host platform on day one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »