Sega SG-1000

~ the goodbye ~

Sega was an arcade company. In the early 1980s Sega Enterprises was one of the five largest arcade manufacturers working in the United States, and then the arcade business turned down in 1982 and took its revenue with it. Gulf and Western, which owned Sega, sold off the North American arcade manufacturing arm and the licensing rights to Bally, keeping the Japanese subsidiary. Hayao Nakayama, who ran that subsidiary, argued that the company already knew how to build game hardware and should point it at the home instead. He was given permission to try.

The SG-1000 went on sale in Japan on 15 july 1983 at 15,000 yen, on the same day Nintendo released the Family Computer. Sega shipped it alongside the SC-3000, the same machine with a keyboard attached, because the keyboard version had been designed first and the games-only box was added once Sega heard what Nintendo was planning. To hold the price down the platform was assembled out of parts anyone could order: a Zilog Z80A clocked at 3.58 MHz, with the video and sound chips both coming from Texas Instruments. Sega projected fifty thousand units for the year. It sold a hundred and sixty thousand.

Two things produced that number. Sega had twenty-one games out by the end of 1983 against nine for the Famicom, because an arcade company converting its own back catalog can move faster than a company building a library from nothing. And Nintendo had to recall Famicom units over a faulty circuit, which took the competition off the shelf for a stretch of the launch window. By 1984 neither advantage survived. The Famicom scrolled more smoothly and drew more colors, and Nintendo went out and signed third parties while Sega stayed wary of publishers it was already fighting in arcades. The SG-1000 II that arrived on 31 july 1984 with detachable joypads changed nothing about any of that. Sega replaced the line with the Mark III in 1985 and stopped building the SG-1000 II that october.

The part I keep returning to is the recall. Sega's decision to remain a console manufacturer, which eventually produced the Mega Drive that is the only Sega most people here ever touched, rests on a first-year sales figure that was inflated by a competitor's manufacturing defect. Anybody who has shipped hardware knows how that reads from the inside. The number arrives and it is real and it is three times the forecast, and nothing in it tells you which part of the market you actually won. Sega spent the next decade finding out.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the computer half ~

The SC-3000 was the SG-1000 with a rubber keyboard and twice the main memory, and it was the model that traveled. John Sands Electronics put it into Australia in november 1983 and Grandstand Leisure took it to New Zealand, with further releases in France and Italy and Spain. It never reached the United States or Britain or Germany, the three markets that would have made it a household name in English, though an unlicensed clone called the Telegames Personal Arcade turned up in America and Taiwan playing both SG-1000 and ColecoVision cartridges.

It sold 120,000 units in Japan during 1983 and roughly 300,000 worldwide across its life. There is a generation of Australians for whom the first computer in the house was a Sega, which is a sentence that sounds wrong everywhere else on earth.

~ small black tombstones ~

Hideki Sato, who ran Sega's consumer hardware development, did not like the cartridges. He said they looked like small black tombstones sticking out of the console, and the achievement he was proudest of from the whole SG-1000 era was replacing them with Sega My Cards, credit-card sized game media that slotted into a separate adapter. Sega also hired the comedy duo Tunnels to sell the thing on television, which is the 1984 Japanese version of a celebrity endorsement deal and about as effective as those usually are.

Tsukuda Original licensed the hardware and shipped its own variant, the Othello Multivision, a console built around Sega's design and sold under a board game brand. Fifty-one cartridges and twenty-nine My Card titles came out for the platform in total. One of them was Girl's Garden, the first game programmed by Yuji Naka, who would later be the reason Sonic ran at the speed he did.

~ what survived it ~

Every SG-1000 game runs on the Mark III, and the Mark III became the Master System. So the dead machine did not vanish so much as sink one layer down and keep working, which is the quietest way for a platform to end. Sega kept publishing for it after the successor arrived: the last cartridge was Loretta no Shozo in february 1987, three and a half years after launch and well into the life of the console that replaced it.

The whole SG-1000 family including the Mark III sold over 1.4 million units in Japan by 1988, of which the original model accounted for 400,000. Retro Gamer once called it an abject failure and one of the forefathers of the Master System in the same sentence, and both halves are true. Sato's own summary was blunter. Sega knew how to make arcade games and knew nothing about making consoles, and in 1983 the idea that there was a consumer market for video games at all was still an argument rather than a fact.

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