The Mickey Mouse game Castle of Illusion was another early hit for the console, and there were plenty of other E-rated and below exclusives coming down the pipe, like a Barney the Dinosaur edutainment game and Treasure's McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure (the latter has no business being as good as it is). Its biggest breadwinners ended up being their family-friendly fare, namely the Sonic series and Virgin's Aladdin. The following year's sequel, Sonic 2, was even more successful and cemented Sega as a force to be reckoned with in the console market. In the summer of '91, they finally managed to come up with a Killer App known as Sonic the Hedgehog, which was made the Genesis's pack in and truly kickstarted its success. The design process was lengthy and involved extensive market research, on-the-street interviews and polls, some of them conducted in the United States. Sega gathered the minds behind Alex Kidd and tasked them with coming up with a replacement mascot who could appeal to this older audience. The kerfuffle with EA would also wind up paying dividends, as the Genesis version of John Madden Football attracted sports fans to the system and gave the console another edge over the NES. Many early titles had complex gameplay and/or nightmarish imagery one wouldn't expect of any other console game. It was obvious to Sega that they weren't going to get anywhere trying to appeal to Nintendo's audience, and that the answer lay in the burgeoning demographic of teens and young adults with disposable income, who largely preferred home computers before the console's launch. A few months later, the system had its first standalone hit, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, adapted from the 1988 film of the same name and driven by the sheer star power of its lead figure at the time. ![]() What really captured the public's imagination instead was Altered Beast, a hastily-made but fairly-accurate port of Sega's arcade hit which came bundled with most of the consoles. However, Enchanted Castle was a severe critical and commercial failure, especially in western countries. The Genesis/Mega Drive initially did the same, as evidenced by their original mascot platformer Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, a sequel to the Master System's Alex Kidd in Miracle World. During the Master System era, Sega made a grab for the same kiddie demographic as Nintendo. What made this console such a hit in the West was a shift in Sega's target audience early in its lifecycle. At any rate, Nintendo voluntarily dropped a lot of these policies later. Those same developers flocked to Sega due to the latter's apparent laxity Sega were angling toward the same kind of lockout policy until Electronic Arts broke the mechanism and then, characteristically, threatened to leak the details out to other third parties unless Sega agreed to more favorable terms. It was nursed along by Nintendo's region lock policy, which was viewed by some developers as a violation of anti-trust regulations. released in 1988 in Japan, 1989 in North America, and 1990 elsewhere.įor the most part, it worked. In actuality, according to the 2014 book Sega Mega Drive Collected Works by Keith Stuart, it was Sega co-founder David Rosen who wanted the name change because he disliked the name "Mega Drive" and wanted the console to represent "a new beginning" for Sega. ![]() by Mega Drive Systems, Inc., a manufacturer of hard disk drives. Thus, Sega decided that they would beat Nintendo to the punch with a console based on their System 16 arcade board (codenamed "Mark V").Įnter the Mega Drive or, as North Americans refer to it, the Sega Genesis, note It was commonly believed that the name change was because "Mega Drive" was already trademarked in the U.S. ![]() They were already being impacted in Japan by the sudden success of NEC's PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16 in the West) which, while not actually 16-bit, was a noticeable technical improvement from the Famicom, which was underpowered even for its time. Nintendo were complacent with their success and dragging their feet on developing a 16-bit system, which was the arcade standard at the time. The hold of the NES/Famicom was too strong, and the Master System wasn't advanced enough to topple the juggernaut. While the Sega Master System was a decent success in Europe and South America, it failed to make any strong dents in the North American and Japanese markets.
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