The Mega Drive (メガドライブ) is a fourth-generation video game console released by Sega in Japan in 1988 and Europe in 1990. The console was released in North America in 1989 under the name Genesis, as Sega was unable to secure legal rights to the Mega Drive name in that region. The Mega Drive, heavily marketed as "16-bit" due to its hardware, was Sega's fifth home console and the successor to the Sega Master System, with which it is electronically compatible.
The Mega Drive was the first of its generation to achieve notable market share in Europe and North America. It was a direct competitor of the TurboGrafx-16 (which was released one year earlier in Japan under the name PC Engine, but at about the same time as the Genesis in North America) and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (which was released two years later). The Mega Drive began production in Japan in 1988 and ended with the last new licensed game being released in 2002 in Brazil.
The Mega Drive was Sega's most successful console, with over 29 million units sold worldwide. The console and many of its games are still popular today: Some games have been re-released in compilations for newer consoles and/or offered for download on various online services, such as Xbox Live Arcade and Virtual Console. The console is also still popular for fan translations and indie game development.
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Although the Sega Master System was a success in Europe, and later also Brazil, it failed to ignite much interest in the North American or Japanese markets, which, by the mid-to-late 1980s, were both dominated by Nintendo's large market shares. Meanwhile in the arcades, the Sega System 16 had become a success. Hayao Nakayama, Sega's CEO at the time, decided to make its new home system utilize a similar 16-bit architecture. The final design was eventually also used in the Mega-Tech, Mega-Play and System-C arcade machines. Any game made for the Mega Drive hardware could easily be ported to these systems.
The first name Sega considered for its console was the MK-1601, but it ultimately decided to call it the "Mega Drive". The name was said to represent superiority and speed, with the powerful Motorola 68000 processor in mind. Sega used the name Mega Drive for the Japanese, European, Asian, Australian and Brazilian versions of the console. The North American version went by the name "Genesis" due to a trademark dispute.
Launch
The Mega Drive was released in Japan on October 29, 1988. Sega announced a North American release date for the system (under the name of Sega Genesis) on January 9, 1989. Sega initially attempted to partner with Atari Corporation for distribution of the console in the US, but the two could not agree to terms and Sega decided to do it themselves. Sega was not able to meet the initial release date and US sales began on August 14, 1989 in New York City and Los Angeles. The Genesis was released in the rest of North America later that year.
The European release was on November 30, 1990. Following on from the European success of the Sega Master System, the Mega Drive became a very popular console in Europe. Unlike in other regions where the NES had been the dominant platform, the Sega Master System was the most popular console in Europe at the time. In the United Kingdom the most well known of Sega's advertising slogans was "To be this good takes AGES, to be this good takes SEGA". Some of these adverts employed adult humour and innuendo with sentences like "The more you play with it, the harder it gets" displayed with an illustration of the waggling of a joystick. A prominent figure in the European marketing was the "Sega Pirate", a talking one-eyed skull that starred in many TV adverts with a generally edgy and humorous attitude. Since the Mega Drive was already two years old at the release in Europe, the many games available at launch were naturally more in numbers compared to the launches in other regions. The ports of arcade titles like Altered Beast, Golden Axe and Ghouls 'n Ghosts, available in stores at launch, provided a strong image of the console's power to deliver an arcade-like experience. The arrival of Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991 was just as successful as in North America, with the new Sega mascot becoming popular throughout the continent.
In Brazil, the Mega Drive was released by Tec Toy in 1990, only a year after the Brazilian release of the Sega Master System. Tec Toy also ran the Internet service Sega Meganet service in Brazil as well as producing games exclusively for the Brazilian market. On December 5, 2007, Tec Toy released a portable version of Mega Drive with 20 built-in games.
In India, distribution of the Mega Drive was handled by Shaw Wallace.
Console wars
The Mega Drive initially competed against the aging 8-bit NES, over which it had superior graphics and sound. Despite this, the Mega Drive was all but ignored in Japan as soon as it was launched. Some positive coverage came out of magazines Famitsu and Beep!, but Sega shipped only 400,000 units in the first year. In order to sell more units, Sega tried some risky moves, including creating an online banking system and answering machine called the Sega Anser[23] and several peripherals and games. The Mega Drive remained a distant third in Japan behind Nintendo's Super Famicom and NEC's PC-Engine throughout the 16-bit era.
Sega CEO Hayao Nakayama, fearing a second market failure soon after the Master System, hired Tom Kalinske to replace Katz in mid-1990. Although Kalinske initially knew little about the video game market, he learned quickly and surrounded himself with industry-savvy advisors. A believer in the razor and blades business model, he developed a four-point plan: cut the price of the console; create a US-based team to develop games targeted at the American market; continue and expand the aggressive advertising campaigns; and replace the bundled game, Altered Beast, with a new title, Sonic the Hedgehog. The Japanese board of directors asked "Are you out of your mind?", but Nakayama approved all four points. Magazines praised Sonic as one of the greatest games yet made, and Sega's console finally took off as customers who had been waiting for the Super NES decided to purchase a Genesis instead. Nintendo's console would debut against an established competitor, while NEC's TurboGrafx-16 was left out and NEC soon pulled out of the market.
Sega began 1992 with a number of advantages: a 55% to 45% market share over the Super NES, a lower price, and a tenfold advantage in number of games. Sega's advertising continued to position the Genesis as the "cooler" console, and at one point in its campaign, it used the term "Blast Processing" to suggest that the processing capabilities of the Genesis were far greater than those of the SNES. A Sony focus group found that teenage boys would not admit to owning a Super NES rather than a Genesis. Neither console could maintain a definitive lead in market share for several years.
In Europe, the Mega Drive maintained support through 1998. It outsold all other consoles, including the Sega Saturn, in later years. Brazil also saw success with the Mega Drive, where it held 75% of the market share.
Add-ons
In early 1991, Sega announced the Mega-CD for release in Japan in late 1991 and in North America (as the Sega CD) in 1992. While this add-on did contain a faster CPU, more memory and some enhanced graphics capabilities over the Mega Drive itself, the main focus of the device was to expand the size of games: cartridges of the day typically contained 8 to 16 megabits of data, while a CD-ROM would hold 640 megabytes (5120 megabits). While it became known for several games, including Sonic CD and Night Trap, the expansion only sold 6 million units worldwide.
At June 1994's Consumer Electronics Show, Sega presented the 32X as the "poor man's entry into 'next generation' games." Although some blame Sega of America for developing this failure, the 32X was originally conceived as an entirely new console by Sega of Japan. Sega of America R&D head Joe Miller convinced Sega of Japan to strengthen the console and convert it into an add-on to the existing Genesis, but they would not make it a competitor to the forthcoming Sega Saturn. Although this add-on contained two 32-bit CPU chips and a 3D graphics processor, it failed to attract either developers or consumers as the superior Saturn had already been announced for release the next year. Originally released at US$159, Sega dropped the price to $99 in only a few months and ultimately cleared the remaining inventory at $19.95; only 200,000 units were sold.
