NeoZeedeater
Tektite
WARNING - another long self-indulgent thread approaching.
It's a companion thread to the Nintendo one:
famiboards.com
I couldn't tell you the exact month or anything but it was around 40 years ago that I became a Sega fan. Even at a young age, I was a weird kid that paid attention to company names on arcade cabinets. I was a huge fan of Frogger, and I think that's where I first noticed the Sega logo. Frogger was developed by Konami but it was Sega that distributed the game in the West.
Soon after that was Zaxxon which drew me in. When you're used to shooters like Namco's Galaga and Taito's Space Invaders, having a scrolling game with a 3/4 isometric view and elevation changes like Zaxxon stands out.
Congo Bongo was one of my favourite arcade games even though I thought it was kind of a fancy rip off of Donkey Kong at the time. It was interesting learning decades later that it was co-developed by Ikegami Tsushinki, the company Nintendo hired to help create Donkey Kong.
I had forgotten SubRoc 3-D's name for years but the impact this arcade game had on me didn't go away. This periscope shooter was in stereoscopic 3d along with smooth scaling sprites, making it one of the most high-tech games of the early '80s.
While I had Carnival for Intellivision and Car Chase for VIC-20 (a clone of Sega/Gremlin's Head On), it was on the Commodore 64 that I delved into more ports of Sega games at home. I still have my totally legit C64 backups of Congo Bongo, Star Trek, Zaxxon, Out Run, Up'n Down, Quartet, Wonder Boy, and Power Drift seen here:
When I got Out Run on C64, I blew my TV's speakers out blasting the music. I never bought an Emerson product again.
The second half of the '80s seemed to really establish Sega as the leader in arcade technology with souped up cabinets for games like the Hang On series, Space Harrier, After Burner, Out Run, and Galaxy Force. And these weren't just showpieces for graphic detail. They nailed every aspect of game design: stunning art direction, memorable soundtracks, responsive controls, etc. combined with speed and intensity. Go buy this stuff on 3DS, Switch, etc. if you haven't already. These games are still awesome!
It was probably in late 1986 when I saw the new Sega system (back before anyone really called it the Sega Master System) on display at Compucentre, a store that always had several monitors on with various games. The graphics were very colourful and detailed, moreso than anything else on console. Even in the launch era, it seemed like something futuristic and special. And like with Nintendo, I was fascinated with the light gun. The pack-in games Hang On and Safari Hunt got a lot of playtime.
Like I mentioned in the Nintendo thread, my household ended up with both Nintendo and Sega thanks to my sister being lured in by Mario and my parents having some more money that year. I'm really glad I didn't miss out on the Master System like many people in my region did as it had some of the best games of its generation.
Despite the weak market share of the SMS, I had a good sized network of gamers for borrowing and trading games for it as well as rental access. And the largest mall near me (Metrotown in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver) had a handful of places to buy SMS games: Sears, Toy City, Real Canadian Superstore, Compucentre, and some other stores I forget the names of. Across the border in the US, places like Fred Meyer and Babbages carried games for it.
I met my best friend in grade 7 in 1987 on a school skiing trip and the first time I went to his place, he showed me his Sega collection with games like Astro Warrior, After Burner, Marksman/Trap Shooting, Space Harrier, Action Fighter, and Ghostbusters. Rambo stood out because we played the two-player co-op mode. We have been playing multiplayer games together ever since. He also won a Sega Master System in our school's raffle that year which he exchanged to get more games. All I won in the raffle was a mini screwdriver set.
One of my younger cousins was also a Sega owner. Babysitting him and his sister was the best gig ever as I was basically getting paid to play video games with them. We played a lot of co-op Fantasy Zone: The Maze which was a Pac-Man-like spin off of the shooter series.
In one of many trades, I ended up getting the Segascope 3D glasses along with Maze Hunter 3D and Space Harrier 3D (I missed out on the best playing 3d glasses game, Missile Defense 3D). Even non-gamers were impressed with the 3d effect and colours despite the constant flickering.
Shinobi is special to me for a few reasons. Upon its release, it really stood above other ninja games on the home market with a larger variety of bosses, locations, and moves. And even though it was graphically downgraded from the arcade version, Sega re-designed the game in many ways to suit the console hardware adding in a health meter, new power-ups, and several magic abilities.
Also, when my grandma was visiting, she asked to try it. I thought she was just being polite and pretending to take an interest in my hobby until I went to her place and she had bought a Sega and Shinobi for herself. She was also a fan of Rastan and Gangster Town. I thought it was awesome as most people of my parents' generation didn't play video games. The odds of a posh sounding Englishwoman who lived through WW2 being interested in Shinobi and Sega seemed near impossible. My other grandparents wouldn't touch this medium.
With the arrival of Miracle Warriors and Phantasy Star in English in 1988, the SMS quickly became the system to own for JRPGs in the West. I rented the pair within a week of each other and was fascinated by both of them. Phantasy Star was easily the superior one and I was in awe of its smooth 3d dungeons, Star Wars-esque sci-fi/fantasy theme mixing, and overall ambition. The nearly $100 CAD price tag was brutal but I ended up buying that rental copy for much cheaper. Having a female lead character was also very cool at the time, too. Sega did that on SMS previously with Quartet but Phantasy Star was the system's flagship title and its most critically acclaimed game at that point.
On my 14th birthday, the Berlin Wall was being torn down but I was busy going to the mall to buy Rastan, a port of one of my favourite arcade games at the time. It wasn't available so I looked at screenshots on the back of SMS boxes to find something similar. The samurai slasher Kenseiden caught my eye. It felt a little risky buying it since I never saw any magazine reviews of it but it was well worth it. It somewhat resembled Konami's Castlevania with its deliberately stiff movements and horror atmosphere but it had plenty of its own style. Its character upgrades and optional areas to explore offered more depth than most action games of the era.
The SMS had quite a few other franchises I loved that have become forgotten. Penguin Land was a puzzle-platformer with physics ahead of its time and a neat level editor I spent many hours with. Zillion was an anime styled action-adventure inspired by Epyx's Impossible Mission. Global Defense was like a super detailed scrolling Missile Command. Kung Fu Kid was a short but sweet platformer that introduced me to wall jumping in games.
I remember some debates in the 8-bit era about who was considered Sega's mascot. With Nintendo, it was obvious by this point it was Mario. With Sega, it wasn't so clear cut pre-Sonic. The company didn't really promote Alex Kidd over Wonder Boy or vice versa (Alex Kidd in Miracle World wasn't a pack-in title in NA until 1990 as far as I know). And one could argue a case for Opa Opa from Fantasy Zone as it had cameos in other Sega games.
I think most will agree that Wonder Boy was more consistently good than Alex Kidd. Miracle World and Shinobi World were well received Alex Kidd games while Lost Stars and High-Tech World, not so much. All three SMS Wonder Boy games in the '80s were generally praised. I still consider Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap the pinnacle of 8-bit platform-adventures.
Late 1989/early 1990 was the launch window of the Sega Genesis. Not every new game was a winner but I was very impressed with what I saw of games like Sega's port of Capcom's Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Mystic Defender, Rambo III, etc. Even Altered Beast wasn't the butt of jokes back then; it was quite the visual showpiece for the system.
Revenge of Shinobi was the exclusive that mattered most to me in Genesis' first year. How did this Yuzo Koshiro guy master the sound chip already?
Sega's publishing of Thunder Force II also marked Technosoft's debut in the West, a name I quickly took notice of. Sega buying Technosoft years later felt like a natural fit. That was another great thing about Sega: their partnerships via converting or publishing other developers' games was very strong and helped give more niche Japanese companies worldwide exposure. Sega versions of games like Golvellius, Power Strike, Ys, and Time Soldiers made me take notice of Compile, Falcom, and Alpha Denshi.
I got my Genesis in July 1990 around the time one of my friends got a TurboGrafx-16. We both started buying and renting niche games from a local store called Encore Video Games.
Encore was awesome because it carried Japanese Mega Drive games. Not only did these import games usually come out earlier but they had superior box art and, for some reason, they sold them new for $60 CAD, around $10 less than domestic Genesis versions. Some of the earliest first-party MD games I bought were Strider, Shadow Dancer, Castle of Illusion, ESWAT, and Super League. It cost me $30 to modify my Genesis cartridge slot to play Japanese games. Had I know they were just filing down a small bit of plastic, I would have done it myself.
Golden Axe was the biggest multiplayer game for me in the early part of the 16-bit era for co-op and versus. It was a notable step up from other home beat 'em ups, and not just visually. They did a stellar job on the timing of the weapon collisions and the deep thuds of the sound effects to make the attacks feel so satisfying.
Here are some scans from a PC Engine magazine I still have over 30 years later. What stood out the most for me in this issue was the Sega arcade section as it showed a giant holographic-looking shooting game. It made me want to visit Japan even more than before. This was a bit before my school offered Japanese classes so I couldn't read the katakana yet but it says Cyber Dome Super Shooting System.
I also had imported issues of the UK magazine Sega Power. Chapters bookstore carried it in Canada. While some of the fanboy-ish Nintendo bashing in it was eye rolling, Sega Power gave a good glimpse of what PAL-exclusive games I was being deprived of in the early '90s.
My anticipation for Sonic 1 on Genesis was huge. I lived for mascot platformers like Mario and Bonk, and since Sonic had been development for years, I was hoping for something special. It lived up to the hype and then some, quickly becoming my favourite game so far. The graphics looked incredible in motion, and rolling ball physics of whizzing through tunnels and loops was quite novel. It was the most impressed I had been with the genre since Super Mario Bros. five years earlier.
I was an early adopter of a Game Gear in 1991 (I already had a Game Boy and was still waiting on a price drop for the Lynx). I was just about to buy the SMS version of Sonic when I noticed Sega advertising that you could get a free copy of GG Sonic if you sent in the bar code from the Game Gear box. I was worried I bought my system too early to qualify, and I didn't know if Sega of America would exclude Canada for the promotion, but Sonic soon arrived in the mail.
to be continued in my next post
It's a companion thread to the Nintendo one:
Four decades of being a Nintendo fan
I don't know how many people want to read a long self-indulgent thread like this but I figured a personal history topic might be fitting for my first thread here so I'm porting this over from Resetera. I couldn't tell you the exact month or anything but it was around 40 years ago that I became...
famiboards.com
I couldn't tell you the exact month or anything but it was around 40 years ago that I became a Sega fan. Even at a young age, I was a weird kid that paid attention to company names on arcade cabinets. I was a huge fan of Frogger, and I think that's where I first noticed the Sega logo. Frogger was developed by Konami but it was Sega that distributed the game in the West.
Soon after that was Zaxxon which drew me in. When you're used to shooters like Namco's Galaga and Taito's Space Invaders, having a scrolling game with a 3/4 isometric view and elevation changes like Zaxxon stands out.
Congo Bongo was one of my favourite arcade games even though I thought it was kind of a fancy rip off of Donkey Kong at the time. It was interesting learning decades later that it was co-developed by Ikegami Tsushinki, the company Nintendo hired to help create Donkey Kong.
I had forgotten SubRoc 3-D's name for years but the impact this arcade game had on me didn't go away. This periscope shooter was in stereoscopic 3d along with smooth scaling sprites, making it one of the most high-tech games of the early '80s.
While I had Carnival for Intellivision and Car Chase for VIC-20 (a clone of Sega/Gremlin's Head On), it was on the Commodore 64 that I delved into more ports of Sega games at home. I still have my totally legit C64 backups of Congo Bongo, Star Trek, Zaxxon, Out Run, Up'n Down, Quartet, Wonder Boy, and Power Drift seen here:
When I got Out Run on C64, I blew my TV's speakers out blasting the music. I never bought an Emerson product again.
The second half of the '80s seemed to really establish Sega as the leader in arcade technology with souped up cabinets for games like the Hang On series, Space Harrier, After Burner, Out Run, and Galaxy Force. And these weren't just showpieces for graphic detail. They nailed every aspect of game design: stunning art direction, memorable soundtracks, responsive controls, etc. combined with speed and intensity. Go buy this stuff on 3DS, Switch, etc. if you haven't already. These games are still awesome!
It was probably in late 1986 when I saw the new Sega system (back before anyone really called it the Sega Master System) on display at Compucentre, a store that always had several monitors on with various games. The graphics were very colourful and detailed, moreso than anything else on console. Even in the launch era, it seemed like something futuristic and special. And like with Nintendo, I was fascinated with the light gun. The pack-in games Hang On and Safari Hunt got a lot of playtime.
Like I mentioned in the Nintendo thread, my household ended up with both Nintendo and Sega thanks to my sister being lured in by Mario and my parents having some more money that year. I'm really glad I didn't miss out on the Master System like many people in my region did as it had some of the best games of its generation.
Despite the weak market share of the SMS, I had a good sized network of gamers for borrowing and trading games for it as well as rental access. And the largest mall near me (Metrotown in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver) had a handful of places to buy SMS games: Sears, Toy City, Real Canadian Superstore, Compucentre, and some other stores I forget the names of. Across the border in the US, places like Fred Meyer and Babbages carried games for it.
I met my best friend in grade 7 in 1987 on a school skiing trip and the first time I went to his place, he showed me his Sega collection with games like Astro Warrior, After Burner, Marksman/Trap Shooting, Space Harrier, Action Fighter, and Ghostbusters. Rambo stood out because we played the two-player co-op mode. We have been playing multiplayer games together ever since. He also won a Sega Master System in our school's raffle that year which he exchanged to get more games. All I won in the raffle was a mini screwdriver set.
One of my younger cousins was also a Sega owner. Babysitting him and his sister was the best gig ever as I was basically getting paid to play video games with them. We played a lot of co-op Fantasy Zone: The Maze which was a Pac-Man-like spin off of the shooter series.
In one of many trades, I ended up getting the Segascope 3D glasses along with Maze Hunter 3D and Space Harrier 3D (I missed out on the best playing 3d glasses game, Missile Defense 3D). Even non-gamers were impressed with the 3d effect and colours despite the constant flickering.
Shinobi is special to me for a few reasons. Upon its release, it really stood above other ninja games on the home market with a larger variety of bosses, locations, and moves. And even though it was graphically downgraded from the arcade version, Sega re-designed the game in many ways to suit the console hardware adding in a health meter, new power-ups, and several magic abilities.
Also, when my grandma was visiting, she asked to try it. I thought she was just being polite and pretending to take an interest in my hobby until I went to her place and she had bought a Sega and Shinobi for herself. She was also a fan of Rastan and Gangster Town. I thought it was awesome as most people of my parents' generation didn't play video games. The odds of a posh sounding Englishwoman who lived through WW2 being interested in Shinobi and Sega seemed near impossible. My other grandparents wouldn't touch this medium.
With the arrival of Miracle Warriors and Phantasy Star in English in 1988, the SMS quickly became the system to own for JRPGs in the West. I rented the pair within a week of each other and was fascinated by both of them. Phantasy Star was easily the superior one and I was in awe of its smooth 3d dungeons, Star Wars-esque sci-fi/fantasy theme mixing, and overall ambition. The nearly $100 CAD price tag was brutal but I ended up buying that rental copy for much cheaper. Having a female lead character was also very cool at the time, too. Sega did that on SMS previously with Quartet but Phantasy Star was the system's flagship title and its most critically acclaimed game at that point.
On my 14th birthday, the Berlin Wall was being torn down but I was busy going to the mall to buy Rastan, a port of one of my favourite arcade games at the time. It wasn't available so I looked at screenshots on the back of SMS boxes to find something similar. The samurai slasher Kenseiden caught my eye. It felt a little risky buying it since I never saw any magazine reviews of it but it was well worth it. It somewhat resembled Konami's Castlevania with its deliberately stiff movements and horror atmosphere but it had plenty of its own style. Its character upgrades and optional areas to explore offered more depth than most action games of the era.
The SMS had quite a few other franchises I loved that have become forgotten. Penguin Land was a puzzle-platformer with physics ahead of its time and a neat level editor I spent many hours with. Zillion was an anime styled action-adventure inspired by Epyx's Impossible Mission. Global Defense was like a super detailed scrolling Missile Command. Kung Fu Kid was a short but sweet platformer that introduced me to wall jumping in games.
I remember some debates in the 8-bit era about who was considered Sega's mascot. With Nintendo, it was obvious by this point it was Mario. With Sega, it wasn't so clear cut pre-Sonic. The company didn't really promote Alex Kidd over Wonder Boy or vice versa (Alex Kidd in Miracle World wasn't a pack-in title in NA until 1990 as far as I know). And one could argue a case for Opa Opa from Fantasy Zone as it had cameos in other Sega games.
I think most will agree that Wonder Boy was more consistently good than Alex Kidd. Miracle World and Shinobi World were well received Alex Kidd games while Lost Stars and High-Tech World, not so much. All three SMS Wonder Boy games in the '80s were generally praised. I still consider Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap the pinnacle of 8-bit platform-adventures.
Late 1989/early 1990 was the launch window of the Sega Genesis. Not every new game was a winner but I was very impressed with what I saw of games like Sega's port of Capcom's Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Mystic Defender, Rambo III, etc. Even Altered Beast wasn't the butt of jokes back then; it was quite the visual showpiece for the system.
Revenge of Shinobi was the exclusive that mattered most to me in Genesis' first year. How did this Yuzo Koshiro guy master the sound chip already?
Sega's publishing of Thunder Force II also marked Technosoft's debut in the West, a name I quickly took notice of. Sega buying Technosoft years later felt like a natural fit. That was another great thing about Sega: their partnerships via converting or publishing other developers' games was very strong and helped give more niche Japanese companies worldwide exposure. Sega versions of games like Golvellius, Power Strike, Ys, and Time Soldiers made me take notice of Compile, Falcom, and Alpha Denshi.
I got my Genesis in July 1990 around the time one of my friends got a TurboGrafx-16. We both started buying and renting niche games from a local store called Encore Video Games.
Encore was awesome because it carried Japanese Mega Drive games. Not only did these import games usually come out earlier but they had superior box art and, for some reason, they sold them new for $60 CAD, around $10 less than domestic Genesis versions. Some of the earliest first-party MD games I bought were Strider, Shadow Dancer, Castle of Illusion, ESWAT, and Super League. It cost me $30 to modify my Genesis cartridge slot to play Japanese games. Had I know they were just filing down a small bit of plastic, I would have done it myself.
Golden Axe was the biggest multiplayer game for me in the early part of the 16-bit era for co-op and versus. It was a notable step up from other home beat 'em ups, and not just visually. They did a stellar job on the timing of the weapon collisions and the deep thuds of the sound effects to make the attacks feel so satisfying.
Here are some scans from a PC Engine magazine I still have over 30 years later. What stood out the most for me in this issue was the Sega arcade section as it showed a giant holographic-looking shooting game. It made me want to visit Japan even more than before. This was a bit before my school offered Japanese classes so I couldn't read the katakana yet but it says Cyber Dome Super Shooting System.
I also had imported issues of the UK magazine Sega Power. Chapters bookstore carried it in Canada. While some of the fanboy-ish Nintendo bashing in it was eye rolling, Sega Power gave a good glimpse of what PAL-exclusive games I was being deprived of in the early '90s.
My anticipation for Sonic 1 on Genesis was huge. I lived for mascot platformers like Mario and Bonk, and since Sonic had been development for years, I was hoping for something special. It lived up to the hype and then some, quickly becoming my favourite game so far. The graphics looked incredible in motion, and rolling ball physics of whizzing through tunnels and loops was quite novel. It was the most impressed I had been with the genre since Super Mario Bros. five years earlier.
I was an early adopter of a Game Gear in 1991 (I already had a Game Boy and was still waiting on a price drop for the Lynx). I was just about to buy the SMS version of Sonic when I noticed Sega advertising that you could get a free copy of GG Sonic if you sent in the bar code from the Game Gear box. I was worried I bought my system too early to qualify, and I didn't know if Sega of America would exclude Canada for the promotion, but Sonic soon arrived in the mail.
to be continued in my next post
