The Sega Master System was the 8-bit era’s little engine that could – until it couldn’t. While NES owners were busying themselves with Mario, Castlevania, and Contra, SMS players had to make due with the likes of Alex Kidd, Penguin Land, and Teddy Boy.
Today, Sega announced its financial results for the full fiscal year that started in April 2024 and ended in March 2025.
I like what's on their legacy IP list, but there are still many more franchises they could revive. Shining Force and Chakan come to mind.
"That’s not how you launch a system".
I wish we lived in the Alternate Timeline where Sega was still a dominant force in the console space and it hadn't been Microsoft.
Saturn was a fantastic piece of kit... they just went a little too ambitious with its dual CPU setup. which turned a lot of developers off (at the time). The homebrew community have done some amazing work many years later, thanks to multichip experience. It is still the best platform for arcade fighters and shmups of all time. Dreamcast is a close 2nd though.
Yeah it was a interesting decision especially when looking at how dual CPU is considered a root cause of why the Jaguar was a failure.
Also the hardware rendered four sided polygons where the standard was three if they kept with triangle polygons I feel the systems development would have been easier to work with and we would have seen more third party ports in the west.
I think it was a victim of its time more than anything it saw huge success in Japan but the leadership and internal turmoil in the west meant games were not getting localised along with a focus on arcade like games were the PlayStation and later the N64 were pushing more in depth experiences over coin munching high score driven games.
I still enjoy my Saturn it was the first console I mowed lawns for and saved up for to purchase. I went so far as to purchase a used Saturn to run off an SD card. I even have a second Dreamcast modded to run off an SD card as well.
Certain video games firsts have become common knowledge over the years, while some incredible feats have fallen into the dustbin of time - TechStomper has dug up five of those forgotten firsts.
Here's my contribution to the Master System:
http://cdn0.spong.com/pack/...
and
http://gomi321.com/wp-conte...
Seriously, who was the artistic genius who came up with these great game covers!?
Terrible list!
NES was the best console at that time by a long shot.
The Sega Master System was such a great gaming system for the time. While I enjoyed my NES, the SMS had some of the best games of the generation on it. Phantasy Star was my all time favorite and was the first RPG I ever played. RPGs have been my favorite genre ever since. Sega was/is such a cool company. Instead of just calling their tip hotline for tips I would ask for guides and they would mail me stapled-together walk-throughs and cheats for every game I asked them for, for Free! Best customer service ever.
I still got mine with hundreds of dollars in games. Those were the good old days.