Seeeeeeeeeggaaaaaaaaa (you know...on the Genesis?)

"The Rise and Fall of Sega" via Slashdot.

Yes, I read Slashdot. The article itself was ok, but I was more interested by the discussion about Sega.

I was a pretty hardcore Sega fangirl for a long while, and vainly held on up until its last gasping breath. However, even I knew that it was slowly losing out and when the Playstation came out, I could see it lowly fading towards an end.

One thing that annoyed the piss out of me was how Sega seemed to come out with a new system every 6 months. My parents weren't rich, and it was hard enough buying GAMES for a new system let alone finding myself looking at an ad for yet ANOTHER Sega system in the newest issue of Gamepro, EGM, (Ultra)Gameplayers...

I always contended to my friends that the Playstation was all marketing. It showered games in a quantity over quality ploy in my opinion, and with big name Sony behind it, it peddled itself like ice cream on a Mr. Softee truck. Rolling through the neighborhood playing its siren song. The Saturn was more like the quaint little ice cream shop in the old part of town owned by a former soda jerk called "Pop." It was good ice cream, but what neighborhood kid was going to ride his bike halfway across town for that unless they were like the kids from Our Gang or Beaver or something.

Anyhow, the lack of games wasn't just because Sega was so hardcore about quality. For example, there were rumblings about how the Saturn hardware was hard to work with. Well...maybe not hard...fickle would be the better word I suppose. You could work with it, but to do it well was where the trip up came from. For one thing, that's why Yuji Naka and the Sonic Team got such great kudos. It was rumored that if there was anybody who could work the Saturn, it was definitley the Sonic Team.

I never thought I was rooting for the underdog, I felt more like the fan of the team that got robbed. It was great to read all the opinions on that Slashdot thread and find myself yelling out, "That's what I thought!"

I don't know, probably hindsight is 20/20, but I distinctly remember similar arguments being raised back in the day...so if so many people knew why wasn't anything being done? Or maybe something was being done.