Recently, I was perusing Twitter and came across the fact that Sega is celebrating their 60th anniversary. As part of this, they have established a website called “sega60th.com” and are holding weekly events around their various studios. While the events have thus far, with regards to my interests, been lacklustre with few to no announcements when it comes to new games or ports, I still think this is an excellent opportunity to discuss the history of Sega as part of the celebration of their 60th anniversary.
Sega has its origins in a company called “Service Games” (notice what you get if you take the first two letters of each word) that was originally established to distribute coin-operated machines such as slot machines and jukeboxes. This company was later dissolved and, the company that we are familiar with today, Sega was established on the 3rd of June, 1960. Sega continued their focus on coin-operated machines and it wasn’t until the late 1960s that we began to see the first signs of what Sega would become.
Originally released in Japan in 1966, Periscope, the first arcade game developed by Sega, proved to be a massive success worldwide and led to Sega continuing to develop arcade games such as Head On and Zaxxon and publishing the highly successful Frogger. Eventually, Sega decided to enter the home console market and, on July 15th 1983, the SG-1000 was released. While selling less than Nintendo’s Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the console proved successful enough that Sega decided to pursue this new market.
Originally branded as the Sega Mark III, what would later become better known as the Master System was released in Japan in 1985. This was also the time when we began to see some of Sega’s franchises develop such as Phantasy Star, Alex Kidd and Fantasy Zone. While the Master System saw weak sales in Japan and North America where the NES dominated, the system saw more success in Europe and Brazil. It’s interesting to note that the Master System continues to be popular in Brazil where it sells tens of thousands of units every year.
Sega’s most successful home console was released in 1988 in the form of the Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis in North America). Sales initially started out slowly but saw new Sega franchises enter the mix such as Golden Axe and The Revenge of Shinobi. However, the creation of Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991 and switching the pack-in game from Altered Beast to the debut game of the blue hedgehog saw sales of the console skyrocket. This success also saw some controversy due to Sega’s policy to release mature games under the tagline “Genesis does what Nintendon’t“. The release of Night Trap and the uncensored version of Mortal Kombat saw congressional hearings and eventually lead to the creation of the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board).
Sega’s next console was the Sega Saturn, released in 1994. Their first console to feature native 32 bit support (the Sega Mega Drive had a 32 bit add-on), the console proved to be quite successful in Japan with games such as Virtua Fighter and Panzer Dragoon cited as the reason to buy the console. However, their worldwide release was overshadowed by the release of Sony’s PlayStation and the Sega Saturn is generally considered to be a commercial failure. The lack of a new Sonic game (Sonic X-treme, the game that was meant to be the flagship title for the console, was cancelled) is often viewed as a contributory factor for the console’s failure.
Sega’s final console would be the now legendary Dreamcast. Originally released in 1998, the Dreamcast was the first console to support online play and is now considered to have been ahead of its time. However, the console was overshadowed by the PlayStation 2 and, despite successful games such as Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 etc., Sega decided to pull out of the console market and to become a third party publisher.
This new era saw Sega begin to release their games on a variety of consoles such as Sonic Heroes (which was released on GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC), Jet Set Radio Future (exclusively for the Xbox), Super Monkey Ball (exclusively for the GameCube) and Virtua Fighter 4 (originally released in arcades and later ported to the PlayStation 2). Later on, Sega began to acquire PC developers such as Creative Assembly, Sports Interactive and Relic Entertainment in an effort to expand their Western market with Mike Hayes, president of Sega of Europe and America between 2009 and 2012, describing the newfound focus on the PC platform as critical.
Sega also acquired Atlus, the developer of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona franchises, in 2013 and established Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio to focus primarily on the Yakuza series. The company has also seen success porting their Japanese franchises to PC with the release of Valkyria Chronicles in 2014, Bayonetta in 2017, Yakuza in 2018 and, most recently, Persona 4 Golden in 2020.
While Sega has had some financial woes recently and have had to sell off a large portion of their arcade business (pretty much their roots as far as their history is concerned), I am still very interested to see what Sega has in store for the future, whether their 60th anniversary event will have any new game announcements or ports, how Sonic’s 30th anniversary celebration is going to be handled next year and what their plans are when it comes to further releases from Atlus. Let me know your thoughts on the history of Sega, the celebration of their 60th anniversary, your own personal experience with Sega consoles and games and any additional information you have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.