Sega launches the Mega Drive with arcade hardware inside

What happened

The design borrowed from Sega's coin-operated systems: a 16-bit main processor for game logic, the older eight-bit chip retained to drive sound and to run the previous console's software through an adapter, and a video chip capable of fast scrolling with many colors on screen. Conversions of the company's own arcade hits were the obvious selling point. Japanese sales were modest, since Nintendo's grip there was close to total and Sega's brand was associated with arcades rather than with living rooms.

Outside Japan the calculation looked different. Nintendo's console was five years old, Europe had already taken to Sega's earlier machine, and North America had no entrenched 16-bit alternative. Renamed for the American market and launched there the following year with sports licenses, arcade conversions and advertising that named its competitor, the same hardware performed far better abroad than it ever did at home. Few consoles have had such divergent fortunes in different territories.

The world at the time

Nintendo's console dominated Japan and North America with a mature catalog, and publishers were bound by terms that made supporting a rival awkward. NEC's compact machine had already shown that a challenger could get attention with better graphics. Sega's strength was its arcade division, whose games it could convert exclusively.

What it changed

Under its American name the console became Sega's most successful product and forced Nintendo to respond with new hardware. It also drew the company into content controversies over digitized violence and into an expensive series of add-ons that damaged its credibility, contributing to the decisions that eventually pushed it out of hardware altogether.