There was no Shinobi, no Golden Axe, no Thunder Blade. All I could find propped against the shelf was some cutesy Alex Kidd rubbish and random sports platitudes designed to lure in parents, not players. I knew what the problem was, of course. It wasn't the game store that was lacking in shelf candy; it was my naivety that had played tricks on an arcade-addled mind for believing that promo in the first place. No matter, it was gone from my memory the moment I got back to the Spectrum shelf, and it didn't return until this issue of The Escapist came along.
A few minutes of cursory research gives a different slant to my search for a Master System, and one that backlights the ominous storm cloud that has hung over Sega for a long time. The Master System was the final evolution of two other games systems Sega never granted a U.S. or European release: the SG1000 and the SG1000 Mark II. This initial foray into the home hardware market ran headlong into the Nintendo Famicom and struggled to find a finger hold on the Eastern shelves.
Despite receiving great support from Taiwanese players, the SG1000 was once again remanufactured (very early in its life) into the Master System for the U.S. market. When the consoles didn't immediately fly off the shelves, Sega's interest evaporated, and they licensed the Master System rights to toy giant Tonka. Of course, the toy truck manufacturer had no concept of videogames, especially in a market still reeling from collapse, and the Master System sold even worse under their administration. In response, Sega immediately invoked its new philosophies and severed the damaged Master System limb, setting its attention firmly on the future.
But I wasn't alone in that game store. The same grubby-faced kids I knocked elbows with in the back alley arcades were also hunting for this Holy Grail that promised a wealth of top coin-op titles in the living room. We didn't know or care who Sega was, or if they'd spent millions of Yen developing hardware; we knew Joe Musashi and the Ferrari Testarossa's names, and if they'd been on the shelves to tempt us, the Master System might have lived up to its name and held a very different place in history.
What I don't know about marketing would fill a warehouse, but selling a Master System to the likes of myself and other arcade creepers would not have been a difficult task. It's been said the company's first global console suffered due to a lack of a mascot that could compete with Mario, yet I remember loads of them: We played them three times a week and all weekend in the arcades! Fine, perhaps we didn't know they were Sega mascots, but their names carried weight with addicted gamers. We cared as much about fancy promotional campaigns as we did about global warming or going to school. All we wanted was the games, and if Sega, or whatever it was called, wasn't going to give us home conversions of the titles we spent all our money on in the arcade, it could go to hell and wait for us there.
And so the Master System died young and was quietly buried in unconsecrated ground. Sega, true to their beliefs, moved on without, it would seem, looking back, toward the future of gaming: 16-bit consoles and, perhaps fittingly a machine called "Genesis," which at an approximated 29 millions shipped, is Sega's best-selling console to date.
Sega's marketing of the Genesis is fondly remembered for a churlish goading of Nintendo and a playful, almost irreverent indifference to sales figures. This kind of confidence is infectious, giving power to a product while instilling a sense of security in the customer base. Good (or perhaps lucky?) timing was also a significant factor, though neither of these accounts for the phenomenal triumph of the machine
