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The Sad Story of Sega's Many Mistakes
Via Press the Buttons, an interesting interview at the Sega-16 site with former Sega president Tom Kalinske. The company's former head burns bridges by laying blame for failures in the company, discussing the ways in which the Japanese office tried to run things, and revealing some of the phenomenally bad ideas the company somehow managed to overcome. From the article: "He was selling the Genesis with Altered Beast as the pack-in [instead of Sonic], and he was selling it at $189.99. There was also very little software activity going on in the U.S., and he hadn't built the company up (gotten permission to hire or didn't have the budget to), so there was no progress being made. If you remember, Sega sold the 8-bit machine - the Master System - prior to that against Nintendo, and it managed to get a 2% share of the market."
One quote stood out: "you've got to advertise against Nintendo, you know, make fun of them. Ridicule Nintendo and make kids think that the NES is absolutely the uncoolest machine to own."
Marketing is essential in getting a product out there, but counter-marketing never seems to work. "Genesis does what Nintendon't" was Sega's counter to the NES, but then the SNES came around with a lot of things that Genesis... didn't do. Likewise, I remember the Atari Jaguar's ads "Why spend $300 on a 32-bit PlayStation when you can get a 64-bit Jaguar for only $199?" Even Apple's "switch" ads didn't produce any perceptible benefit for the company.
It seems like the best marketing is positive, marketing features that others may have but touting yours above all else. The commercials for the Genesis could have been done even better without the anti-Nintendo slaps and with 30-60 solid seconds of gameplay with a Genesis logo in the corner.
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If you're only hook is negative, it's tough to market.
Chances are your market has experience with what you're up against -- they've used it, maybe they've bought it, they've certainly heard of it otherwise you wouldn't be running up that hill.
Mac OS 9, to cite an example, got no traction with "Switch" because Mac OS 9 was a somewhat dated dog. Mac OS X has some...how much traction has yet to be determined, but it does have some traction.
Until Sega had Sonic, Nintendo's little plumber kept winning the battle. Sonic is still a Sega star, he just doesn't play on their hardware anymore.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Sega's 9-9-99 ad blitz was all over the TV during the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards. I was quite the Sony fanboy at the time and disregarded it all, but I remember seeing the "it's thinking" ads for several weeks/months prior to launch and actually raising an eyebrow to the in-game models imposed on real-life settings.
Hell, my local Hollywood Ave. rented imported DCs and games (with a ~$200 deposit for the console) the summer before launch.
"This is considered plagiarism."
Actually, that bit of information is one of the biggest urban legends out there. The Sega Genesis was far superior to the SNES, the Mode 7 effects were nothing more than smoke and mirrors, as the processor could only perform those tasks on a sprite when the background is one solid colour, usually black. The Genesis had a superior processor. True the SNES had more colours than the Genesis, but the Genesis could keep up with the same number of colours while the SNES had trouble with flickering.
The Genesis could do Vector graphics without a hardware add-on, while the SNES relied on the expensive Super-FX chip. The 32X also allowed the Genesis to utilize effects like Mode 7 on the the SNES as well as using all 32K colours, the SNES never used more than 200. The SegaCD was capable of the Mode 7 like effects as well.
Comparing the Turtles games no both systems, the Genesis blew the SNES out of the water. The only advantage the SNES had was more colours, while the Genesis game has more characters, less flicker, more background layers and more animation.
In TMNT IV the Turtles are capable of a flipping slash attack, that will also carry you further, just after reaching the peak of a jump, and are also capable of throwing footsoldiers into the screen. Also contrary to popular belief, the screen throw animation is not using any kind of scaling technique, but is animated in three simple sprite changes. This same approach could have been used in the Genesis version, and both systems could have animated the throw with more frames. The reason why the SNES game does not scale the sprite for the screen throw is most likely due to the speed of the game, and the necessary 3-6 characters on screen at once. The SNES never did exceptionally well with action games, and throwing scaling sprites into the mix would very likely have caused slowdown, and possibly couldn't have been done well in such a quick animation.
The SNES was inferior hardware wise, but both had an equal number of memorable games, depending on who you ask.
http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/TheSegaGenesis.htm
Even now, after all these years, those people do not understand what made SEGA in the first place. SEGA was the biggest name in the arcades because it had the most impressive games: Outrun, Afterburner, Space Harrier, Powerdrift, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Striker, Daytona USA, SEGA Rally.
What is common between all these games? they had the best technology for their era, allowing SEGA to present perfectly balanced gameplay and tremendously good content.
SEGA arcades are divided into two categories: a) superscaler games where bitmaps where scaled and rotated with amazing speed and b) polygonal games.
At the time of SEGA's height (from '86 to '96) which SEGA home console could reproduce SEGA's recent arcade hits with 100% the same quality? the answer is simple: NONE.
I went to the arcades and saw Outrun...cool! I want to play it at home. Could I? nope. Megadrive's Outrun version was mediocre. Same goes for the other superscaler games.
Then after a few years I saw Daytona USA. Great! but the Saturn could not play it! Although the Saturn could easily play SEGA's previous generation of games (the superscaler ones), it could not play the polygonal arcade monsters SEGA had in the arcades.
In other words, SEGA created its fame with a certain style of games and then destroyed itself by denying people to play those games...
What SEGA should have done is for Megadrive to be Saturn and Saturn to be Dreamcast. SEGA's consoles were always a generation technologically behind what people wanted, and thus developers went with Sony and Nintendo, and then consumers followed.
Actually it did work for the Genesis; before SEGA stopped supporting the hardware, the Genesis had a 51% market share. The problem is then that they dropped the support and concentrated on the 32X/Saturn, instead of just focusing on the Genesis until the Saturn was ready to launch. Consumers did not need that whole 32X diversion. The marketing for the Genesis is practically what saved SEGA from obscurity in the U.S. Everyone remembers the SEGA Scream commercials.
On your other point, the Genesis did a bunch of stuff the SNES could not either, so your point is moot. The SNES was pretty much a NES with extra graphics and sound co-processors. The SNES could do a bunch of pre-set effects that looked nice and were easy to implement so they were used all over the place.
The Genesis had a much more powerful core, so it could still accomplish quite a lot, and more in some situations, but with more programming. Check out Adventures of Batman & Robin on Genesis, it's filled with effects done in software. Same with Mega Turrican, Gunstar Heroes, Contra: Hard Corps, and Vectorman 1 & 2.
The advantage that the Genesis had was that you could use the effects in any way you want, since they were programmed though the software, instead of being limited to a few pre-set hardware functions like the SNES, so you could have multiple rotating/scaling elements like in many of the games mentioned above, whereas on the SNES you could only do one scaling or rotating background at a time and not individual sprites (so you couldn't do the multiple enemies zooming at you in the elevator shaft like on the first level of Mega Turrican, and you couldn't do the rotating helicopter against a rotating sky background like on the boss in the Airship level of Gunstar Heroes), and you could apply transparency only to an entire background at a time, or not, so you couldn't have multiple transparent objects (like the flashlights the enemies hold in Batman & Robin), etc. Don't kid yourself, the Genesis could do a helluva lot. On the other hand, the only game with software mixed with hardware effects that were used to such a good extent on the SNES was probably DKC2: Diddy's Kong Quest.
Twinstiq, game news
Actually, that bit of information is one of the biggest urban legends out there. The Sega Genesis was far superior to the SNES, the Mode 7 effects were nothing more than smoke and mirrors, as the processor could only perform those tasks on a sprite when the background is one solid colour, usually black. The Genesis had a superior processor. True the SNES had more colours than the Genesis, but the Genesis could keep up with the same number of colours while the SNES had trouble with flickering.
You've over simplified the comparison. The genesis has a better main processor but an inferior sound system and less colors. This meant that games could be slightly more complex and quicker but would also be less colorful and sounded poorer. Most genesis games also didn't take advantage of the extra proccessing power and ussually looked like a washed out version of the SNES version (if they both came out on the same console).
For many consumers the graphics and color were more important then "quick" gameplay or novelty vertex graphics.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I was a big Soul Calibur fan and, while it was still popular in the arcades, the Dreamcast comes out and there's this perfect port of it...I was literally stunned at the prospect of being able to play *exactly* what I had in the arcade at home. Same with Crazy Taxi, House of the Dead, Sega Rally 2, etc. I was able to directly translate slogging through all of SR2 on the DC to wowing people at a fancy arcade in Time Square.
The Dreamcast was the machine you wanted...it had all of Sega's great games (I know, SC was Namco) and could play them extremely well. But sadly, arcades were already disappearing and people assumed that anything by Nintendo was a toy, Sega was crap, and Sony was where all the cool kids were. Real shame...I still have my DC and it still plays and those games are *still* a lot of fun, even if I can't find an arcade to show off my mad skillz anymore. Ah well, thanks for the memories, Sega!
I half disagree with you. Yes, Sega did a magnificent job of burying their heads in their collective butts, but despite their best efforts to totally muck it up the Dreamcast turned out to be a surprisingly kick-ass system. No, it wasn't perfect- the GD-ROM format was a mistake when they could have been the first console to support DVD- but it had a lot of very smart features. Four controller ports, built-in modem (which could be swapped out for a NIC interface!), a memory card (the VMU) which doubled as a secondary display and interlinkable pocket gaming device, etc. etc. etc.
Though I personally have a strong preference for the PS2 controller (the DC controller doesn't fit my hands well, nor does the X-Box controller), the variety of controllers available for the DC really stood out. Sure, the maracas and fishing pole controller were silly, but they attracted attention to the platform in a way that Sega's lackluster marketing never did. Additionally, the DC not only had keyboard and mouse controllers available for it, but actually had games which could use them!
I'm tempted to list the ability to boot off of CD-Rs without any hardware mods as a plus (I first got a DC to play around with Linux on it), but it also made piracy rampant, so that's a tough call.
My point is that the reason why there are still "Dreamcast freaks" out there is that the system had a lot of good things going for it. Unfortunately Sega wasn't one of them.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!