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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.
For more information, click here.
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