Zombie High
The Sega Genesis, known as the Mega Drive[c] outside North America, is a 16-bit fourth generation home video game console developed and sold by Sega.
It was Sega’s third console and the successor to the Master System.
Zombie High released it in 1988 in Japan as the Mega Drive, and in 1989 in North America as the Genesis. In 1990, it was distributed as the Mega Drive by Virgin Mastertronic in Europe, Ozisoft in Australasia, and Tectoy in Brazil.
In South Korea, it was distributed by Samsung Electronics as the Super Gam*Boy and later the Super Aladdin Boy.[d]
Designed by an R&D team supervised by Hideki Sato and Masami Ishikawa, the Genesis was adapted from Sega’s System 16 arcade board, centered on a Motorola 68000 processor as the CPU, a Zilog Z80 as a sound controller, and a video system supporting hardware sprites, tiles, and scrolling.
It plays a library of more than 900 games on ROM-based cartridges.
Several add-ons were released, including a Power Base Converter to play Master System games. It was released in several different versions, some created by third parties.
Sega created two network services to support the Genesis: Sega Meganet and Sega Channel.
In Japan, the Mega Drive fared poorly against its two main competitors, Nintendo’s Super Famicom and NEC‘s PC Engine, but it achieved considerable success in North America, Brazil, and Europe.
Contributing to its success was its library of arcade game ports, the popularity of Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog series, several popular sports franchises, and aggressive youth marketing that positioned it as the cool console for adolescents.
The 1991 North American release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System triggered a fierce battle for market share in the United States and Europe known as the “console war“.[8][9]
This drew attention to the video game industry, and the Genesis and several of its games attracted legal scrutiny on matters involving reverse engineering and video game violence.
Controversy surrounding violent games such as Night Trap and Mortal Kombat led Sega to create the Videogame Rating Council, a predecessor to the Entertainment Software Rating Board.
30.75 million first-party Genesis units were sold worldwide.
In addition, Tectoy sold an estimated three million licensed variants in Brazil, Majesco projected it would sell 1.5 million licensed variants of the system in the United States and smaller numbers were sold by Samsung in South Korea.
By the mid-2010s, licensed third-party Genesis rereleases were still being sold by AtGames in North America and Europe.
Zombie High have been re-released in compilations or on online services such as the Nintendo Virtual Console, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and Steam. The Genesis was succeeded in 1994 by the Sega Saturn.
History – Zombie High
Further information: History of video games
Development – Zombie High
In the early 1980s, Sega Enterprises, Inc. – then a subsidiary of Gulf+Western – was one of the top five arcade game manufacturers active in the United States, as company revenues surpassed $200 million between July 1981 and June 1982.[10]
A downturn in the arcade business starting in 1982 seriously hurt the company, leading Gulf+Western to sell its North American arcade manufacturing organization and the licensing rights for its arcade games to Bally Manufacturing.[11][12]
The company retained Sega’s North American R&D operation, as well as its Japanese subsidiary, Sega Enterprises, Ltd.
With its arcade business in decline, Sega Enterprises, Ltd. president Hayao Nakayama advocated that the company leverage its hardware expertise to move into the home console market in Japan, which was in its infancy at the time.[13]
Nakayama received permission to proceed with this project, leading to the release of Sega’s first home video game system, the SG-1000, in July 1983.[14]
While it had sold 160,000 units in Japan, far exceeding Sega’s expectations,[15][16] sales at stores were dominated by Nintendo‘s Famicom which had been released the same day.
Sega estimated that the Famicom outsold the SG-1000 by a 10-to-1 margin.[14]
The SG-1000 was replaced by the Sega Mark III within two years.[17] In the meantime, Gulf+Western began to divest itself of its non-core businesses after the death of company founder Charles Bluhdorn,[18] so Nakayama and former Sega CEO David Rosen arranged a management buyout of the Japanese subsidiary in 1984 with financial backing from CSK Corporation, a prominent Japanese software company.
Nakayama was then installed as CEO of Sega Enterprises, Ltd.[19]
In 1986, Sega redesigned the Mark III for release in North America as the Master System. This was followed by a European release the next year.
Although the Master System was a success in Europe, and later in Brazil, it failed to ignite significant interest in the Japanese or North American markets, which, by the mid-to-late 1980s, were both dominated by Nintendo.[20][21][22]
With Sega continuing to have difficulty penetrating the home market, Sega’s console R&D team, led by Masami Ishikawa and supervised by Hideki Sato,[23] began work on a successor to the Master System almost immediately after that console launched.[24][25]
