Sega turns 60 this year, and the company has been celebrating that fact in a wide range of ways – one of which is a special video history lesson which runs through the company’s home hardware lineage.
This particular seminar was held by Sega producer and manager Hiroyuki Miyazaki and takes us from the early days of 1983’s SG-1000 (released in Japan on the same day as Nintendo’s considerably more popular Famicom) right the way up to Sega’s final home console, the Dreamcast.
During the talk, Miyazaki goes into detail on how Sega was fond of using the names of planets as the internal codenames for its systems (the exception being the Saturn, which retained its codename right the way up to launch). He speaks about the Sega Nomad, a portable Mega Drive system which was released in North America in 1995 and was Sega’s final attempt to wrestle control of the handheld market away from the Nintendo Game Boy (spoiler: it didn’t work, but the machine is great – if a little battery-hungry).
A nice surprise was that Miyazaki showed off a prototype of the console that has, up until now, never been seen in public. Still retaining the “Venus” codename, the prototype Nomad is rather fetching, and arguably more attractive than the oddly-shaped system we actually got. (What is that slanting top section all about, anyway?)
This year, Sega paid tribute to its most famous handheld console, the Game Gear, by releasing a micro version exclusively in Japan.
