SEGA has lost it's shine over the years, but IMO they are the greatest game company of all time. Their arcade output was STELLAR, their game dev teams were the most elite all through the mid 00's.
Seriously, look at their list of output. Just banger after banger. Not to mention their arcade hardware was top notch and was widely adopted.
Even though I haven't liked a lot by Sega in quite awhile, I really respect at how amenable they seem to be with fan projects, so much so that they hired one of the biggest Sonic hackers (Christian Whitehead) to make Sonic Mania. I'm sure Sega is aware of most of the fan projects (e.g. Sonic Robo Blast 2), and they seem to be somewhere between "not caring" and "supportive", which is pretty cool.
Sega also embraced emulation pretty early. I remember as a kid I had "Sega Smash Pack" on my PC, which used Kega Fusion, and on Steam I have "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics", which is using vanilla Genesis ROMs that I believe you can load in virtually any emulator.
Compare this to Nintendo, who took down stuff like AM2R, and multiple Switch emulators.
Same thing with Taito, founded by ukranian jew Michael Kogan. The company that created the phenomenal Space Invaders and spark the japanese video game industry from a niche hobby to mainstream.
The Sega Genesis was the last console with a "game console", "non-domestic-PC", and "non-toy" auras, for me.
At a non-internet time, game consoles were like magnets for socialization and for making friends through shared experiences.
I never knew who David Rosen was.
Unfortunately only today I know who he was.
And he was the kind of person that did significant work that influenced and nourished the imagination and experiences of many young people and adults.
Thanks a lot for Sega, for the arcades, for the Master System, for Akai Koudan Zillion and for the Mega Drive/Genesis, Mr. David Rosen.
Rest in peace.
In Rosen's last Sega-related interview with Keith Stuart for the book Mega Drive Collected Works, he disagrees with the Sega internal conflict narrative as presented in Console Wars and says it was just Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske being unable to understand why certain decisions had to be made.
After Console Wars, he apparently stopped giving interviews because he didn't like that game historians were constantly getting the Sega story wrong.
> After Console Wars, he apparently stopped giving interviews because he didn't like that game historians were constantly getting the Sega story wrong.
Classic, nobody dislikes journalism as much as someone who lived through something journalists have covered. They always get stuff wrong in pursuit of an angle or narrative.
It's part of the strange history of Sega. Even back in their heyday, Sega of Japan had a pattern of treating its American and European offices as subordinate, yet the founders of the company just a few decades earlier were Americans
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Seriously, look at their list of output. Just banger after banger. Not to mention their arcade hardware was top notch and was widely adopted.
Rest in peace David! Thank you!
Even though I haven't liked a lot by Sega in quite awhile, I really respect at how amenable they seem to be with fan projects, so much so that they hired one of the biggest Sonic hackers (Christian Whitehead) to make Sonic Mania. I'm sure Sega is aware of most of the fan projects (e.g. Sonic Robo Blast 2), and they seem to be somewhere between "not caring" and "supportive", which is pretty cool.
Sega also embraced emulation pretty early. I remember as a kid I had "Sega Smash Pack" on my PC, which used Kega Fusion, and on Steam I have "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics", which is using vanilla Genesis ROMs that I believe you can load in virtually any emulator.
Compare this to Nintendo, who took down stuff like AM2R, and multiple Switch emulators.
After Console Wars, he apparently stopped giving interviews because he didn't like that game historians were constantly getting the Sega story wrong.
Classic, nobody dislikes journalism as much as someone who lived through something journalists have covered. They always get stuff wrong in pursuit of an angle or narrative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega