It was made as the "Model 4" Mega Drive, and included 20 built-in games, as well as a switch that switches the adapters inside the cartridge slot to play PAL and NTSC games. In 2012, ATGames released the Firecore Sega Mega Drive 20-in-one system. The Mega Drive is still manufactured in Brazil, with many games built into the console. Tec Toy also released the internet service Mega Net, and made exclusive games including a port of Duke Nukem 3D. The Mega Drive was released by Tec Toy in 1990, only a year after the Brazilian release of the Sega Master System. The first UK shipment of 30,000 units was sold at retailers Comet, Dixons, Rumbelows and Toys R Us. In the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, it was priced at £189.99 / €189.99. The European release was on November 30, 1990. Although the NES and Nintendo's impending SNES were still threats to Sega's market share, they had forced the theoretically competitive TurboGrafx-16 system into relative obscurity, thanks in part to NEC's poor North American marketing campaign. In an attempt to build themselves a significant consumer base, Sega decided to focus on slightly older buyers, especially young men in their late teens and early 20s who would have more disposable income and who were anxious for more "grown-up" titles with more mature content and/or more in-depth gameplay.Īs such, Sega released titles such as Altered Beast and the Phantasy Star games. Nonetheless, it had a hard time overcoming Nintendo's ubiquitous presence in the consumer's home and the huge catalogue of popular games already available for it. The Mega Drive initially competed against the 8-bit Nintendo Entertaiment System (NES), over which it had superior graphics and sound. The Mega Drive was released in the rest of North America on September 15 of the same year with the price reduced slightly to $190. sales began on Augin New York City and Los Angeles with a suggested retail price of USD $200 at launch. Sega was not able to meet the initial release date and U.S. In 1987, Sega announced a North American release date for the system of January 9 1989, making it the second console to feature a 16-bit CPU (the first one being the Mattel Intellivision) and the first to feature single-instruction 32-bit arithmetic. ![]() The Mega Drive was not as popular as the two aforementioned systems in Japan. However, after the release of the PC Engine CD add-on and the Nintendo Super Family Computer, the Mega Drive soon lost ground. Although this initially caused slow sales, the Mega Drive soon eclipsed the earlier machine in popularity. The Mega Drive was released in Japan in Octofor ¥21,000, almost exactly a year after the first of the fourth generation consoles NEC's PC Engine. One of these add-ons was the Sega 32X, a 32-bit add-on compatable with 16 and 32-bit games. Since the Sega Saturn was on the way, the Sega Genesis got 2 Add-ons for life support to last long enought to bring the Saturn on the scene. ![]() The Korean-market consoles were licensed and distributed by Samsung Electronics. The North American version went by the name "Genesis" (a.k.a Sega Genesis) due to a trademark dispute, while the South Korean versions were called Super GameBoy (수퍼겜보이) and Super Aladdin Boy (transliterated from 수퍼알라딘보이 this was the Korean version of Mega Drive 2). Sega used the name Mega Drive for the Japanese, European, Asian, Australian and Brazilian versions of the console. "Mega" had the connotation of superiority, and "Drive" had the connotation of speed and power. The first name Sega considered for their console was the MK-1601, but they ultimately decided to call it the "Mega Drive". Hoping to dramatically increase their share, Sega set about creating a new machine that would be at least as powerful as the then most impressive hardware on the market - the 16-bit Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and the Macintosh II home computers. Although the Sega Master System had proven a success in Brazil and Europe, it failed to ignite much interest in the Japanese or North American markets, which by the mid-to-late 1980s were both dominated by Nintendo with 95% and 92% market shares respectively.
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