In 1992, Sega was poised to rule the video game industry for all time. According to their commercials, they were way cooler than Nintendo, and games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 backed up the ads. Little did we Sega acolytes know that at the height of her power Sega was already falling victim to that fatal flaw that would lead to her destruction. But it soon became obvious to all but the most die-hard of Sega supporters: Everything Sega made that wasn’t the Genesis sucked, and sucked badly.
How naïve I was! I was overjoyed when I received the Sega Game Gear for Christmas in 1992. Some of my friends already had one, and there was no doubt it blew the Game Boy away in every conceivable area—it was bigger, it was black (which meant it was cool), it had more buttons, you could turn it into a portable TV by purchasing a simple add-on, and it was in color. Color, people. That was huge. While my Nintendo-loving friends were forced to huddle around their green-hued Game Boy, I was able to play 8-bit Game Gear games in full and glorious color. Yet it was somehow wrong. There were some fun games for Game Gear (the Sonic games chief among them) and it initially seemed like a sound investment, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that for all its superiority the Game Gear was missing something. As each new game ended up being worse than the last, it slowly dawned on me that technical superiority doesn’t mean a damn if you can produce the games to back it up. While Nintendo was releasing gems like Link’s Awakening for Game Boy, Game Gear owners had to deal with gaming miscarriages like Quest for the Shaven Yak starring Ren and Stimpy and Chakan: The Forever Man, along with a host of mediocre ports of much better Sega Genesis games. I bought a new game here and there, but my enjoyment of Game Gear didn’t last much beyond that Christmas.
But I still loved my Genesis, and my faith in Sega was not shaken. That would take an even more disastrous financial blunder, a decision so insulting, so terrible, and so misguided that it remains hated and despised by even those who once called themselves loyal Sega aficionados: The dreaded Sega CD/32X double whammy that sent the company into a (deserved) free-fall from which it never really recovered.
In an effort to prolong the Genesis' life against the technically superior (yes, I can admit that now) Super Nintendo, Sega released two add-ons designed to make the Genesis more powerful. The first, the Sega CD, hooked up to the bottom of the Genesis and let Sega fans play "CD quality" games, which meant crappy interactive movies with grainy, terrible video and non-existent gameplay. Naturally, I desperately wanted one.
The $300 Sega CD was too expensive for me, but so pure was my loyalty to Sega that when the 32X was announced at the relatively cheap price of 150 dollars, I begged my parents for a chance to “upgrade” my Sega Genesis to a 32-bit powerhouse. Let’s see those Nintendo kids talk bad about Sega now, right? It even had the first ever Star Wars game for a Sega console: Star Wars Arcade, which promised to accurately recreate the space battles from the movies in 32-bit detail. How could I lose?
By getting a 32X, that’s how. Unlike the CD, which hooked up to the bottom of the Genesis in a somewhat aesthetically pleasing manner, the 32X plugged into the cartridge slot and sat atop the Genesis like some mushroom shaped tumor. It even came with a set of metal clamps to surgically hold open the Sega Genesis slot so it could be forced inside--that's incredibly disturbing, and I wish I was making it up.Not only was it ugly and difficult to get attached to the Genesis, but the new Star Wars game was awful. Sure, I had a lot of fun playing it for a few days around Christmas—the sound was way better than what the Genesis could normally do (though still nowhere near as good as the SNES, which, incidentally, cost less than the 32X!) and the graphics were impressive (from time to time), but that was about it. That was my big “Star Wars” Christmas, and I got plenty of enjoyable Star Wars stuff, including the movies on VHS, but the 32X will always cast a dark shadow over the whole day. 200 dollars of my parents’ money was lost forever on a crappy Star Wars game that got old after about a week. They were so mad at me that they refused to buy me another video game system from that day on.
I never got another game for the 32X, and it was quickly tossed aside in favor of the only good Sega add-on—The Sega Channel, which let you play 30 full games a month for less than the price of a Netflix subscription. It was brilliant, ahead of its time, and probably saved me hundreds of dollars on game purchases. But it was too little, too late, and Sega could never recover from the disaster that was the 32X. Better minds than mine have already filled the internet with diatribe after diatribe on the system’s failings, so I don’t need to go into detail about what an unforgivable hunk of junk it was. Suffice to say that it was an unforgivable hunk of junk. So why is such a miserable piece of electronic afterbirth on my list of my favorite Christmas presents? As a warning, a cautionary tale to all those youngsters out there who, whether from brand loyalty or easy susceptibility to in your face advertising, might be thinking of buying a suspicious product. Even companies you trust, even companies who have provided you with hours of quality entertainment, can sell you down the river without a second’s hesitation. It’s also a lesson on the capriciousness of fate. One minute your company can be on top of the world with Sonic the Hedgehog, the next minute you’ve got a warehouse full of unsold Star Wars games; Star Wars games where a full half of the game’s expansive eight levels consist of flying around in empty space trying to shoot a certain number of TIE Fighters. It would have been boring if it wasn’t so infuriating.
I learned a valuable lesson that Christmas: Sometimes things you believe in suck. It’s a lesson that only grows more relevant as time goes by. Why Sega? Why?
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