GranDread Kouryaku Guide Book - 10th December 1997 Amazon says November https://www.amazon.co.jp/グランドレッド-攻略ガイドブック-廣木-克哉/dp/4900700908 Surugaya is also wrong https://www.suruga-ya.jp/kaitori_detail/179001135 But Book Off is right https://www.bookoffonline.co.jp/new/0015368467 so yeah, bit of a free for all. Luckily we're here to fix this noise.
Didn't find Taxi Chaos but did find the next best thing: https://twitter.com/SEGA_OFFICIAL/status/1337345156253564931 This was something I had only seen very low quality pictures of - coloured Game Gears at the 1994 Tokyo Toy Show. Sega had people choose their favourites, and the winners went into production... sort of. Sega played with the buttons a bit and I think they went with a different shade of blue, but it's the thought that counts. Meanwhile, in America: Game Boys in different coloured shells? What a silly idea, said Sega of America... sometime in 1995. In Japan, Nintendo introduced its coloured Game Boy range ("Game Boy Bros." (ゲームボーイブロス)) in November 1994. Sega introduced their coloured Game Gears... also in November 1994. Ten days earlier. While I've yet to completely confirm the dates, it's looking like you could buy coloured Game Gears on the 11th, and coloured Game Boys on the 21st. Nintendo had twice the range and would go on to market them worldwide, but Sega released theirs first. Don't know who came up with the idea first, but it's fun to think Sega was openly mocking a marketing tactic they invented.
When I saw "Italian" I decided to look into this: it's a false alarm at its best, sadly, but I do admit that a perfect storm of coincidences makes it so believable. This is nothing more than a group of guys who wanted a funny name to join some local amateur tournaments. What's so funny about "Sega", you ask? Well, it has other meanings in Italian, including "handjob", but the one they were going for in this case is that "to be a sega" in Italian sport context means that you suck, and, by their own words from that Facebook group, they chose that name because "it's ambiguous and it can lead opponents to underestimate them". The shirts also are fanmade, there apparently is no involvement from actual Sega at all, these guys do mention some sponsors and Sega isn't one of them, I'm actually surprised they got away with this misappropriation of the name, though it's probable that Sega doesn't even know about them. Now for the best part. Staffolo is a place in Italy, apparently. The fact that it looks so much like the English word "staff" is just icing on the cake. As I said, a perfect storm of coincidences, that Facebook url and those team pictures can mislead anyone who doesn't speak Italian. Luckily for you, I do
The fact they didn't name themselves "Super Staffolo Bros." or something makes it all the more likeable. Lol
It's a nice touch, but a classic Codies cartridge with no Micro Machines on it - and yes, I fully understand why - is like having a cheeseburger with no patty in it.
I have to assume this is some V-Tuber shit but the video says it's powered by SEGA so here we are: It does show off how maimai plays at around the 19:30 mark to the 53:00 mark though.
Secret software: Sakura Taisen Soundtrack Jouki Chikuonkan This is one of many confusing Sakura Taisen albums, but differs from most in that it is a "CD Extra" disc. The clue is in the PC and Macintosh specs on the back... and the CD Extra logo. Just one of many exotic technologies that have unexpectedly turned up on Sega Retro in some form. CD Extra is a means of putting both computer data and CD audio on the same disc - a type of "enhanced CD" defined in Sony/Philips' Blue Book standard, except it might pre-date that standard... except CD Extra discs seem to have been briefly popular around 1996/1997 so would post-date the standard and sadkjhflkasdjgflas. My guess from the QuickTime logos is that it contains videos, but given the disc contains a video game soundtrack, I couldn't say for sure. If I were to hazard a guess, the "CD Extra" name didn't catch on, not for any sensible reason, but because Philips already had a product with that name: A type of compact cassette. For those not subscribed to Techmoan, type II cassettes are "chromium dioxide", and while every other manufacturer called them either "Type II" or "Chrome" (including Philips prior to the 1990s), Philips started using "CD" to describe their tapes because they're insane. That's the same Philips that invented the compact cassette, and co-invented the compact disc, i.e. there was no marketing benefit to this at all. Incidentally if you didn't know there were different tape formulations, chances are none of this marketing ever worked and it was a gigantic waste of time.
I might have to go hunting - Yu Suzuki Produce Hang On/Space Harrier is marked as CD+, which is another name for enhanced CD. That means there's PC-readable contents on this disc too. The spinecard makes the feature slightly more obvious, but these things are easily lost and we don't have a scan of it.
Went hunting: Category:Enhanced CDs I was aware of music CDs that let you access extra content if played on a PC, but I thought this was just a fad of the late 1990s and died shortly before DVDs hit the mainstream. Turns out there's some Sega-related discs that had these features as late as 2009! There could* be more - I've noticed not all publishers bothered to license out the "official" enhanced CD or CD+ logos. *I've found at least three that don't yet have pages on Sega Retro. Phantasy Star Online and Mushiking.
An exciting piece of useless knowledge: SPOT THE DIFFERENCE (other than scan quality) http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:n2p74t.5.1 "Now, there are no limits." seemingly did not become a registered trademark until early 1987, so for the earliest US Master System games published in 1986, the slogan is marked with ℠ - "service mark", a symbol really seen outside of the US, and is probably wrong in this context but whatever. SMS Power have been aware of this for years (at least, for some games), and we blindly copied them without really looking into it. Both boxes are still wrong though. http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:n2p74t.2.127 I've only looked at this briefly, but the 1976 Sega logo became a registered trademark in the US in... 1976. Records might be dodgy but the US got it first, and it's slowly been rolled out across the rest of the world. The problem is that it was only registered for one use - "coin operated amusement machines", which is all that Sega were making at the time. They didn't get it tightened up until 1989: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:n2p74t.2.126 and even then they've re-registered the same logo a few times since, so presumably it wasn't foolproof. In 1986/87, I'm not sure the registered trademark applied to home video games, and that might explain the mystery around all those Sega logos I was posting last year: https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...-information-thread.26211/page-55#post-953579 The oldest Mega Drive games use a ® symbol in every region, probably because game developers weren't versed in trademark law. By 1990/1991 all the in-game logos symbols were switched to ™ (in the US and Europe where this meant something) or had their symbols removed (in Japan, where ™ doesn't mean anything). Now at this point, the Sega logo was a registered trademark in much of the world, but because Sega was targeting regions as a whole rather than specific countries, it makes sense not to take the risk in claiming a trademark was registered when it wasn't. This is especially important when they had the SEGA name baked into copy protection to try and stop unlicensed produce - you can't argue someone was misusing your trademark if you weren't using it properly yourself. Sega made a big deal around 2000 about now being able to using a ® symbol with their logo - I'm guessing at this point, the Sega logo had been registered in most of the world where trademark law mattered, and they were confident to use it everywhere for everything... even though in the US they had been printing it with an ® for 25 years by that point. There's also notes about how colour wasn't being taken into context, so the different shades of blue weren't a factor.
I've been able to verify the existence of both ℠ and ® covers for every US Master System game from 1986. Except Teddy Boy Blues (on card). I can't find an ® version of that - if it doesn't exist, that would suggest it was the first discontinued Master System game in the states (and therefore maybe the least popular?). Also can't find an ® version of the Light Phaser, and Master System consoles themselves are a bit elusive. This minor refresh in packaging might have coincided with adjustments to the control pads, having the wire come out the top rather than the side, or that might have been later - I just don't know. What I do know is that manuals and extra material probably aren't linked up properly. It's a bit difficult to check through ebay listings alone.
Teddy Boy has an ® release, a lot of work has already been done on this by others for software; US variant list PAL variant list Not so much for hardware, there are differences with actual consoles too, some have ®, others don't. I think the pads changed (first ones also have screw in mini sticks) in 1988 with the release of consoles with built in games, but that may have happened a bit earlier.
It is just a curious tidbit but in Bubsy II, Bubsy can use a Nerf Ballzooka. I don't know if this is stuff that should be put on the wiki but I like those kind of trivia like the tie-in comics that I found out about earlier this week.
This is the kind of stuff that really should be on the wiki, most game pages need expanding with all sorts of trivia.
Trademarks, part deux (I don't necessarily believe that both these covers were printed in 1987) In PAL regions, Sega had fun with ® symbols, this time for their logo. It's difficult to find details because every time I look through worldwide trademark databases, the whole site seems to break, but I am fairly confident that in the UK, Germany, Spain and Portugal (at least), the Sega logo was a registered trademark in those juristictions by the time of the Master System's launch. Nice Classification 9 apparently covers video games, lots of governments were recognising this by the mid-1980s etc. But they didn't have every country in Europe down, and so there are versions without the ®. It's looking as if at some point, Sega stopped bothering to appease every nation and went with a compromise - Sega™, and that lasted through the Mega Drive, Saturn and early Dreamcast. Until that point, however, it's likely that Sega were putting out two different sets of covers - we'll never know how many were mistakenly sold in the wrong markets. Or indeed if it was genuinely a misprint. It was on the 1st November 2000 that Sega™ became Sega®... according to Sega: https://web.archive.org/web/20071121164546/http://sega.jp/corp/release/2000/1101/ "But wasn't Sega already Sega®?" ...yeah I think so, but 2000 was also the year Japan adopted the Madrid system which made it easier to register trademarks worldwide. Those that weren't adopting this system were catered for, and so all of Sega's main markets were covered. Probably. It's complicated legal garbage that I'm not sure anyone really paid close attention to.
Going by pure memory of when I researched this before, I think that Sega switched from ® ~1990. I don't think they had different versions for different PAL regions (outside of very early language variants), they just reprinted early SMS games many times, and later prints show these differences across the whole region, rather than different countries getting different variants at the same time. The date is just when the game was originally copyrighted. 1986-1987 ℠ 1987-1990 ® 1990+ no ®
Incidentally, I have a rare variant of Space Harrier, it's a PAL English only variant with ® instead of ℠, the only game that I'm aware of that has this. I got this from Hong Kong (one of the few original 1986 PAL release countries), the only place that I've seen this version. So that would seem to be the transition from ℠ to ®. This was the very first "2 mega" game (I think on any format), and had production problems, just a small shipment originally arrived in the US, in March with the main shipment expected at the end of April 1987. There is an ℠US variant of Space Harrier (presumably the March shipment), I guess that Hong Kong got the next batch (English ®) as US second batch, before Europe got the 5 language ® after that. So ℠ finished by March 1987 (probably manufactured earlier than that). Great Baseball which released in the US March 1987 also seems to have been one of the last ℠ releases. Edit: Memory fail ... the last ℠ release was Wonder Boy in 1987-06, every game released prior to that have ℠ variants, no games after do. 1986 09 Choplifter 1986 09 Fantasy Zone 1986 09 Ghost House 1986 09 Hang On & Astro Warrior 1986 09 Hang On & Safari Hunt 1986 09 My Hero 1986 09 Teddy Boy 1986 10 F-16 Fighting Falcon 1986 10 Transbot 1986 10 World Grand Prix 1986 11 Action Fighter 1986 11 Black Belt 1986 12 Alex Kidd in Miracle World 1986 12 Astro Warrior 1986 12 Great Ice Hockey 1986 12 Marksman Shooting & Trap Shooting 1986 12 The Ninja 1986 12 Pro Wrestling 1986 12 Rambo First Blood: Part II 1986 12 Super Tennis 1987 03 Great Baseball 1987 03 Shooting Gallery 1987 03 Space Harrier 1987 04 Quartet 1987 05 Ghostbusters 1987 06 Wonder Boy
