General Questions and Information Thread

^ Or if you don't think Sonic the Hedgehog released on 23 June 1991

 

https://segaretro.org/File:CTW_UK_348.pdf



Ironically New Computer Express closed down about a month after Micro Mart went weekly. These weeklies are really good for dating stuff as the monthlies were relatively dated in comparison. Unfortunately the other weekly, Games-X only lasted a few months longer than NCE, which marked the end of UK consumer weeklies, or at least I thought. It's possible that Micro Mart increased their games coverage when they became the last man standing, so I'm now interested in hunting these down. Of course, a full run of CTW would make that redundant, but I have big gaps with not much confidence that the missing issues will show up again. Just before Games-X's demise we did start to get weekly games columns in national newspapers such as Power Up! in the Daily Mirror, which are useful to an extent, but quite limited in space to cover much of anything.

Anyway, I've started scanning my 1991 issues of CTW. You can now follow the week by week reports and interviews on Sega buying out Virgin Mastertronic and forming Sega Europe (issues 342-348). Unfortunately I only have cover photos for issues 342 and 345, but as the takeover was the lead story in both issues you can still read it although you may need to squint your eyes in places ...

 

I'd apply if I didn't live in another continent - that salary is hilarious.

Though my Sonic lore only really extends to 2001, and I've never much been interested in all the American-y stuff like SatAM and the Archie comics. There are far more qualified people on this board.

 

A Friday mystery for someone


https://picclick.com/Sega-Worldwide-Socce-PC-Imatioj-Football-Game-98-296355602439.html

"why"

 

You might call this well travelled - a European copy of Street Racer, packaged up for Australia, then re-packaged up for Portugal. Seems Ecofilmes found it easier to source unsold stock from the other side of the world than from its nearest neighbours.

 

In fact, Ecofilmes sold unsold stock from wherever it could get its hands on it. That's how they became what they are today... and that's why we had a Mega Game II (yep... even in 1997 many Portuguese kids still wanted a Mega Drive)...

 

Yesterday, I saw this hashtag on Japanese twitter: #フォロワーの10割が持っていないもの (Something that 100% of my followers don't have), and then this popped up on my timeline: "Quartet project proposal"









After taking a look at the account I didn't find anything that points to them being a dev, but they did had a few posts indicating that they worked at one of the High-Tech Lands in the 80s.

I also found this post on their account: Sales information for OutRun from September 1986.


The document apparently comes from the Sales Department, and it lists the daily income performance for stores across the country (i.e. Osaka locations ranking in 66,400 yen a day, Ikebukuro locations -> 68,400 yen, Shibuya locations -> 56,400 yen, and so on)

Average daily income performance across all locations -> 53,000 yen

One month income performance -> 53,000 yen x 31 days = 1,643,000 yen

 

Probably should have come up with an answer to this a few years ago



Physical releases of Football Manager totally still exist... but you don't get a disc, you get a code. So it's not really physical at all.

Sega Retro classes this as a "PC game" but as a digital download in a cardboard package, it kinda... isn't.


I'm not super sure how many Sega games pull this stunt. And I imagine this practise might continue for years (you still get digital gift cards after all).

 

Yeah, I was looking into this earlier this year and IIRC it seems that all of Sega's EU physical PC releases are now just codes in boxes, with even the boxes and manuals getting dropped at this point. They still have the physical retail product codes that they've been using since they went back to directly publishing PC games in 2003. They're now just over 200, so it shouldn't be too hard to fill in any gaps, something I was planning to do, but forgot about. These are also tracked differently than copies sold directly on digital stores, so these get counted in the UK physical sales charts, but not the digital charts. Which is something we may need to take into account if we ever bother to include those on the wiki.

Edit: Even kid friendly titles like Sonic Superstars are just a code, although that did come in a cheap cardboard box with some basic quick start instructions. But outside of Football Manager, Sonic, and the occasional collectors edition most PC games don't even get a "physical" release anymore.

 

One thing leads to another and I find myself listing all the licensed football leagues in every Football Manager from 2005 to 2022.


Football management simulators are niche. Every year Sports Interactive release a new one, it goes on the wiki, none of us play it, and the cycle repeats, so my familiarity with this series doesn't extend much further than collecting box scans. But you can get a story from that - watching how they slowly acquire licenses over the course of 20 years, to the point where the next iteration is set to have the English Premier League. Though it's crazy it's taken so long for that - tiers 2-6 were apparently represented as far back as the 2005 edition, and you've been able to manage the top flight of Wales and Northern Ireland in leagues I didn't even know existed since the 2011 edition.

(though to be fair, the competitions do change their names quite a bit)


Anyway the weird thing is that while they're happy to promote the inclusion of third-tier German leagues, not all leagues are represented on boxes, so the games have more than what they claim. The Italian Serie A is in some of these, apparently. The Korean K-League is only mentioned on Korean boxes. But these leagues aren't guranteed to exist every year, so can end up being replaced with generic, unlicensed alternatives. And then there's situations like this:



The reason there's a few "Arsenal Editions" of Football Manager games is because they literally only licensed Arsenal - the rest of the Premier League was presumably too expensive or in the hands of EA, so Sports Interactive were forced to negotate with individual club(s).

And as management sims, these are mostly text-based affairs - no fancy graphics to draw, meaning it doesn't take long to make changes. What this probably means is there's 324892304 versions of 20+ games, none of which have been sufficiently documented, and may never be.

 

Still a few more to find from the last few years, but seems that "Total War: Warhammer III - Limited Edition" was the last PC game to get a disc release (22.02.17), with at least Football Manager 2022 getting a code release prior to that (21.11.09)

Code (Text):

1.  
2. #   Date     Title                                         Format
3. 205 24.08.23 Persona 5 Royal                               Code
4. 204 24.10.11 Metaphor: ReFantazio SteelBook Edition        Code
5. 203 23.10.17 Sonic Superstars                              Code
6. 202 23.11.07 Total War: Warhammer Trilogy                  Code
7. 201 23.11.06 Football Manager 2024                         Code
8. 200 23.10.23 Total War Pharaoh Limited Edition             Code
9. 199 23.10.19 Endless Dungeon - Day One Edition             Code?
10. 198 22.11.08 Football Manager 2023                         Code
11. 197 23.02.23 Company of Heroes 3                           Code
12. 196 22.02.17 Total War: Warhammer III - Limited Edition    Disc
13. 195 21.11.09 Football Manager 2022                         Code
14. 194
15. 193 20.11.24 Football Manager 2021                         Disc
16. 192
17. 191
18. 190 20.09.24 Total War Three Kingdoms Royal Edition        Disc
19. 189 20.10.29 Company of Heroes 2: All Out War Edition      Disc
20. 188 20.07.30 Total War: Warhammer - Savage Edition         Disc
21. 187 21.08.17 Humankind                                     Disc
22. 186 20.11.05 Troy: A Total War Saga                        Disc
23. 185 20.02.06 Total War Rome II Enemy at the Gates Edition  Disc
24. 184 19.11.19 Football Manager 2020                         Disc
25.  

 

You know when you're looking for pictures of Gamera Photo CDs and end up finding undocumented Virtua Fighter arcade machines



バーチャルーレット, which I think translates to "Virtua Roulette", but it could be "Virtualoulette" or some other weird portmanto.


Another machine Sega probably tried to supress because it was made in partnership with Banpresto. It dispenses posters, and must have existed at some point, because you can find photos of said posters online.

 

Now look what's happened.



Sega's name in the small print. This is the VHS of a Japanese film called "Driving High!" (ドライビングハイ！)



or how about this one, "Time Leap" (タイムリープ) from 1997. Also available on LaserDisc.



Got to really squint this time: Hikaruonna (光る女)



Damn you Gamera

 

TIL that Koji Ogata of slight Double Dragon design fame worked with Sega, through Cepia, for a little while in the 2000s before going freelance. Why? He's outright uploaded a couple pieces of rare material from that time to his YT channel - one being what is advertised as the original internal proposal documents for the Medalink system release Magical Poppins (which he was in charge of planning)...

... but before those, there are also some rogue slides at the start for what look like a couple of unreleased titles for the system, including an "After Burner The Medal", which I don't believe was known before.


And even more intriguingly, something that did release but very rarely ever gets proper footage out there -

Remember Sega Stadium? Besides getting a bunch of new Sonic artwork done for it, it turns out a few of the 'sports entertainment' attractions Sega made for these places (like "Sega Baseball" above) had video-based parts. Since we have pages for all the big rides put into the likes of Joypolis I think these also qualify... but pre-existing documentation on the others won't be great.


Plus, as an aside to the latter - the chain may have been shortlived, but the wider idea of Sega making big sporting simulators wasn't, as even afterwards they did things like Let's Go Golf! and also the as yet undocumented REC Check Golf (which got several versions, before being dropped a few months after Sega Interactive was established) into the 2010s:

And the story here apparently still continues, as Joypolis Sports now exists in Japan and soon Hong Kong (with the world's first "Sonic Stadium" - whoops - at the latter). At first I thought that all the simulators these newer places use were simply bought in from others, but a few late 2010s patents assigned to Sega development personnel possibly suggest otherwise.

(I miss when I thought they had just let Sunsoft make Virtual Batting on the Sega Titan Video and then mostly called it a day)

 

One for the Swedes

No Mega Drive collection can be complete without the hundreds of Swedish rental versions of games. This isn't an unknown, but as I've been wasting spending time adding in distributors to game pages, I was able to make some sense of why these covers kept changing colour.

I say "some" sense because most of this isn't documented online. Which is odd.

Anyway there are three "generations" of Swedish rental cover:

1) the old stuff, covered by Kanal 10:


2) Kanal 10 got bored of video games so the rights were passed to a new company, "Hent Gruppen" with the same people at the helm. Some of the covers are black like the above, but newer ones are orange.


3) Around 1994 Hent Gruppen was bought out, and the covers re-branded to SF Interactive Media, (Svensk Filmindustri, which still exists) usually opting for green or blue designs:

SF also got into SNES rentals too. I believe in both cases, the company was officially licensed to do so by Sega/Nintendo's distributors, so this isn't some small-timey rental business being creative, this is all genuine and above board.

There's also another slightly different type marked "RENTAL ONLY" which I assume means games that you couldn't buy in Sweden, only rent. But I don't know for sure.

(Pit-Fighter on the Mega Drive's not great but I would have thought it would have sold enough to justify a normal release. But whatever)

The benefit of all this is that we can now spot anomolies:


Bubble and Squeak from 1994 and International Superstar Soccer Deluxe from 1996 should not have rental covers that look like this. What seems to be the case is that older covers(?) were recycled and new labels put on top - see how the red borders don't line up like the scans above ^


So little information is out there that I can't tell if this means anything, but hey.

 

today on "things I found accidentally"



This was a chain of video game rental stores in the US... until Blockbuster ate it in 1995/1996.


https://picclick.com/Sonic-The-Hedgehog-2-Sega-Genesis-Zapp-Rapp-205036131059.html
Look ma, vaguely related bits of paper that we probably want to document

 

For Saturn Day, recently-revived Argonaut Games had programmer Matt Porter answer various technical questions about the Saturn version of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos:

https://x.com/ArgonautGames_/status/1845150212442161269

There's a lot of information to mirror for a development subpage. I've added information regarding a particular tidbit about the rendering bug on the bug page - the rest needs going through.

 

Instructions on a sheet of paper for the games they rented (if they included the original manuals they would probably be stolen or damaged)... it reminds me of the manual for the Japanese version of Dragon Ball Z: Buyuu Retsuden sold by Ecofilmes in Portugal (which went almost unnoticed and whose Portuguese manual was also a sheet of paper)... in 1996 with the debut and success of the Dragon Ball series (Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z) in Portugal the three versions of the game sold very well...

 

This was vaguely documented elsewhere but



I thought the cancelled Mega-CD Last Action Hero was one of those lazy Mega Drive ports, where they'd just replace the music and add some FMV intros. Turns out... it might have been worse!

Apparently Sony Imagesoft commissioned NINE video game conversions of Last Action Hero, but by my count, only six released (they were banking on this film out-performing Jurassic Park. It didn't). The Mega-CD was the biggest casualty, which is hilarious because this was the version originally getting the bulk of the promotion - it was set to be a Final Fight/Streets of Rage clone with FMV backgrounds. Psygnosis (kings of cancelled Sega projects) were modeling it all with Silicon Graphics workstations and everything.

If any of this sounds familiar (apologies if it does), that's because Psygnosis already used this tech with Bram Stoker's Dracula (Mega-CD):

All signs point to Last Action Hero being better than that, but... well.

Also because we live in crazy land, the developers weren't allowed to give the heroes guns, and the child character Danny Maddigan, which the whole damn movie is about, wasn't allowed to be featured in game either. Also all of these projects were started before the film was finished - a real recipe for success.

Last Action Hero (Mega-CD) - screenshots (or mockups) made it to the press. As for the other versions, most of them are terrible, and given their lack of magazine coverage, were probably sent out in small quantities to die.