General Questions and Information Thread

At long last!

 

It's crazy how much I rely on it these days. If I want to get any sort of detail on anything, the internet won't cut it anymore - most of the time it's coming from old magazines (or mystery items on ebay).

And while obviously we're mirroring a good chunk of those magazines... they're not searchable. I mean Christ, you can't even see individual pages anymore.



I almost had a fun one a couple of days ago - I noticed Madeline Schroeder the so called "mother of Sonic" (remove Madonna and the fangs!), helped form Crystal Dynamics. She did this with Dave Morse (who had a background with Amiga) and another Sega person, Judy Lange.

Except search Sega Retro and you won't find a "Judy Lange" - she literally only turns up because the internet has copy-pasted the same sentence 432890023984023 times without checking. It was seriously looking like one of the founders of Crystal Dynamics, one of the most significant Western games developers of the last 30 years, didn't actually exist, and I'd have to consult archive.org for old records.



Except turns out we've got a couple of press releases under the longer-form "Judith Lange" that confirm a Sega connection. Buy still, the internet might have got her name wrong.

(although it might not matter that much - she was out the door within two years (i.e. before Crystal Dynamics did anything important))



It's fascinating if you look into it - there's like a circle of inbreeding between Sega of America, Electronic Arts, the 3DO Company and Crystal Dynamics. And then Sony Computer Entertainment America comes along steals all the keys from the bowl.

 

Yeah... I miss that too... and many other things...

 

There's a story I don't fully understand, and again is probably relying on archive.org stabalising itself.


Sakura Taisen Hanagumi Tsuushin credits a company called "Sega United". I'd seen this name before in financial reports but we didn't have a page... because I didn't know what it was. So I thought I'd find out.



Here's the only English clue - it's not a Sega Saturn, but a Sega Saturn-shaped CD case. It exists for some reason, and that's about as far as the story goes.


But apparently this venture was really really important. Prior to its creation, wholesale distribution for Sega products in Japan was carried out by third-parties, with the biggest being a company called Mumin (that is, Sega ships to Mumin, Mumin ships to retailers). But it was difficult, because of a group known as Shoshinkai(??), who had a very pro-Nintendo stance on toy distribution. Sega United was invented so Sega could take control, teaming up with others to get the Saturn sold in more places.

Apparently one of the success stories of this group was being able to reduce the price of CD production, which is why earlier Saturn games retailed for more than later ones.

But Sony's distribution plans were better, so Sega United and Mumin came together to form Sega Muse to copy them. Apparently this was frequently covered by Japanese press at the time, and is cited as one of the reasons the Saturn out-sold the Nintendo 64 in its home country.

 

The funny thing is that Mumin was also a "competitor" to Sega, being the official distributor for Atari Lynx and Jaguar in Japan.

 

Good news everyone,

after looking for something completely different I learnt something semi-important about one of our ~mystery~ PC games:


and I mean I guess the clue's already on the box, but this, ladies and gentlemen, is not Sega Worldwide Soccer 98... it's... "Worldwide Soccer 98". It's different, in ways that hurt the brain.


We don't know much about this game - it hasn't been dumped, copies are rare, and generally nobody cares about its existence. But according to Sega, the main difference from the Saturn game is that the Japanese team is fully licensed, and simulates the one which played at the 1998 Dynasty Cup (an event that hadn't concluded when the Saturn version of SWWS 98 was released in Japan). Its late June release means it might be closer in design to World Cup '98 France: Road to Win, but who knows.

Either this probably needs its own page, but it's still a bit of an unknown quantity.

 

https://gamehistory.org/dmca-2024-statement/

"Statement on the DMCA 2024 Triennial review ruling

The US Copyright Office announced today that they would not grant a new exemption in support of video game preservation. Our statement..."

 

Today on "nobody cares about 30-year-old sports games"

https://picclick.com/Sega-Sports-Sega-Genesis-Game-Gear-Promotional-165432100581.html
Want to pay $15 for a bit of scraggy paper? Not really, but there is one interesting part of this promotional Sega Sports leaflet:


"NHL All-Star Hockey Starring Mario Lemieux". Chances are this became NHL All-Star Hockey '95, but uh... what happened to Mario Lemieux? Well, cancer happend to Mario Lemieux, and he missed the whole 1994/1995 season.

In fact, Mario Lemieux's health seems to have messed up Sega's plans quite a bit. Seems they struck a deal with him with Mario Lemieux Hockey in 1991, but weren't able to get another ice hockey game out until early 1995 - is it because they were stuck between a licensing deal and the man not actually playing much ice hockey? Or did they just suck at making sports games (spoilers: it might be that).


NHL All-Star Hockey '95 is one of those games where Hidden Palace released 3429083204 prototypes, and nobody has bothered to check through them. The earliest build we have is dated 1994-09-14, a couple of months before the final, but it's not super interesting. There's plenty of differences, but not significant ones - different palettes, a few non-essential graphics changes, less aggressive AI, no rolling demos and a timer that counts down too quickly. Although according to the header it identifies itself OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, as in "oooo cares".


Although I did notice that even the final game has obvious graphical errors on its title screen. Well done lads.

 

If you ever see

Code (Text):

1. | developer=[[Sega]]

on a video game page, chances are it's wrong. It's not necessarily inaccurate, "Sega" made games, but especially in later years, you can usually narrow it down to specific departments, or in some cases, external developers. If it just says "Sega", chances are we've not looked into the game in any great detail.

There aren't many cases on the wiki, but there's a few very simple Hello Kitty games on the Dreamcast that don't have credits, which I put down to me not being a 5-year-old Japanese girl. That and they don't seem to have credits screens, or at least nobody has uploaded footage of one. Mysterious.



So let's go hunting - how about Hello Kitty no Magical Block - is this really a Sega game?



Oh. Yes it is. It's Pengo. Yes even for a cheapo pack-in game it looks absymal, and Sanrio had penguin characters it could have used, but if you can pretend it's 1982, this isn't terrible. More frightening is that this is the second secret Pengo game I've come across while working on Sega Retro, the first being Ninku Gaiden: Hiroyuki Daikatsugeki. How does this keep happening.


In fact I'd go so far to say none of these Hello Kitty games suck. They can't justify shipping on separate GD-ROMs, but these are classic foundations: Hello Kitty no Garden Panic is (better?) Battleship, Hello Kitty no Lovely Fruit Park is a puzzle-strategy game called Colony (as well as other things - I used to play it as Hexxagon), Hello Kitty no Waku Waku Cookies is... something. The late-90s CGI doesn't do them any favours, but if you've played any licensed video game from the era, you know this could be much worse.

Actually come to think of it, Hello Kitty: Roller Rescue on PS2 is pretty decent too. Maybe Sanrio had genuine quality standards for video games back then.

 

A rare sighting (even if just in a black and white artwork photocopy) of the elusive Mega 6, thanks to Sega News and BEEP:

I reckon Sega might've only ever rented these out, rather than actually selling - it would explain the cabinets being like gold dust compared to our Mega-Tech System, and how they haven't even bothered to put a price at the bottom of this one (only a "we'll tell you later, hopefully" message).

 

So we don't have a page on Sega News; ours currently redirects to the French Sega Club newsletter. Could you go into a bit of detail on what it was?

 

I have raised this before - not much is known, but the hypothesis from how few are around and the low photocopy-like quality on all of them is that around the late 80s/early 90s, these slips were quickly sent out to anyone in Japan who enquired about a product or thing that didn't have a proper flyer or promotional booklet available.

Pretty much all of the examples that have turned up so far have been for arcade things, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any made for console products too.

 

It's probably worth trying to work out where "normal" flyers came from. I know they were given out at conventions, but was that the only place? Did Sega post them customers? Were they carried around by salespeople (and how does that work)?

Because if they didn't take the Mega 6 to a convention, maybe there was no need to print out fancy flyers. Or maybe there's a fancy flyer we've not seen yet.


It's tricky - a cabinet might be rare because they didn't produce many, or because they actively destroyed them all. I would guess this style of arcade was better suited to Western markets, so perhaps unsold (or pre-owned) stock was rebadged and sent abroad.


I'd write more about arcades, but the whole business is shrouded in secrecy. You have to be an arcade operator in the 80s and 90s to know what happened, and... I wasn't.

 

I don't check on this thread as often as I should but I checked the date of this post and, well. lol. lmao

 

If they were posted out (and I do have reason to believe so), these might've been the envelopes they came in:

This is why people like Onionsoft above and the resources they've provided e.g. the Game Machine archive are the key to some of the walled garden parts of arcades.

(Also, from the few glimpses we have of the Mega 6 cabinet, it looks like it probably used a different design entirely to the Mega Tech - there's no upper screen, for one. I would suspect Sega marketed this in Japan with low expectations and did the rent option in accordance with the MD's lower popularity... Nintendo VS Systems, as it goes, are actually still in existence today, but didn't do as well as expected in Japan after a year)

 

Did I post about how publishers and distributors might be annoying, or did I just think it.


While archive.org has been down, I've been treading water - if there's no new Sega-related information being put online, I can't really add it to the wiki. One thing I've been doing is adding links to support companies in game credits, and a lot of Sega games specifically call out "Atlus U.S.A., Inc.", now known as Atlus West.

Typically video game databases don't make much distinction between regional offices, i.e. everything with an Atlus logo was made by "Atlus". However because Atlus is owned by Sega, and the US subsidiary has a very specific job of localising (Sega) products, I figured it made sense to split the two.

It's not the first ime this has occurred: we have Acclaim Japan, Namco Hometek and since this afternoon, Data East USA. I think it is inevitable that other regional offices will want pages too - for example, Bases Loaded '96: Double Header is very much a "Jaleco USA" product for the US. Likewise, we have pages for Sega of America and Sega Europe, so why are we just listing games as published by "Sega"?


But there's a couple of issues that I've found as of late: in the minds of some companies, "publishers" and "distributors" were the same thing, and I must admit in some cases (e.g. Tec Toy) I don't know where the line between them is. There was also a period where the US Atlus branch also called itself "Atlus Co., Ltd." - the same as its Japanese counterpart. And that'll throw off the wiki's automation.


And yes, once upon a time Sega Retro would have called pages names like "Virgin Games, Ltd." and "Virgin Games, Inc.", i.e. favouring the legal name over the colloquial one. I put a stop to this, a) because it makes the wiki a lot harder to read, and b) there's no consistency across firms - some will use the short form "Ltd.", others "Limited" and the Japanese are notoriously bad at English punctuation. Also it opens the door for horrible (if accurate) titles like

"株式会社セガ・エンタープライゼズ"
"Kabushiki Gaisha Sega Enterprises doing business as Sega Enterprises, Limited"

It's similar to preferring "Sega" over "SEGA" and not littering titles with ™ and © symbols - you've got to draw a line somewhere, and "Sega Enterprises" seems like a pretty fair line.


Not really sure why I'm posting this, but it's something to think about I guess. If you take a game like Galactic Attack on the Saturn:

https://segaretro.org/File:GalacticAttack_EU_cover.jpg

Distributed by Acclaim Entertainment Ltd.
Distributed by Acclaim Entertainment, GmbH
Distributed by Acclaim Entertainment S.A.

but who "published" it? Did Acclaim even touch it, or is it all Taito's doing?

 

Yeah, the line between distributor and publisher can get pretty blurred. I'd just go by T-Series code for the publisher. I don't think Taito was ever a licensed publisher in Europe.

 

The Sega System was an early name for the Master System. But what's a Mega Cartridge?

Was this the name for all SMS carts during the "Sega System" era? Or were these cartridges actually "mega" in any way?

 

It means the ROM is "1 megabit" in size (128kB). This was something they were keen to emphasise for some reason (you'll also see "2 mega" and "4 mega" cartridges being advertised).

This was still a thing with the Mega Drive as late as 1994 - 40 MEGA, because bigger numbers = better. Except this doesn't work so well when you consider a CD-ROM games had about 600 megabytes to play with and were selling for around the same price.


It's the opposite these days. It's bad if a game takes up hundreds of gigabytes of space, and the switch to solid-state drives means PS5 games can be smaller than their PS4 counterparts.

 

Yeah, when Fantasy Zone released for Mark III in Japan it was really pushed as being the first megabit cartridge, it was quite a bit bigger than the biggest Famicom game released up until then. Then Space Harrier being a 2 megabit cartridge was pushed hard, and then Afterburner being 4 megabit was bigged up by Sega too. Games smaller than a megabit were released on card, hence the Mega Cartridge.