General Questions and Information Thread

Recently on "I hope archive.org uploads turn on again soon"

Category:Sega as publisher

I guess you can call this the "official" push to link to specific Segas rather than generic "Sega". Except I'm not pushing very hard.

Sega Enterprises, Ltd.
Sega Corporation (2000-2015)
Sega Games
Sega Corporation (2020)

...

Sega Enterprises, Inc.
Sega Enterprises USA
Sega of America
Sega Europe

...and yeah I suppose things like Sega Publishing Korea and Sega Taiwan too.

Admittedly I'm not usre "published by Sega, Sega, Sega, Sega and Sega" is particularly clean, but it's slightly more accurate than attributing everything to one company in the group.


I won't lie, the benefits are dubious. If you take a third-party publisher, say Namco, we can automatically list the entire softography on one page while still making the article "readable". However, 40-50% of games covered on Sega Retro were published by some form of Sega, and as you can see on the "Sega Enterprises, Ltd." page, it's already massive (and this was just low hanging fruit).

"But don't they just call themselves 'Sega'"

and this is the other issue. The Sega logo is used so games don't have to worry about making the distinction between all the different branches.


(why is our Sonic 1 box scan watermarked)


Japan is usually very easy, they'll print either

株式会社セガ・エンタープライゼズ (Sega Enterprises)
株式会社セガ (Sega Corporation)
株式会社セガゲームス (Sega Games)

on the box. You can see me struggle with the "Sega Enterprises, Ltd." and "Sega Enterprises, Inc." conundrum - in Japan the "Ltd." doesn't exist, it's a localisation of Kabushiki Gaisha/Kaisha (株式会社), and this is a Japanese game.




In America they often hide the true name of the publisher and refer to themselves as Sega.

And in Europe...





Well if the games, manuals and boxes are designed and produced in Japan, maybe the publisher is Sega Enterprises Ltd., with Sega Europe having an uncredited distribution role. Frankly, I don't know.

This is less of an issue with newer games - post-Dreamcast it became far more common to print useful details, but stuff from the 80s and 90s... god knows.

 

I think I solved a mystery yesterday, which means I can post a fairly reliable history of Sega US arcade operations. Kinda.

Ignoring the pre-history of the 1940s and 50s, Sega got its first US branch in 1974 with the imaginatively titled Sega Enterprises, Inc. (SEI) - this lasted ten years until the company was sold off (it now sits dormant under a different name somewhere in the Paramount empire (yes that one)).

A few months later after contracts had expired, Sega came back to the States in 1985 with a brand new company Sega Enterprises, Inc. (USA). This time often trading as "Sega Enterprises USA" (SEU). This company existed for decades, however in 1996 sales and distribution (note: not "manufacturing") responsibilities were handed to a newly established Sega GameWorks - an apparently stupid plan, because and SEU reclaimed this responsibility in 1998.

The missing piece of the puzzle is what happened after that, because the changeover wasn't advertised. In 2003 a new company was formed to handle the arcade business, Sega Amusements USA (SAU). SEU continued to exist until it didn't - the trail goes a bit cold after this point.

In 2014 SAU with (the much more sensible) Sega Amusements Europe to form Sega Amusements International (SAI). This still exists to this day (though isn't actually owned by Sega, it just licenses the name after a management buyout)


So it's
SEI -> SEU -> GameWorks for a bit -> SEU -> SAU -> SAI

simple

 

It became "Play It Amusements" a few years before Europe fully took the reigns as well - which is also how the company remains today.

 

Video game journalism is wonky as all hell - that's not news. But it would be nice if, when the internet plans to copy paste news stories, someone would do some due dilligance.


Work is ongoing to turn mentions of "Sega" into "Sega Enterprises/Corporation/Games/Interactive/Amusements/of America/Europe/whatever". One thing we haven't done is make note of the Asian divisions - Sega has had a presence in Korea and Taiwan for decades, we have company pages, but games aren't linked up.

And so, the life and times of Sega Publishing Korea. Turns out, this was Sega's second attempt at establishing a base in South Korea - many sites (including Sega Retro until a few minutes ago) conflated it with the first: Sega Korea.



Pretty much the only thing online about "Sega Korea Ltd." is this one photo I've cropped, and stories that it closed in 2008. The English press picked up the announcement and ran with it - "hey guys, Sega's dissolved their Korean business!". "That's terrible!". "I miss the Mega Drive!".

What did Sega Korea do? Erm... uh... err. They never seemed to have a website, and their operations took place exclusively in a country you probably weren't in, so chances are you can't answer that question. "Thing I don't understand has stopped existing" - what a story, and turns out it really didn't matter, because days after Sega Korea closed, Sega Publishing Korea opened.

Sega Korea lived about four years, opening in 2003 and doubling up as both Sega's official software distributor for the region, and a failed(?) means of growing an arcade business (as in, physical Sega World venues like Japan). Its replacement, Sega Publishing Korea, was formed a dedicated software publishing division and has existed ever since - in a sense, Sega dropped its attempt at building a Korean arcade empire, and stuck to consumer software. I believe it also cut its losses on a similar Singaporean venture around the same time too.

At the time, none of these venues would have been documented in English (and they're still mysterious now), so it's kind-of a non-story that nobody can really comment on. You have to dig to find traces of Sega Korea's legacy:



They published some games, but we haven't got decent scans (or dumps?), so you'd be forgiven for not knowing this. I'd argue the previous distributors are more interesting, because they've got names like SONO KONG and WIZARD SOFT. Monkeys and wizards [citation needed] - much more interesting

 

Uploads to Archive.org seem to be at least partially restored, so maybe there'll be a stockpile of oddities coming through in the next few hours.

Such as an incomplete scan of The Ivy League Guide to Winning at Video Games. I can't tell if this is an elaborate parody or a serious product.

But it's alerted me to something I maybe should have known: Batsugun Saturn Tribute Boosted


This is a port of the Sega Saturn game Batsugun. It has nothing to do with Sega... but it's clearly called SATURN TRIBUTE in tribute to a Sega Saturn.

... and it's not the only one. Other "Saturn Tributes" include
- Assault Suit Leynos 2
- Cotton 2
- Cotton Bombermang
- Guardian Force
- Wolf Fang/Skull Fang

and a few other "S-Tribute" games, when they were presumably more wary of using the term "Saturn":
- Cleopatra Fortune
- Elevator Action Returns
- Layer Section/Galactic Attack
- Metal Black
- Puzzle Bobble 2x/3

I think the link is too tenuous for dedicated pages on Sega Retro, but something like References to Sega/Video games might be in order - some acknowledgement that such things exist. Those Aladdin/Lion King compilations released a few years back would qualify too - when it's obvious there's an (emulated) Sega console involved, but they're not allowed to explicitly use the term "Sega".

 

The Saturn Tribute series consists of emulated Saturn games with lots of input lag.

 

They were also popular among homebrew users for a short while; Cotton 2 copies often got bought just so dumpers could pry the emulator out of it and play other Saturn games.

 

Scanned and posted a new SEGA Company Profile for you, likely from 1990. Enjoy.

https://archive.org/details/segaprofile1990/

(Yes, there are still a couple Harmony issues left to scan too. Sooooomedaaaaayyyy...)

 

Awesome - I think that one is 1989's, based off some partial bits of it that we already had.

We have had 1990's in full for a little while as well (it came through at the same time as the En-Joint scans), but the quality isn't exactly top notch on it.

 

You're probably right. I was basing it on the graph indicating target sales for 1990, but I just realized it's for April 1990, pretty early in the year, so likely printed in late 1989. Just guessing anyway.

 

Just clocked something else that dates it specifically to 1989 - only just in fact - the presence of this:

Sega sold off the Time Out locations in July 1990. It's now striking me as odd that they were still proudly touting them as a core part of their business mere months before they got rid - doubly so when you realise they probably modelled Fantasy Square on the above:

 

Judging from the Mega Drive software they're showing, it would be late 1989. Kujaku Ou 2 came out on 25th November, Rambo III on 21st October. Golden Axe came out in December 1989, but that looks like an arcade screenshot(?), which might suggest it wasn't out yet (or they were lazy). Though of course these could all be prototype versions.

Not quite sure when Sega bought into Linguaphone, but I do know something:



you couldn't make it up

 

I think I've posted this before, but

https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:GameMachine_JP_312.pdf&page=16
It all comes back to the Sega AI Computer.

 

When you find things that make you go "huh??" while searching for other things...



This is the "Mood Max" or "Mood Machine", a collaboration between Sega and...Pfizer...yes, that Pfizer...

It looks like they just took a Print Club, gave it new decals, put a credit card slot in it...oh and charged $50 per play. The side of the cabinet says that one could experience "first kiss" "job-well-done euphoria" and uhh "post-coital afterglow"...

Based on the headband that the model and the character wears, this appears to be some sort of "mood manipulator", but I'm curious to know how they pulled it off since there's "no electrodes".

The original image apparently comes from the January 2004 issue of Wired; specifically in a section titled "Artifacts from the Future". I'm guessing this is where they did profiles on high-tech products. I couldn't find anymore information on this particular machine online.

Unfortunately, the issue isn't on IA yet, but this particular scan thankfully comes from a 2008 blogspot post where someone was trying to scan in many of the images featured in the profiles during this era.

 

I'm pretty sure this isn't real. It's an art piece thing where they're imagining culture and tech from the future

but heck this is great for our References to Sega/Print page

EDIT: We have a References to Sega/Art page now, neat.

 

...

 

Incredibly fake, but a better attempt than most!

 

I can't believe I fell for a printed shitpost

Admittedly, I didn't take a look at the other "artifacts from the future" since I was looking for something else, but after a while something did feel off about the whole thing and now I can see the photoshop work on it...

The other reason why I didn't question it is because in the 90s there were tons of companies entering into the purikura market in particular in Japan, and Atlus partnered with a company called Okasei Corporation [㈱オカセイ] to produce two Hello Kitty-themed purikura machines. I originally thought they were the same company as the one that produces beds for nursing facilities today (it looks like they aren't) so that's where the medical association came from.

The newspaper clip I've attached is from pg.18 of the 09/01/00 issue of Game Machine.

 

Another one for the collectors:



Think all these US Dreamcast boxes are the same?



I don't. The recent push to explain "which" Sega published things on Sega Retro has unearthed a few of these minor variants; when "Sega Enterprises, Ltd." became "Sega Corporation" in November 2000. Products released during that period had to do some minor rebranding, so there are more versions of "things" than you think (though there probably always was).

In the Dreamcast's case this also matters because this was when Mil-CD support was pulled. The Japanese "Sega Corporation" Dreamcasts actually note this on their boxes, but I'm not sure the US ones do. This is the only clue (though even then it might not be definitive). I've yet to see Sega Corp-branded PAL Dreamcasts, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any out there.

I expect this rebranding exercise to apply to games and accessories too, though given the Dreamcast would be axed by January 2001, I'm not sure what the extent of it is.