Irimajiri Speaks Out About the Saturn, the 32X, and SOA’s Financial Troubles

We need wiki pages for most of this. I genuinely can't keep up.

 

That wasn't really the case with Sega Europe though, they already directly covered UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Austria when Sega bought them out from Virgin, with sub-distributors in Portugal and Switzerland also going through Virgin Mastertronic / Sega Europe. Italy, Benelux, and Nordic distributors had existing contracts where they dealt directly with Japan, but they were supposed to be switching to dealing with Virgin Mastertronic (soon to be Sega Europe) by 1992. Sega Europe bought out the Benelux distributor and directly distributed there from 1993.

This goes back to 1988 when Virgin became distributor for the UK, France, and Germany. They bought out the existing UK distributor Mastertronic not long after, and set up subsidiaries in France and Germany. In 1989 they extended the contract by 5 years until 1994, and also took on Spain, but there they appointed a sub-distributor, rather than distributing directly. Just before the Sega buy-out the Spanish distributor started distributing for Nintendo, so Sega directly distributed there from then on.

And whilst Sega Europe and Sega UK were closely entwined, they weren't one and the same, for example each country had it's own Managing Director. In 1991;

· Sega Europe: Nick Alexander
·· Sega UK: Alan Sharam
·· Sega France: Christian Brecheteau
·· Sega Germany: Winnie Derlian
·· Sega Spain: Paco Pastor
·· Sega Austria: Michael Neubauer

 

Every so often I remember how the corporate history of Sega Europe is to some degree even more convoluted than the other regions the company operated in, and stuff like this is why. God help They Create Worlds if they ever do decide to record a podcast episode covering them, as was threatened in 'Dreams of Sega'.

 

For sure, and there's a whole new level of convolution for non-EEC/EFTA countries ...