I've been digitizing a bunch of old home videos for my parents and came across some footage of Sega's setup at "Innoventions," at Epcot Center in Disney World in 1994. It's really, really poor quality, but I figured I'd upload it anyway since there probably isn't a ton of video of a full setup of Virtua Formula: I'm the small one. I got 6th place, my sister got 7th, and my brother got 3rd. To be fair, he was the only one with a driver's license at the time. Bonus footage at the end of me being absolutely thrilled to take a picture with Sonic and Tails.
Some decent quality B-roll footage of the later Dreamcast era of the exhibition also recently surfaced (@ 26:42): By all accounts I've seen, there were much fewer interesting rarities on show at the place by this point (older footage features prototype MD/32X games, the aforementioned Virtua Formula and all the other arcade games, even that weird early promotional material for the Sonic cartoon), but still good to see.
I also went in 1999. My face is on one of the rocks outside! My belief is that the Sega display was probably shipped over from E3 - the big Sonic over the Sonic Adventure booths almost certainly was (unless they made two), but it wasn't a massive section of the park (otherwise I reckon I would have remembered it more clearly). The older set looks far more elaborate. One thing I do know is that the internet is quite good at documenting Disney park history. The remnants of River Country is akin to Hidden Palace Zone in Sonic 2 - it inspired people to go digging. I have YouTube subscriptions to Defunctland and Yesterworld - I love this stuff. This isn't either of those but it seemed reasonably on top of Innoventions history when it was first posted last year. Obviously new B-roll footage might debunk a few claims though. Basically Innoventions was big until it stopped being big, and then they axed it.
Although the likes of Disneyland are bound to give rise to more polished videos, the remnants of defunct cultural rubbish usually never fail to fascinate at least someone out there. It's the allure of the unknown, even when you know it was once there, and as much as there are problems with it, the whole "lost media" phenomenon shares the same root. (personally speaking I probably wouldn't even be making this bloody post if my younger self had never saw that photo of the SegaWorld escalator blocked off by a Coke vending machine)
It also helps that with Disney parks in particular, they often have massive plans that don't end up materialising. Obviously you get the places that were never built, but it's the crazy stuff that's stares you right in the face: Animal Kingdom was going to have a fantasy area with Dragons, and they were so certain it would be made that a Dragon appears front and centre in the park's logo. They never made it. For years the park had this logo - it might still have this logo. EPCOT is the absolute height of failed plans - the whole reason it exists is because Walt Disney wanted to completely rebuild society (the "experimental prototype community of tomorrow" bit). And after being downscaled to the point where it was totally unrecognisable, there was this situation (actually around 1999/2000 come to think of it) where they had big, clearly visible, empty buildings that had to close because the sponsors left. You see some of that with Innovations - vast chunks of it were closed off or scaled down, and they have this literal "road to tomorrow" that doesn't go anywhere and it's insane. Attractions that are right there, fully functional, but are walled off, so you get all this space with nothing in it. And then you have the old water parks that are closed but the music still plays. I love it.
I personally love lost media videos as long as they aren't talking about video games where somehow every single proto is "lost media" despite obviously having final versions of so many games. It pisses me off quite frankly.
I'm just going to dump this here as I'm already way behind on my things to do for the wiki, and this isn't my area of expertise. In the mid-90s Disney World released some CD-ROMs "The Walt Disney World Explorer", there might be several revisions, so probably worth looking through for someone interested in Sega's Epcot Center stuff.
I went there in late August / early September 2001, I remember the date because it was about a week or so before the Twin Towers tragedy. I don't remember seeing any Sega stuff there at all, which fits with the wiki page which says that Sega pulled out in January. That was also the month that they abandoned the Dreamcast, so I guess that was related.
Not much to report - this is the only Sega-related screenshot on both discs. There's two editions, one from 1996, and another from 1998, with the latter just updating the park where it needs to (notably adding Animal Kingdom). It's your typical mid-90s point-and-click multimedia thing - slideshows, the occasional video and some bits of trivia that are almost certainly documented on the internet. Although to give it credit, pretty much every attraction is covered, and it's an interesting time capsule if you're into Disney park history. And of course you get the marketing for the now extinct attractions. Such as Discovery Island which I forgot to mention - the former bird sanctuary that has been decaying well within public view since 1999. when you wish upon a staaarrr~
I went to this attraction as a kid during the Genesis era, and have vivid memories of it. I recall that they had a lot of Genesis kiosks, like 40 or so (I was a small child though, so maybe it just felt like a lot?), in a really big section of the building (I remember big glass windows where you could see the displays from outside?), with all the recent and upcoming(?) games. I don’t know that there were any prototypes, but at the time I was mostly into Sonic and despite recognizing the games from gaming magazines, I wouldn’t have been able to tell what was pre-release and what wasn’t. The kiosks had a timer on them, and it was something like 10 minutes. After the timer ran up the kiosk would reset so that kids wouldn’t hog the machines. I remember this, because I found a kiosk with the SEGA Channel on it. One thing I noticed is I couldn’t find Mortal Kombat anywhere - which had come out recently - and I imagined it was because Disney was so wholesome. However, I noticed on the SEGA Channel menu that Mortal Kombat was on there, so I selected it to download. I was going to stick it to the mouse!!! I remember it felt like it took a long time to download the game- I don’t know that it was actually hooked up to download or faked in some way. But if it was, I imagine it properly emulated the download speeds. I remember the kiosk clearly had what looked like the SEGA Channel adapter, but in hindsight it seems weird that they would hook up cable to this one random kiosk in the middle of like 40 other ones. Either way, I remember that download taking a long time to complete, but I got into Mortal Kombat and put in the blood code… because I wanted maximum gore at Disney World! Awww yeah. So I get into the game, and I throw like two punches, blood starts flying, and then… the kiosk resets. By that point my parents made me leave this section, but I would’ve spent HOURS on it if I could’ve.