Talk:Sega Genesis

Rename to Mega Drive

I removed these comments, based on the sentence at the top of the discussion page, Q13 of the FAQ, and that the IP making the comments is wp:duck the same one as the disruptive IP editor before. Chaheel Riens (talk) 13:47, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Amazing how the jingoism is still so prevalent in all of this. It's pretty ridiculous and a shame some people just won't understand that the legitimate points of each have all been considered several times, including WP:WORLDVIEW and national bias, and the community has decided there's no consensus to say the article title should be changed. Red Phoenix ^{build the future...}_{remember the past...} 21:13, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

I put the {{round in circles}} template on this talk page for that very reason, and I would support the reverting of any new threads started by IPs or unconfirmed editors on the FAQ topics as disruptive. By the way, congratulations to all those involved in getting it to FA status. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 09:42, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, it was a pretty hard fight. Red Phoenix ^{build the future...}_{remember the past...} 03:13, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Hay, some of us IP's are quite helpful - I don't register because I fully believe in the "Anyone can edit" Mantra. How about changing "any new threads started by IPs or unconfirmed editors" to "any disruptive threads started by IPs or unconfirmed editors" I had nothing to add to the FAQ, but I'd like the ability to without people prejudicing against my registration choice. 188.39.82.139 (talk) 11:25, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Fair point - the comment is only that of an editor. The actual FAQ states "In June of 2013 a near-unanimous consensus of participating editors agreed that, after a good-faith review of this FAQ, discussing the title issue without raising something new would be considered disruptive." There is no mention of the editors status - it applies to all editors, whether IP, newly confirmed, or veteran. Chaheel Riens (talk) 12:04, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

You want to keep the name of this article as "Sega Genesis" because Wikipedia is USA-centric (not a surprise, since the main servers of the English Wikipedia resides in the USA and not in Great Britain) but I want also to point that the phrase "the Sega Genesis, known as Mega Drive in most regions outside North America" is wrong. It should be changed to "the Sega Genesis, known as Mega Drive in all the regions outside North America". Because in Asia, Europe, South America, and even in Africa everyone calls that console "Mega Drive". --79.10.243.5 (talk) 15:57, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Wrong. It wasn't known as "Mega Drive" worldwide outside of North America - Korea knew it as the "Super Gam*Boy" and later "Super Aladdin Boy". If you're going to keep projecting nationalistic UK-based bias, at least read the article and put together two and two instead of insisting on a change just to try and prove yourself right on something. I'm pretty sure the FAQ above explains exactly why this article is at "Sega Genesis", and "because Wikipedia is USA-centric" is not on that list. Red Phoenix ^{let's talk...} 16:10, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

I was born in Britain and lived here all my life. My partner is from the US. Between us, I hope I can avoid a UK bias more than most. However, I mock and pour scorn on ignorant tourists who think Chiswick is pronounced "chizz wick" or Towcester is pronounced "toe chest hurr" (they aren't). So I happily hold my hand up and say "not US biased" too. Now, back to topic .... I recall the "Mega Drive" as a console that kids used circa 1990, and recall "Genesis" emulators for the PC appearing around 1998. I learned at that point of its US name, and thought "oh, fair enough". The bottom line is, at least in the context of the real world, and not just that on Wikipedia, is nobody really cares about your noble quest to change the name. Sorry, but there's far worse things going in the world, I cannot get excited about the name differences of a 25 year old obsolete gaming console. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:17, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Note

It might be wise to mention successful later Genesis titles, such as Vectorman, instead of focusing entirely on SNES games in discussion of the 1995 market. To put in perspective the lack of supply which Kent claims was caused by Nakayama's focus on the Saturn, more than 2 million Genesis units were sold in 1995, but Kalinske estimated that "we could have sold another 300,000 Genesis systems in the November/December timeframe."TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 18:17, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

I agree. I had posted a Vectorman newspaper source in one of these talk pages at some point. There are newspaper sources about Vectorman. What other 1995 titles did you feel were standout releases? There was probably a couple for 96/97 as well.--SexyKick 22:04, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Only those discussed in the article I linked to, which mentions several holiday best-sellers. Of course, it might be unwise to rely on a single source. I could try to do some research, but that's part of the reason I left a comment here rather than editing the article directly: I'm not as well-versed on the Genesis as I am on the Saturn. The "Changes at Sega" section of Sega Saturn originally borrowed heavily from this page, but I revised it to eliminate extraneous detail and attribute POV. I did not, however, copy my text into this article because some of that added detail may be more germane here. I think it's clear that a great many industry figures underestimated the continued resilience of the 16-bit market, and I believe the raw figures should be included along with Kent's interpretation of them.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:36, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Of course, games like Ranger X and Ristar do come to mind when I think of good later Genesis games, but that's all irrelevant until I can produce sources.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:39, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

We used to have raw year to year figures. It is what it is. I do think it's pretty awesome how the Sega CD outsold the Saturn in the US.--SexyKick 01:17, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

EA's reverse engineering...

...is an important topic this article should cover. I'd suggest something like the following:

Shortly before the North American launch of the Genesis, American video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) approached Sega about releasing its games for the platform. EA had previously focused on PC development on the assumption that consumers would lose interest in inferior console technology, but the overwhelming popularity of the Nintendo Entertainment System convinced the company to change direction in 1988. According to former EA chief creative officer Bing Gordon, "We said, 'You're coming out with this system and you're nowhere, but we have games' ... [but] you have to give us a different license than Nintendo because you're nowhere.'" At that time, Nintendo required third-party developers to sign agreements not to develop for any systems other than those made by Nintendo, and retained the sole authority to determine which third-party games were manufactured and in what quantities. Sega executives were reluctant to negotiate terms with EA, insisting that "We're going to be as important as Nintendo and we're not going to back down." As recounted by EA founder Trip Hawkins, "Sega was trying to clone almost everything about Nintendo." After almost a year of discussion between the two companies, a Sega executive told Gordon "If you want a different deal you're going to have to reverse engineer the system, aren't you?"

EA technicians reverse engineered both the NES and the Genesis in 1989. The clean room reverse engineering of the Genesis was led by Steve Hayes and Jim Nitchals, lasting several months before EA secretly began development of Genesis games. Hawkins finally confronted Sega Enterprises CEO Hayao Nakayama one day prior to the 1990 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), noting that EA had the ability to run its own licensing program if Sega refused to meet its demands. Sega relented, and the next day EA's upcoming Genesis games were showcased at CES. EA signed what Hawkins described as "a very unusual and much more enlightened license agreement" with Sega in June 1990: "Among other things, we had the right to make as many titles as we wanted. We could approve our own titles ... the royalty rates were a lot more reasonable. We also had more direct control over manufacturing." After the deal was in place, Gordon learned that "we hadn't figured out all the workarounds" and "Sega still had the ability to lock us out," noting "It just would have been a public relations fiasco." EA released its first two Genesis games, Populous and Budokan: The Martial Spirit, within the month. The first Genesis version of EA's John Madden Football arrived in the fall of 1990, and became what Gordon called a "killer app" for the system. Taking advantage of the licensing agreement, Gordon and EA's vice president of marketing services Nancy Fong created a a visual identifier for EA's Genesis cartridges: A yellow stripe on their left side added during manufacturing.

• 1.Bertz, Matt (July 2011). "Reverse Engineering Success". Game Informer. 21 (219): 96–99.
• 2.Kent, Steven L. (2001). The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story Behind the Craze that Touched our Lives and Changed the World. Roseville, California: Prima Publishing. pp. 408–410. ISBN 0-7615-3643-4.

Before I add this, any comments? Did I make any mistakes? Is there more EA information we should cover? (We could also add something about the saga of Joe Montana Football, which EA "scaled back" due to fear it surpassed Madden.) Any thoughts about where I should put this?TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 07:01, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Only a tiny one. Don't use season names like "fall" use Q4 or "the end of 1990" etc - X201 (talk) 07:55, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

The article's mighty long already and while this is important to mention, the mention can be much, much smaller, like two or three sentences in "North American sales and marketing" smaller. That'd be my suggestion. The whole story with quotes and all would be better off in a longer Genesis history article broken out summary style or in the companies' respective articles. czar ♔ 12:03, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Nice research, TTAAC. It does seem a bit quote-heavy and anecdotal, but very nice and informative. In a quick response to czar, I would strongly oppose a spinout article as being excessive; I'm even looking to get rid of History of the Dreamcast when I work on Dreamcast in the next few months. My return suggestion would be to add it as a full paragraph in the North American sales and marketing (because it should precede the Sega v. Accolade bits) and to reduce it to one paragraph by trimming up the quotes and anecdotal bits. I'm not terribly concerned with longer articles as long as they're not excessive, and very rarely do I see spinouts as being needed (in this case, Sega CD and Sega 32X are definitely needed ones). However, with some expansion about Nintendo and EA reverse-engineering it as well, might this worth a section in History of video game consoles (fourth generation)? Red Phoenix ^{let's talk...} 14:03, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Development

Having done work on the "Development" sections of Sega Saturn and Sega CD, I am surprised there is not much discussion of the Genesis' development in this article. Are there simply not enough sources? Even one of the sources cited has some interesting tidbits that might merit inclusion, for example: "The designs for the graphics parts had already begun, and we had an issue regarding the cost, as it was quite a late stage when we had decided on the main CPU...The reason we used two CPUs was because we believed that the load would be too heavy, had we used one to handle both sound and visuals. Due to that reason, we used the Z-80 as a sub-CPU to handle the sound." Just a thought.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:01, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Nevermind, I added a sentence.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:12, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Massive Lede section

It's been a while since I dared look at this article, but I have to say that the lede section alone is becoming larger than some stub, or even start class articles, weighing in at 540 words. It really needs trimming down by some margin. Before I work on it with secateurs, I thought I'd mention it here first for other opinions? Chaheel Riens (talk) 11:22, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Agreed—it continues to balloon. I had recommended a much more concise three ¶ lede back in Archive 21 that may be helpful as a baseline. czar ♔ 14:28, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

I believe we're still using the lede that was written during the FACR, and since that was subjected to their scrutiny I'd rather stick to it over redoing it.--SexyKick 17:20, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Sega-16.com

I should preface this by saying that I added Sega-16 interviews to Sega Saturn, and suggested one for use in Sega CD, which was subsequently added by User:Red Phoenix. However, I always had a sneaking suspicion that Sega-16 might not have editorial oversight up to Wikipedia's standards (although I wasn't too keen on checking), and WP:VG/RS lists the site as unreliable. Perhaps Horowitz is sufficiently reliable that his interviews with primary sources can be cited, but it would be quite hard to individually justify all eight references to Sega-16 in this FA. Note that numerous Sega-related articles, even Good Articles like Sega Channel, continue to use Sega-16 as a reference.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:58, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

TheTimesAreAChanging, I would contest quite the opposite. As much as WP:VG/RS doesn't say that it is, I wasn't there to debate it with them at the time. I did my homework on Sega-16 before I ever used it for any information, and surely Horowitz's contributions can be considered reliable as he is an established video game journalist. It's also worthy of note that his work specifically on Sega-16 has been cited by Retro Gamer. Red Phoenix ^{let's talk...} 01:48, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, Sega-16 could certainly help flesh out Sega CD's "Library" section if that is so, but I think it would be nice to have a broader discussion and establish a new consensus about the site if it is reliable.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 02:52, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Not a bad idea, honestly. Part of the thing here is that Sega-16 has had a changing face over the years. It used to host a lot of comment from Sam Pettus (Eidolon's Inn, which is a thoroughly unreliable site) and did have a lot of issue. In the five years I've been gone, though, it appears that Horowitz' involvement in the site has heavily increased. He removed the unreliable content; it's literally nowhere to be found there. Their game lists are gone, all of that is gone, and their features are rock solid with most being written by Horowitz himself (a few others are written by members of his listed site staff). Red Phoenix ^{let's talk...} 03:08, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

A new discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games/Sources would be a good idea if there is a belief that the situation has changed since it was initially deemed unreliable. Taking a closer look the last recorded discussion was over two years ago so a new discussion could very well come up with a new consensus. I would however suggest that some solid evidence be provided as to what is different now since that would make overturning the previous consensus a more plausible outcome.--70.49.80.26 (talk) 02:26, 21 May 2014 (UTC)