“SEGA was ahead of its time.”

It’s a popular catch-cry for Dreamcast enthusiasts and full-blown SEGA fans alike. It’s the last solace for those who still grieve SEGA’s absence from the hardware arms race. It keeps SEGA fans warm when alternate futures and parallel universes no longer sun them. It’s an emotional place where what-could-have-beens become what-should-have-beens long before they were.

TV on a Console

Home Away From Home

Thanks for the Memory

Motion Sickness

Welcome to the Net Level

With more and more of SEGA’s endeavours coming full circle in recent times, it’s hard to deny that the fallen hardware giant was right about gaming’s trajectory all those years ago. Come with us on a journey through time, and we’ll see just how ahead of the curve the company truly was.Nintendo has ruled the handheld roost for as long as there’s been a roost, but that didn’t stop the Boys in Blue from giving it a red hot go. Enter the Game Gear, replete with a backlit colour display and TV Tuner.It wasn’t until 18 years later that we’d watch the idiot box on an Xbox, with Netflix hitting the 360 in 2008. Another three before we’d again see Perfect Strangers on a portable gaming device, when Netflix finally launched on 3DS last year. To this day, you can hook up your hypothetical Game Gear to cable, satellite, your VCR/DVD combo – everything except actual television, because those bastards went digital. Which means you can’t leave the house to watch TV for four hours. Oh well.While Nintendo was busy figuring out how to put Game Boy games on the Super Nintendo, Sega made a way to bring the home experience to a handheld. The SEGA Nomad allowed players to boot up their Mega Drive and Genesis cartridges outdoors*.As brief as the experience may be, it quite literally brought the home console experience to a handheld a whole 16 years before the Vita did. And it’s still the only handheld that allows you to play Street Fighter II the way it was meant to be played: with six face buttons and diagonals.Now here’s the real kicker: SEGA originally intended the Game Gear’s successor to feature a touchscreen interface, but shelved the idea because it was too expensive.Now it’s an industry standard, but by 1997, SEGA remained the only console manufacturer not nickel-and-diming you for the ability to save games.I am of course referring to internal backup memory. SEGA pioneered its inclusion with the Mega CD in 1991, and carried the torch with the SEGA Saturn in 1994.Unfortunately SEGA backed down (instead of backing up) with the Dreamcast in 1998, presumably because it made more business sense to sell memory separately. But that didn’t stop SEGA from innovating.The Visual Memory Unit for the Dreamcast not only functioned as a memory card; it also functioned as a second screen, and a means of continuing your game outdoors. It wasn’t quite ‘Transfarring’ and it didn’t let you drive virtual golf balls on the living room floor, but it threw some neat concepts into the mix. My brother and I would raise Chao in the car then race them in Sonic Adventure when we got home.You could call plays in an NFL game without the other players seeing. You could bring your high scores to Naomi arcade machines, and take them back to your Dreamcast later. Some of these things you can’t even do anymore.What you can do now, though, is save full games and media libraries on your 320 GB PS3 hard drive. Internal memory – who’da thunk it?“You are the controller.” The Kinect marketing team must have taken a few tips from Sega’s training video:Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the Activator: the world’s first full-body control system! Give your thumbs a pat on the back and throw your controllers out the window, because they’re officially retired, forever.Sure, the Wii and Kinect have seen a *little* more success in the motion-controlled gaming sphere, but it’s interesting to note: shoehorning motion control into traditional game types didn’t work then and it still doesn’t work now.It doesn’t end there, though. Introducing the SEGA Fishing Controller, the fully functional ancestor of the Wii Remote:Designed for realistic virtual fishing experiences on the Dreamcast, the Fishing Controller was equipped with a motion sensor that could detect vertical and horizontal motions. Soul Calibur was famously playable with the reel and rod, translating real-life movement into swordplay on the screen.Samba de Amigo marked yet another of SEGA’s motion-controlled endeavours, this time with maraca controllers and a sensor bar. It’s little wonder the Latin Pop sensation would return to Nintendo’s Wii eight years later.Perhaps stranger than Samba de Amigo and sword-fishing Soul Calibur combined was the phenomenon known as Seaman. Seaman – starring Seaman, a carp with a human head –was a voice-activated virtual pet simulator narrated by Leonard Nimoy. Players would converse with Seaman through the microphone attachment, and Seaman would reply, through imitation initially, but ultimately with insulting remarks as his vocabulary increased. If the player didn’t check in on Seaman every day, there was a high chance he would die.Seaman’s most obvious successor was Nintendogs, which replaced a lot of weirdness with a lot of cuteness, but it also touched on the other half of the Kinect equation: voice activated gaming.SEGA’s biggest contribution to the future of video games was undoubtedly in the online gaming space. Both as hardware manufacturers and software developers, SEGA was the primary force behind console-based online gaming platforms as we now know them.

Sega: the poster child of early 90s marketing.

The Cost of Creativity

The dryly-named Sega Net Work System was SEGA’s first foray into online gaming. The network service debuted in Japan on November 3rd 1990, along with the MegaModem and Game Toshokan cartridge (literally “Game Library”).Players would attach the MegaModem to the back of their Mega Drives, download games from the Game Toshokan, and play them with each other over a dial-up connection – all for a monthly fee of ¥800. Only 17 games used the MegaModem, and some of those weren’t even games (Nagoya Home Banking for the win!), but still, that’s pretty damn impressive for 1990. Unfortunately the price was too prohibitive for the MegaModem to reach critical mass (¥12,800 with the Game Toshokan), and plans were scrapped for its US counterpart, the Tele-Genesis.SEGA’s next project was the SEGA Channel service, which launched in December 1994. Sega struck a deal with Time Warner Cable and TCI, offering 50 different titles a month on demand, plus demos, cheats and even unreleased content; all for a $25 activation fee plus a monthly subscription fee of around $15.The SEGA Channel delivered games to over 250,000 subscribers over regular coaxial cable. Games would download to the Genesis’ volatile RAM, meaning that they were erased from the system’s memory each time the console was powered off. No matter, though – games could be downloaded again in under a minute. It’s little wonder the service won Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New” award in 1994. The service continued until July 31, 1998, well into the next generation of consoles. Many cable operators had to clean their broadcast signal and equipment to ensure the SEGA Channel could be received, so the very fact that you’re enjoying broadband internet right now could well be thanks to SEGA.SEGA continued its online gaming push with the NetLink, a 28.8kbps dial-up modem for the Saturn. Netlink’s browser was designed with the Saturn controller in mind, but players could use a keyboard and mouse as well. Despite a limited offering of just five titles, the list of NetLink-compatible games read like a who’s who of online multiplayer: Virtual On, Sega Rally Championship, Saturn Bomberman, Duke Nukem 3D, and Daytona USA CCE. An online-ready console launched with these five titles could have taken the world by storm.The Dreamcast was the world’s first online-ready console, launching with a built-in modem. Sonic Team’s ChuChu Rocket! was the first Dreamcast title to showcase its online capabilities, and was eventually packed in with the console for this very purpose. Unfortunately, SEGANet was not ready until a year later, but SEGA’s online service did launch in style, sporting the likes of Quake III Arena, NFL2K1, and NBA2K1. They were soon followed by the first console MMO, Phantasy Star Online, which still has private servers to this day.Other titles are still playable online, including Quake III and Sega Swirl. Today you would struggle to find a major game release that doesn’t feature online multiplayer in some capacity. A console without online capabilities is now inconceivable. Love it or hate it, you have SEGA to thank (or blame) for this future.Microsoft went on to follow SegaNet’s blueprint, repeating some of the same mistakes while making a few more. They launched Xbox Live on November 15, 2002 – exactly one year after the Xbox – and took a further two years to put out an online multiplayer game worth playing: Halo 2. Even as I write this, Microsoft has announced plans to sell the Xbox 360 at $99 with a two-year subscription to Xbox Live Gold. This is highly reminiscent of SEGA’s Dreamcast offer, essentially giving the console away in exchange for a two-year SegaNet subscription. What started out as SEGA’s experiment could well become the bread and butter of the industry.When you look back on all this forward-thinking, it’s easy to forget the high price of ignoring present market realities. The Game Boy’s display was black and green so it wouldn’t eat six AA batteries in less than four hours. The PlayStation’s lack of internal memory made it cheaper to manufacture, all the while earning Sony a mint on memory cards. Unfortunately for SEGA, offering future tech in the present is expensive, and I would chalk up a majority of Sega’s commercial failures to prohibitive price tags with minimal returns. This is in stark contrast to the company’s ancient rival, Nintendo, which is historically quite content to sit on emerging technologies until they become affordable, and by extension, profitable. If SEGA was still in the hardware game, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine it releasing a Wii with 1:1 motion in 2006, or a Kinect with the dedicated CPU and a copy of Project Milo packed in. And you know what? It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the company failing either.

Sega does what Nintendon’t – it’s Science.

It is little wonder SEGA was the prime mover for video games for so long: with teams AM1 through to AM7 during the 1990s, surely SEGA burned through an insane amount of money in research and development alone. Like a dog digging holes in the backyard, SEGA leapt from the Mega CD to the 32X to the Saturn within the span of three years. This did nothing to build up consumer confidence in the SEGA brand, but in retrospect, it’s hard not to admire the excitement for the medium that SEGA so clearly shared with its fans, and demonstrated with its business decisions. Its devil-may-care attitude towards game development in the Saturn and Dreamcast eras is something that we simply do not see outside of the indie scene today. The Dreamcast read like a love letter to gaming itself. But love doesn’t pay the bills – on 31 January 2001, SEGA bowed out of the hardware game altogether. There is a certain strangeness, living in a future that SEGA saw two decades ago. Even stranger for Sega, a retired prize fighter sitting on the sidelines. Watching Nintendo grapple with the internet; watching Sony outfit handhelds like Swiss Army knives; watching Microsoft struggle to make full body control viable; and being able to say, “been there, done that.”

Adam Redsell is a freelance writer based in Brisbane, Australia. He enjoys hot saunas and choc chip cheesecake, but never at the same time. If you enjoyed this article, follow him on IGN or Twitter . Separately.