Confessions of a SEGA Fanboy
Meditations on the world’s weirdest video game manufacturer.
I was born after the whole “console wars” era. Never once did I have a discussion with my preadolescent friends about which of us had a better piece of hardware to play games on. We were interested mainly, surprise surprise, in actually playing those games. But, upon reflection, there’s another reason we never had these fights: we all had the same machine.
It’s the 21st century, just barely, and everybody I know owns a Nintendo 64. Every kid is playing the same handful of games. Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, Super Smash Bros. Occasionally someone ends up with something offbeat that the rest of us hadn’t heard of before — I was a kid with a copy of Mystical Ninja and my friend group loved scratching our heads trying to figure that one out. But that’s it. The same adventure, played in multiple households across a rural Kentucky county. If we weren’t children easily engrossed in whatever flashy entertainment that played out before us, it would have gotten boring. This is the story of how I didn’t get bored.
There’s a magic to Nintendo that has been discussed to death. It’s Disney. Appealing and colorful and pushing just the right buttons for the widest demographic it can manage.
But there’s a grit to SEGA. Something that’s a little harder to quantify. Let me try:
My uncle had a Dreamcast. No, wait… A little more context. In those days, when everyone I knew and could talk video games with had a Nintendo 64, we ran into a problem. We were kids who had no income of our own and we all had the same games. At first, it gave us plenty to talk about. But because the stream of new games was slow for all of us, the well started to run dry after a bit. Whenever we would go to one another’s homes, we found ourselves diving into the same experiences again and again without anything significant to add to any of them. Oh boy, another round of Mario Golf. Oh yes, let’s take the Pokémon Stadium minigames out for another spin. We were kids full of energy, so we didn’t mind too terrible much. But there was a feeling of treading water lingering behind each of these visits.
Then, sometime in 2001, I ended up at my uncle’s house. And he had, fresh from some store somewhere, a SEGA Dreamcast. A strange, sleek, UFO-looking machine that read games on CDs. CDs like you listened to music on! What would they think of next?
He had a small collection of games, which I believe were already on deep discount in the wake of the console’s untimely death, but there was only one from that first batch I had any interest in. Sonic Adventure. A 3D platformer and action game.
It was like Super Mario 64, my favorite of the games I owned. But only in essence. The meat of the game was something altogether different.
The grace of time allows me to know that a great deal of what makes Sonic Adventure so different from any Mario title is that it is a janky, unpolished mess of a game whose camera is interested solely in killing the player. This is a modern truth, however, uncovered only after digging back into the past from the present. When Sonic Adventure was new, it was all about a grand sense of speed and cinema. There was a plot. There were cutscenes and dialogue. There were loop-de-loops that you could run through. Mario was a slow, aging man by comparison.
That difference, specifically the way it felt when I was a child, is why I’m a hopeless SEGA fanboy. Part of an abused group of video game enthusiasts destined to live in disappointment. But boy, when we aren’t disappointed? It’s for fantastic reasons. I’ll try to explain myself.
SEGA has, traditionally, been a company dedicated to experimentation. Nintendo, the easiest reference point due to that company’s continued success and once-direct competition with SEGA, has been too. The difference is mainly in how the two have experimented. Nintendo has been a company obsessed with refinement. They take what they already have and look for ways to streamline the product, hoping to appeal to new and old consumers alike. It’s why their consoles have been dedicated to backwards-compatibility. It’s why you don’t see huge design leaps between their games, but instead logical steps forward. For the most part. Sometimes, as we recently saw with Breath of the Wild, those steps are incredible ones. Part of the reason Nintendo has persisted as an entertainment giant is because they know what they’re doing and calculate their moves like a group of people who know what they are doing.
SEGA, on the other hand, has instead looked like a group of yahoos who are flying by the seat of their pants. They have been driving a car that’s on fire, but instead of pulling over to repair it, they continue to slap Mad Max-esque gadgets to the thing and let it ride. Tuu tu-tu tuu tu-tu tu-ruu. Trying to understand some of what SEGA did during their time as a major hardware and software developer feels like I’m trying to figure out how ocean currents work on a planet in another galaxy — there’s some basis for whatever hypothesis I can form, but ultimately it’s just guesswork.
The Dreamcast came with four controller ports on the system by default, a built-in modem for online play (the first of its kind), and removable memory cards that acted as portable gaming solutions themselves. It was, to put it simply, insanity. But it was far from their first such act. The Dreamcast’s immediate predecessor, the SEGA Saturn, was built to be an incredibly powerful 2D machine. The idea was to create something that would allow for the types of games the world was already familiar with to be made at a much higher fidelity and complexity. But, when Sony’s PlayStation started making waves as a machine ready to produce 3D graphics, SEGA pushed the Saturn in that direction as well. But they didn’t change the hardware itself, just the image they wanted the system to have. The result was a system with a library of primarily 3D games that just couldn’t take full advantage of the hardware they were running on.
An aside: If you have extra time and are curious about the Saturn and PlayStation’s competing specifications and libraries, the YouTube show Game Sack just published a fascinating episode that examines both. I highly recommend it as additional reading. You can watch it here.
So where’s the personal connection? We talked a lot about hardware there, how SEGA continued to make things up as they went along, but it was all a history lesson. Let’s go back to the Dreamcast library and look at what lil’ me was exposed to that just wasn’t available on the Nintendo 64 I had at home.
I already mentioned Sonic Adventure, a game that copped some of Super Mario 64’s style. It’s sequel played similarly, albeit with direct movement from level to level without a big hub world to explore. Resident Evil: Code Veronica offered what felt like an open space to hunt zombies in, though its survival-horror roots made sure that the player was the one ultimately hunted. And Shenmue, a very strange thing. Shenmue is a lengthy, heavily cinematic adventure game that allows the player to wander freely through its detailed world. Getting into the specifics of Shenmue is a story for another time, but suffice it to say that there was absolutely nothing like it on Nintendo’s cartridge-based system.
And this is going to sound like the most 90’s sentence I could write, but the main reason SEGA was so different came down to one word: attitude.
Hear me out.
I was obsessive over Mario. Legitimately obsessive. I mapped out levels in Super Mario Bros. I knew parts of Paper Mario’s script verbatim. And I struggled with my little hands to collect all 120 stars in Super Mario 64. I knew Mario front to back. To me, he was what video games were. There was a deliberate pace to those games. They were about thought and strategy. Like solving puzzles. These were the game my parents knew and could, in some manner, play. But my parents weren’t cool. Nobody had cool parents.
At that point in my life, my uncle was the coolest guy in the world. He was much younger than my mom, about ten years or so, and it made it easier to relate to him as a kid. He had a big box of G.I. Joes. He liked video games. That’s all it took. But he was also more representative of that attitude that made SEGA different. It was a younger brand, he was a younger man. It’s not the most complex parallel I’m drawing here.
Imagine, then, when my cool uncle showed me Sonic Adventure for the first time. Where Mario had been about deliberate movement and thought, Sonic was all about speed and instinct. Those SEGA games presented me with a smooth 3D world in which they played out. The fact that they looked objectively better than the Nintendo 64 games I knew was about all it took to sell me on their catalog.
And something about that first encounter — the sense of speed, the flow of the movement, or maybe just the fact that it was so different from what I got every day at home — hooked me. And that’s how I became a person who bought a SEGA Saturn in a secondhand store, fixed it up, and started building a library. All because this weird little company fully dedicated itself to being weird.
That weirdness, that attitude, is what makes SEGA an interesting company. They don’t really play around like they used to, but at one point they were fully committed to just trying things out. In an industry that increasingly likes to play it safe, it’s refreshing to revisit those weird bits. To get lost in a sense of speed.
And, really, getting lost is what I play games for anyway.
David Cole is an independent writer and games journalist from Wayne County, Kentucky. His work has appeared in five journals, four performance halls, and on three continents. He has been fortunate enough to work with some of his heroes and see large swaths of the world. Gurney Norman once said David was a good writer with a nice voice, which he still holds as the highest praise. More of David’s work, including his breakout collection I’ve Been a Prisoner All My Life, can be found on his website: davidcole.space.
