Onto our first list for a Sega console: the Mega Drive. Or, if you’re American or Canadian, the Genesis. I’ll be calling it the Mega Drive throughout though, as that’s what it always was to us in the UK, as well as in its homeland of Japan. (In South Korea, it was the Super Gam*Boy and, later, the Super Aladdin Boy, for some reason.)
I’ve mentioned it more than once, but we were a Nintendo household. That’s how it was in those days: you played Nintendo, or you played Sega. It was like supporting a football team, only important. However, we did go and play Sega machines over at friends’ houses. That was allowed (and vice versa, of course). While I played the Master System once or twice, by the time I was getting genuinely interested in games, everyone had upgraded to the Mega Drive.
Released in Japan as early as 1988, in North America in 1989 and most of the rest of the world in 1990, the Mega Drive predated the SNES as the major step into the 16-Bit Era, the fourth generation of console gaming. The PC Engine, aka the TurboGrafx-16, came out even earlier, but it never made much of a splash in the West, and I never saw one of those outside of a catalogue. The Mega Drive was the cool option. It looked sleek, all in black, with an ergonomic controller. The games, advertisements and characters all shouted how cool Sega was compared to the competitors.
I am not, nor have I ever been, cool, and Nintendo was more down my street. After all, Sega didn’t have Mario. It had the sporty stuff, which has never been my thing. Yet it really did sell itself as the grown-up option, and there seemed something almost illicit about playing on it, away from my parents. The Mega Drive had the fast games, the violent games, the grown-up games (or so it seemed to my young eyes).
While the Mega Drive wasn’t a massive success in its native Japan, it was a huge deal in the West. (Oddly enough, the reverse was true of its successor, the Saturn.) Pulling together a list of 25 favourites was more challenging than it was for the Nintendo consoles thanks purely to having spent less time on it, but once I dived in, I reminded myself of some incredible gaming experiences. Other games I played for the first time fairly recently, largely thanks to a local gaming bar that hosts a Mega Drive Mini/Genesis Mini and Mini 2, which are both stacked with games. Once they dropped out of the console business, Sega also had a nice habit of putting out compilation discs of their Mega Drive games for other manufacturers.
I thought about including Mega-CD/Sega CD games on the same list, as this was an add-on rather than a separate console and some CD games are included on the Mega Drive Mini 2. In the end, I decided to do a separate list for them, although as a number of games were released on both cart and CD, it's a bit abitrary which ones end up on that list. I won't do one for the 32X add-on though, that’s out of my experience.
