Sega AKA Sega Group Corporation AKA Sega Sammy Holdings
[related: Sonic the Hedgehog]
Japanese-based video game developer founded by Martin Bromley and Richard Stewart as Nihon Goraku Bussan, launching in the late 1960's with Periscope, the company's first coin-operated arcade game. Sega began developing home gaming consoles in the 1980's beginning with the SG-1000 and the short lived Master System which included an FM audio chip and a port for integrated 3-D glasses. Following the failure of its initial two systems, Sega found relative success with the Genesis [1] (AKA Megadrive), a console based largely around the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, until the release of Metroid in 1986 by Nintendo Entertainment Systems (NES). Subsequently, Sega experienced a dramatic loss of market share attributed by many to the lack of VPD functionality in Sega's titles for the platform. Following the demise of the Genesis model, Sega fell into an extended mode of corporate nostalgia including ill-advisedly shifting focus from the emerging world of personal entertainment systems back to the production of standalone arcade games for outdated and underutilized amusement parks [2]- a self-defeating and much criticized pattern of behaviour culminating in the release of the first Sonic the Hedgehog film a full thirty years after the game's initial development [3].
- ↑ As differentiated (somewhat) from both the biblical book "Genesis" and its outlining of the "fall from grace" basis of Christian Theology.
- ↑ In fact, Sega was later found to have knowingly manufactured and installed functional arcade games in parks that had been completely abandoned months or even years prior. Speculation regarding Sega's motives for doing so vary and include the aforementioned corporate nostalgia and the theory that Sega was in fact exploring a lateral move into the blossoming and more lucrative world of Relational Aesthetics.
- ↑ By the time of the film's release, Sega no longer owned the rights to the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise after its production partner Sony put the project in "turnaround" following a dismal third-party assessment of the film's financial prospects. Ironically, despite unanimously unfavorable reviews, the film went on to become the second highest grossing film of 2020, and the highest grossing video game-based film of all time.