20 Things You DIDN'T Know About The Sega Genesis
20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Sega Genesis
Welcome to MojoPlays, and one of the best forgotten consoles of all time is the Sega Genesis. Forgotten by modern gamers, beloved by classic gamers, now it’s my job to teach you modern gamers about this absolute gem. These are 20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Sega Genesis. Let’s go!
The Most Expensive Genesis Game
Rare and ridiculously pricey video games almost always come with backstories juicier than a JRPG side quest, and the Genesis’s crown jewel proves it by being a game that, legally speaking, should have been yeeted out of existence; the whole saga began in 1989 when Sega was gearing up to launch a special port of the legendary puzzle-monster “Tetris”, but right before release the lawyers burst in like final bosses reminding everyone that Nintendo actually held certain rights that basically shouted ‘Hands off our tetrominoes!’, so the devs were ordered to cancel the whole thing and obliterate every copy like they were performing a real-life save file wipe, but of course a few sneaky cartridges escaped destruction, and now those survivors sell for enough money to make even RPG merchants gasp.
Rambo III
Explosions, machine guns, and Stallone looking like he was permanently trying to whistle without moving his lips, “Rambo III” was basically the Sega Genesis equivalent of someone yelling “YO, CHECK THIS OUT!” into a megaphone. The Sega Genesis game was great, but also delivered the most baffling ‘wait…what?’ moments, starting with the very normal 16-bit tradition of slapping digitized actor photos into cutscenes. In level two, when you rescue a POW who warns that everything’s about to go boom, the accompanying portrait looks unmistakably like Rutger Hauer, which is wild because Rutger Hauer was not in “Rambo III”, nor any other “Rambo” .. anything? And to this day, there’s still no explanation!
Mandela Effect
Whenever someone mentions the Genesis, your brain probably sprints straight to “Sonic the Hedgehog” faster than Sonic himself zooming toward the nearest chili dog. After all, they released together. Right? RIGHT!? Actually, no. One of all time classic gaming Mandela Effects is in play. It’s easy to forget that the blue blur didn’t actually exist when the Genesis first booted into the console wars, meaning the system spent its first few years hedgehog-free like some kind of prehistoric era before quills and attitude were invented; since “Sonic the Hedgehog” didn’t drop until 1991, early adopters weren’t unwrapping their consoles and saying ‘Gotta go fast,’ they were firing up the original pack-in game, the gloriously weird and shirt-ripping “Altered Beast”, a port of the arcade hit where your main power-up is apparently doing CrossFit until you turn into a wolf.
Mascot Before Sonic
Because our old blue mate didn’t show up at launch, Sonic wasn’t even Sega’s first mascot. As it turns out, Sega’s chosen hero was “Alex Kidd”, a platforming protagonist who looks like someone tried to design a child and a monkey at the same time then decided to keep both versions, and his games had him switching powers and themes more often than RPG characters swap equipment; he only got one Genesis outing with “Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle” before Sonic zoomed in and basically told him to pack his bags. Sorry Alex.
Nintendo Are Ruthless
Nintendo had so much clout after the NES’s runaway success that it basically strutted around the retail world like a boss battle with sunglasses, so much so that Nintendo decided to flex on stores the moment the Sega Genesis started looking a little too cool for comfort. With the NES printing money like it was auditioning for a new career, Nintendo could strong-arm retailers by threatening to yank its golden goose off shelves if stores dared to stock Sega’s stuff, which worked fine back when the Master System was about as threatening as a Goomba doing its best, but the Genesis had hype, swagger, and people actually wanting it, so stores were like, “Yeah… we kinda want to sell the thing people want to buy,” leading to a bizarre moment where Nintendo actually stalled the Genesis launch in some major chains.
Sega's THIRD Console
Most North American gamers had never even heard of the Master System, if you mentioned it back then, people would’ve assumed you were talking about a new thermostat. But if you hopped in a time machine and told a kid in 1992 that the Genesis wasn’t Sega’s first, not even their second, but actually their third console, they’d probably stare at you like you’d just claimed Mario was gonna have a voice one day. The truth goes all the way back to 1983 when Sega released the “SG-1000”, a system that launched before Sega even had its legendary arcade hits ready and was therefore stuck with games that felt like they were programmed during someone’s lunch break.
Games Are Still Being Made
There was once an age, right after the dinosaurs and before broadband, when a console stopped getting new games the moment its manufacturer yanked the plug, but the rise of the homebrew scene blasted that rule into pixelated dust as ingenious programmers began creating brand-new titles for so-called ‘obsolete’ systems. Many would-be homebrew devs aim their retro passion at modern platforms by making new-old games like “Shovel Knight”, which looks so authentically NES you half-expect to blow on the cartridge. But some creators insist on going full time-machine and building games the actual old-school way, which is how we get projects like “Tanglewood”, developed using genuine Genesis-era tools and released on real Genesis cartridges decades after Sega officially discontinued the system.
Sorta Backwards Compatible
Backwards compatibility may sound to non-gamers like a yoga move performed while walking in reverse, but in gaming it’s practically sacred. Though the Master System didn’t really have an impact in US, Sega still decided the “Genesis” should be able to play Master System games, but since the two consoles used differently sized media and the Genesis couldn’t natively run the older hardware, Sega sold the fantastically named Power Base Converter. The Power Base Converter didn’t exactly sell like “Sonic the Hedgehog” hotcakes, and its mysterious name didn’t help either, so Sega only produced a small batch and didn’t bother ensuring later Genesis revisions were compatible with it. Lazy.
Official Genesis Wireless Controllers
Wireless controllers have been around long enough that younger gamers might assume they sprouted naturally from consoles like some kind of technological potato plant, but for most of gaming history (before Xbox 360) they were the domain of brave (and sometimes janky) third-party companies. But as it turns out, Sega actually created official six-button wireless controllers for the “Genesis”, which very few people seemed to notice because Sega marketed them about as loudly as someone whispering into a pillow; like most wireless tech of the era, they used IR instead of anything fancy, meaning they worked great as long as you kept line-of-sight like you were trying to impress a motion sensor, and those who used them generally agree they were surprisingly solid for the time. Until your Mom walked in front of you and Sonic stopped dead in his tracks.
Mortal Kombat: Meet Reptile’s Friends
The “Mortal Kombat” port on the Genesis is famous for its glorious blood code and an intro screen that basically winks at you so hard it sprains an eyelid while whispering, ‘Hey champ, type in the code’ and everyone knows the secret fight with Reptile that requires you to perform a list of conditions so specific it feels like you’re trying to summon a demon on the Pit stage, but what most players don’t know is that the Genesis and Sega CD versions hide a truly cursed glitch that gives Reptile some very questionable backup; if you trigger the secret Reptile fight during an endurance round, the game gets confused and assumes the Reptile fight is an endurance match, so after you defeat him, the game spawns a second fighter who looks like someone dipped Raiden, Johnny Cage, or Sonya into radioactive slime and hoped for the best, resulting in a green, garbled disaster with animations that move like a corrupted save file.
WWF Raw: The Original Hidden Wrestler
WWF Raw, on the Sega Genesis, had one of the weirdest hidden wrestlers, and I want to talk about it. The 32x version of the game specifically included the masked ninja wrestler Kwang, a choice so random it’s basically the 2023 equivalent of revealing Madcap Moss as your ultra-secret WWE fighter. Despite having a cool-looking sprite, Kwang didn’t get unique moves, special attacks, or even his signature green mist, the one thing people actually remember about the guy, meaning the developers essentially said, ‘What if we add a hidden character but forget to include everything that makes him, you know… him?’ and thus gaming history’s first officially licensed hidden wrestler entered the ring with all the impact of a wet tag rope.
Penn & Teller & Charity
“Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors,” was a planned release in 1995, starring the magician duo. The game was going to be a six-part chaos sampler that included a mode where Lou Reed instantly vaporizes you with death vision if you pick ‘impossible’ difficulty because, shockingly, ‘impossible’ actually meant impossible; but the publisher went belly-up before launch, so nobody got to experience this beautiful nonsense until it resurfaced online in 2005, which is when players discovered the crown jewel of foolishness known as “Desert Bus,” a game where you drive a bus from Tucson to Vegas in real time for eight straight hours with no enemies, no excitement, and about as much entertainment value as watching paint dry on another bus, all while fighting the vehicle’s subtle drift. LoadingReadyRun embraced the absurdity and created Desert Bus For Hope, a charity event where they play the game for hours and hours based on donations, and the first marathon (approved by Penn and Teller themselves) brought in nearly $23,000, while the running total has since climbed to around $9.5 million. Now that’s a trick.
The Lost Batman Episode
The Adventures of Batman and Robin” showed up on basically every 90s console like Batman himself running late for patrol, and while each version was its own unique beast with totally different levels and stories, the Sega CD edition flexed harder than Bane at a protein shop thanks to the hardware letting it pull off something the others couldn’t: actual full-blown animated cutscenes. There was 16 minutes of original animation stitched between levels, looking shockingly close to “Batman: The Animated Series” and featuring the full cast of voice actors, basically turning the game into a lost episode you have to earn with vehicular justice.
X-Men’s Piracy Prevention Trick
Western Technologies Inc. dropped the Genesis version of “X-Men” right when the animated series was hotter than Wolverine’s temper, and while it wasn’t the same flavor of awesome as the legendary arcade game or the SNES version that shredded eardrums with pure rock energy, the Genesis take carved out its own identity with a gritty, comic-page vibe that made the other adaptations look like Saturday morning warm-ups; nowadays, if someone wants to replay it, odds are they’ll be firing up a ROM while pretending they’re a pirate captain looking for mutant treasure, but the devs accidentally whipped up a piracy-prevention trick that still causes headaches, because near the end, right after you beat Mojo (no not us), the game tells you to ‘RESET THE COMPUTER!’, which is cryptic developer-speak for ‘tap the Genesis reset button, genius’ to reach the final level, a detail that was obvious only if you were holding an actual console and not an emulator.
Korea’s Console Names
“Genesis,” “Mega Drive,” “that thing your cousin swears was better than the SNES,” the brilliant SEGA console goes by many names. But, nothing (and I MEAN nothing) beats what the system was called in Korea: The Super Gam*Boy, a name that sounds less like a video game console and more like the kind of bootleg handheld you get at a dodgy electronics store in Brazil. Eventually they rebranded it as the Super Aladdin Boy, which admittedly sounds cooler and let them use a mascot who was somehow Aladdin but also a genie but also wielding a lightsaber, it was weird dude.
Fergus McGovern
The late Fergus McGovern, founder and CEO of Probe Entertainment, spent the late-80s and early-90s blessing the gaming world with ports, and also with his enormous, smiling head, which he apparently insisted on hiding in games like some kind of corporate Where’s Waldo. The most legendary cameo of all is in the Genesis port of “Mortal Kombat II,” where, after jumping through enough hoops to qualify for the circus, you can transform your opponent into a tiny Fergus-headed man, prompting the screen to shout “FERGALITY!” as if the universe itself is in on the joke.
Genesis of Online Gaming
Did you know that in 1990, Japan released the Sega Meganet? It was an online attachment for the “Genesis” that let players download games, send emails, check banking info, and pretend they lived in the cyber-future, all while operating on early-90s dial-up so slow you could age like a fine wine between menu screens, and although the service was impressively forward-thinking, very few games actually supported two-player online play because the tech was held together by the sound of your modem screaming; unsurprisingly, Meganet didn’t last long and was quietly retired, but its skeleton paved the road for the Sega Channel, the XBand, and eventually online gaming as we know it, proving Sega was once again the brilliant inventor who shows up to the party ten years early with great ideas and absolutely no timing.
Nintendo's Ego Created Genesis
Late Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi was one of the main architects of Nintendo’s rise, the guy who helped steer the ship while Shigeru Miyamoto was busy inventing “Donkey Kong”, “Mario”, and “The Legend of Zelda”, yet Yamauchi was also famously ruthless, and after the NES exploded into a cultural supernova he leveraged that dominance by forcing third-party developers into deals so lopsided they made Bowser’s odds against Mario look fair. Everything changed when the “Genesis” launched and suddenly developers had a second console worth caring about, allowing Sega to swoop in like a cool rebel offering contracts that didn’t feel like homework punishments, and because Nintendo treated partners like they were lucky just to exist in the same room, many publishers eagerly jumped ship to the Genesis.
It Outsold SNES
The general consensus is the SNES won the 16-bit console war in North America, but the truth is far fuzzier: exact sales numbers are tough to lock down, and most estimates say the Genesis and SNES ended up so close that the whole thing was basically a photo finish where both consoles break the tape simultaneously and argue about it later. But once you zoom out to the rest of Earth, the “Mega Drive” absolutely clobbered the SNES across most territories, the only thing skewing the stats is how obliterated Sega was in Japan, where the SNES didn’t just win, it practically set up a victory parade, yet that wasn’t nearly enough to offset the Mega Drive’s dominance in Europe, where the SNES struggled to gain traction against both Sega and the armies of wildly popular microcomputers that Europeans apparently loved more than oxygen. And then there’s Brazil, where Sega isn’t just a brand, it’s a national pastime.
The Release That Changed Everything
Back in the olden days, aka the era of blowing into cartridges like it was a sacred ritual, if you were hyped for an upcoming game, you basically had to sit there, pray, and hope it magically appeared on store shelves before your childhood ended, because release dates were so vague Nintendo Power might as well have written, ‘Coming… sometime probably?’ But Sega decided that “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” deserved an actual event instead of chaos and guesswork, so they invented Sonic 2sday, a worldwide coordinated release date that let everyone know the blue blur would officially hit shelves on November 24, 1992; this was unheard of at the time because it required getting stores across North America AND Europe to honor a strict street date instead of putting games out whenever the stock boy discovered them behind the cereal aisle, and while today a unified release date is so normal we barely notice it, back in 1992 it was borderline wizardry.