Category:Games developed by Sega

SEEEE-GAAA!

Founded in 1960 as Service Games, producing electro-mechanical coin-op machines before later transitioning to arcade video games and still later home console games. While Sega had massive success in the arcades prior to the 1990s, their home console efforts were only a modest success against the monolithic Nintendo until the Genesis/Mega Drive. The 16-bit gaming system, coupled with successful advertising campaigns ("Genesis does what Nintendon't", anyone?) and support for third-party developers during a time when Nintendo (especially its American branch) had strict censorship and publishing restrictions, resulted in Sega managing to gain the upper hand against the big N.

Unfortunately, things began falling apart starting around 1994 - a number of missteps involving the 32X and Saturn cost Sega much of its image, which mainly stemmed from conflicting interests between the Japanese and American branches. While the Dreamcast's release in 1998 seemed to be the start of a turnaround, the PlayStation 2's rocket success caused Sega to withdraw entirely from the console market in 2001 and quickly shift to developing and publishing for third-party systems and developers respectively (creating a surreal situation of Sonic games being on Nintendo consoles).

Interestingly, their machines and consoles used common processors that just happened to be used in popular contemporary computers all over the world, like the Amiga. From the Zilog Z80 to the Motorola 68000, this allowed programmers who were already familiar with these chips to take advantage of swapping between platforms... and later allowed enthusiasts to dissect and reasonably deduce the inner workings of several Sega games. As early as 1992, demoscene artists were making custom demos with relative ease.

So, with growing interest culminating in the adoption of Usenet and the Internet in the late 90s, the ROM hacking scene was born. Without the massive ROM hacking scene spurred by the Sonic the Hedgehog series, much of the knowledge in this wiki might not have been found for years.