Sega Genesis

The Sega Genesis is a fourth-generation video game console developed and produced by Sega. It was originally released in Japan in 1988 as Mega Drive (メガドライブ Mega Doraibu?), then in North America in 1989 as Sega Genesis, and in Europe, Australia and other PAL regions in 1990 as Mega Drive. The reason for the two names is that Sega was unable to secure legal rights to the Mega Drive name in North America. The Sega Genesis is Sega's third console and the successor to the Sega Master System with which it has backwards compatibility (with the Sega Power Base Converter).

The Sega Genesis was the first of its generation to achieve notable market share in Europe and North America. The Sega Genesis was launched to compete with the Nintendo Entertainment System and NEC's PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16. Two years later, Nintendo released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the competition between the two would dominate the 16-bit era of video gaming. While technically inferior to the newer SNES, the Sega Genesis enjoyed significant 3rd party support, in large part because it did not censor games as severely as the SNES, using a rating system instead. The rating system allowed for accurate arcade ports and controversial games to thrive on the console, and proved so successful that Nintendo adopted the rating system, leading to the ESRB.

The Sega Genesis is well known for its wide variety of variations and addons. Two add-ons, the Sega CD and Sega 32X, were even designed to extend the capabilities of the console to compete with 32-bit consoles. These briefly supported add-ons and variations made developers weary of the Sega brand, which lead many of them to embrace competitor consoles in the fifth-generation. This legacy would continue to plague Sega even into the sixth-generation, and was partially responsible for the fall of Sega as a hardware developer.

The console and its games continue to be popular among fans, collectors, retro gamers, emulation enthusiasts and the fan translation scene. Licensed 3rd party variations of the console are still being produced to this day, and there are also several indie game developers continuing to produce games for the console. Many games have been re-released in compilations for newer consoles or offered for download on various online services.

The Sega Genesis began production in Japan in 1988 and ended with the last new licensed game being released in 2002 in Brazil, making it one of the longest supported consoles of all time. The Genesis was also Sega's most successful console; though Sega has never released a total sales figure quote, sales estimates in the past have ranged from as low as 29 million to over 40.8 million. It was succeeded in 1994 with the release of the Sega Saturn.

Virtual Console Compatibility List (Sega Genesis/Megadrive)
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