What’s surprising is how different those selections are: the Japanese version has 17 games that don’t appear on the Genesis Mini. So it’s fitting that the mini-consoles even have different selections of games for different parts of the world. As a visual comparison, Sega’s nostalgic character project Sega Hard Girls imagines the Mega Drive as a shy, bespectacled bookworm and the Genesis as a hootin’, hollerin’ cowgirl who calls herself Jenny.

It was a divisive time.īut the Mega Drive ran a distant third in Japan’s console race - yes, behind the PC Engine/Turbo Grafx 16! - and was sometimes seen as an offbeat, niche console. School yards were often split down the middle between kids who thought Nintendo was the best system, and kids who swore their allegiance to Sega. The Genesis had re-invented itself as the “cool kid” of console gaming in the United States, with an aggressive marketing campaign that thrust Sega into the American mainstream consciousness. The American Sega Genesis and the Japanese Mega Drive are the same machine on the inside, yet their cultural legacies are entirely different.

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