Translated interview about TecToy

[Centrale]

Over at SMS Power!, Melanogaster has kindly translated a video interview with Stefano Arnhold, chairman of TecToy, from Portuguese to English. TecToy is the Brazilian company whose stewardship of the Master System has resulted in it being the longest-lived console in the history of home video games (30 years and counting), as it is still on sale in Brazil. The interview covers how TecToy began, how they established their relationship with Sega to distribute the Master System and subsequent consoles in Brazil, and covers some familiar ground about how difficult and shortsighted the Japanese management of Sega can be sometimes. Interestingly, their first involvement with Sega was in distributing the Zillion anime and marketing a Zillion gun toy. Apparently they were able to secure a prime TV timeslot and Zillion was more successful in Brazil than in Japan.

I'm not going to cut and paste the interview over here... SMS Power! is a great site and every fan of Sega's 8-bit systems should check it out. Here's the link: http://www.smspower.org/forums/15867-ABrazilianDocumentaryOnTecToy

[Berto]

Great and enjoyable read..
This is the first time I learned that SEGA refuses Stefano's idea to place power supply inside the Megadrive with absurd reasons, yet they used it in Saturn. Lol.

[crackdude]

If you want anything translated from portuguese for SegaBits, I can help.

Legendary TecToy stuff this one.

[Centrale]

Very interesting that TecToy pitched the idea of a lower cost, black-and-white handheld system to Sega and even had manufacturing partners like Tiger lined up. Stefano portrays this as more stubborness from SOJ ("Sega does not make monochromatic games!") but I guess since the Game Gear was already in effect it would have further spread Sega's developers thin, to be supporting yet another system. I don't know, I can't understand the handheld market at all. So many amazing systems have failed to catch on... the Atari Lynx was incredible, and had quite a nice library of extremely accurate arcade translations. And the Vita seems like it should be more successful... anyway, I digress.

[crackdude]

And the Vita seems like it should be more successful... anyway, I digress.

I remember quite a while ago I had this fierce discussion with a forum member here. He could not handle that someone (me) thought the Vita was going to fail from the get go. I remember raising some pretty valid points, and so did he. But in the long run the Vita DID go down the way I said it would.

My opinion was that the Vita did not offer anything the PSP didn't already. You can't just put better graphics on a handheld and expect people to latch on to it. Nintendo has always had subpar graphics on their handhelds, and it's a major bulletpoint on their success.
In retrospect, had Sega been less ambitious at the time, the GameGear could have CRUSHED the GameBoy, same way the MegaDrive pretty much crushed Nintendo for about 5 or 6 years. But Sega was an Enterprise, always ready to take the next step a tad too soon.

[Centrale]

I thought the second analog stick was a key feature that many people felt the PSP lacked, that the Vita provided. But aside from that, I think a lot of people are rightfully turned off by the expensive proprietary "memory sticks" that Sony requires.

I'm not sure about a black-and-white handheld from Sega. The only way I could see it having some kind of additional appeal beyond the Gameboy is if the screen would be a lot more clear, but that gets back into consuming more batteries. I think the only way to beat the Gameboy with a black-and-white handheld would have been to be first to market. But at that time, Sega had no third party support. In the end, the Game Gear did pretty well, all things considered - it sold decently, and smartly expanded upon the existing 8-bit library and infrastructure.

[crackdude]

The GameBoy didn't really take off until Tetris came along. If Sega had put out a screen as good as say.. the GB Pocket, with SMS power inside.... killer. And I believe it really could've.