Say, you probably know more on Sega stuff than I do.
I'm curious if you know what Sega's marketing was like in UK before the Master System?
I know Sega made consoles before the Master System, but I don't know if these consoles ever left Japan's shores or if Sega had much of a market in America, Europe and UK.
Yep, the pre-Master System consoles were mostly sold in Japan and Asia and actually there was only one of it.
It's SG-1000 (which is basically SC-3000 without keyboard).
Some reached western but other than Australia and New Zealand, there was no partnership to sell the console.
The marketing were just magazine ads and the impact wasn't big.
SEGA's first 8-bit machine was the
SC-3000.
At that time, SEGA only did arcade games, so this was their first challenge.
They didn't even have an idea on how many units they’d sell.
Also to be noted that SC-3000 was kinda more a PC for beginner-level users than a game machine.
After Nintendo planned to release their own console system at the same time, SEGA removed the keyboard from the SC-3000 and marketed it as a new game machine / home console, the
SG-1000.Turned out SG-1000 was a big hit in Japan.
The problem was, while SEGA knew how to make arcade games, they didn’t really know anything about console development.
That's why most of the games were just ports of their arcade games.
Their development teams then had been working on a new home console system, based off the arcade System II PCBs, which would reproduce that arcade graphics engine as closely as possible.
This was the
Sega Mark III (in Japan) which then changed into
SEGA Master System for American and European market.
While it's strugling in US with its partnership with TONKA, the console did what the NES couldn't - break into the UK market (Thanks to Virgin Mastertronic, and it could have same fate as NES without SEGA's partnership with Virgin Mastertronic but that's a different story) and European market.
So may be you wondered how could SEGA already popular before Master System arrived if SC-3000 and SG-1000 were so rare in Europe?
Well, in western, SEGA's life before Master System was Arcade.
SEGA was the King of Arcade.
