RETRO TECH: SEGA GENESIS

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( music playing ) Woman: I was pretty young. It was my brother's. I found it in a box in my basement. Man: I remember going to my cousin's house and I was like what is that? Man 2: It was a pretty revolutionary device. Slick, shiny, super sexy. It was the first system that made me love games. Man 3: It was the party started. I was like, "Yo, come to my basement and check this out." ♪ Sega ♪ I'm Marques Brownlee and I review dope new tech. But on this show, I'm rewinding the clock to discover the tech of the past that changed our lives forever. This is "Retro Tech: Sega Genesis." Hey, what's up, guys? MKBHD here. So, the tech we have here today is very important. Back in the '80s if you were gaming, Nintendo was it until this console came out. The Sega Genesis. The Genesis came out in 1989 and was a big thorn in Nintendo's side. As home video game consoles made the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit graphics. And it's all over this box. Says 16-bit color graphics. Says 16-bit, 16-bit, 16-bit. Obviously, as someone who makes videos, more bits is better. So, I have no experience with Sega Genesis. I'm starting from scratch. These things are super rare. So, we didn't have a sealed Genesis, but we have the next best thing. Which is Sega Genesis in the original box that it came in. And it smells like old tech. ( sniffing ) I don't know how to describe that smell. Like think of the cardboard box in like your grandparents' basement. This is the matte black Sega Genesis. I appreciate the matte black, of course. Let's see what else comes in the box. Looks like a video cable. RCA cable. Another cable. A power brick. And then you have your controller. Pretty simple A, B, C button layout. I guess I shouldn't expect it to be... in 1989. And then the instruction manual. Do I still have a warranty? That would be funny. No warranty. I think I'm ready to finally play a Sega Genesis game for the first time. And I guess what better game to play than Sonic the Hedgehog. There is no click so I'm not sure if that was... correct or not. Hmm. No graphics yet. Starting to scare me, Sonic. I definitely remember all those retro videos now of people blowing out the cartridge. This is definitely that cartridge. Was it backwards? No. That was definitely the right way. Connect. Hmm. I think I'm just gonna press the reset button. There's no other buttons on this, so. - There's-- - ♪ Sega ♪ ( laughs ) Now that I finally figured out how to turn the console on, I'm going to spend the next few days learning all about the Sega Genesis and its impact on the gaming industry. Hannibal, first of all, thanks for joining us. - For sure. thank you, man. Yeah. - Appreciate it. First thing I'm gonna ask you to do is check underneath your chair. Check. Hey! Sega Genesis. This brings back memories. I missed you. A lot of traumas coming back to me right now in getting destroyed in sports games. Especially holding the controller. It feels like traveling back in time. ♪ Sega ♪ So, let's go all the way back to beginning when you had to go to an arcade. You started seeing arcades everywhere in the '70s. Sherri: Because kids, quarters, and things that go bleep bloop bleep bloop bleep are instant cash grabs. Hannibal: You just played video games until whatever money you had was gone. ( music playing ) Which is a terrible way to spend money. Blake: For a period of time the best games were still in the arcade first. But then there was the video game crash in 1993. Joe: In the early '80s the market was saturated with a million different video games and quality went... ( trilling ) and then there was a huge crash 'cause people were like, "This is a waste of money and a waste of time." Adesina: There was decrease in business of 97% across the industry. This broke companies. People went out of business. It was over. But yet, in the midst of the madness, Sega came into play and they released a console called the SG-1000. It did not do very well because it came out the same day as the NES. Which blew Sega's machine out of the water. Sherri: They have Mario Bros. They have Donkey Kong. The poor SG-1000 cannot compete. Sega, they go back to the drawing board. In 1996, they come back with the Master System. Announcer: The Sega Master System. With twice as much memory. But Nintendo by this time has Super Mario. Super Mario is a juggernaut. Blake: By 1989, one in three households in America had a Nintendo console. And Nintendo really did seem to be running away with the video game market. Sherri: But little company that could, Sega takes it back to the drawing board for the third time. Joe: The Sega Genesis, they're like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. Adesina: Sega finally hit a homerun and that's because they were the first true 16-bit console. Blake: We're living in a world saturated by 8-bit consoles and Sega makes the business decision that we're not going to win this battle. So, let's go to 16-bits. Adesina: It allowed them to create games that had a lot more depth and a kind of 3D appearance. Sherri: Fluid movement, fast movement, no slow down, no lag. The 8-bit certainly couldn't handle anything like that. Hannibal: When the Genesis came out I remember that feeling of wait till I get this on these mother( bleep ). And I'm gonna destroy them. Adesina: Everybody had a Nintendo, but if you had a Genesis, you were a little bit different. Boy: I think I'd rather play Genesis. It's bigger. It probably has better graphics. Blake: For people like myself, Sega and Nintendo were all we talked about. We chose friends based on what consoles people had. A Nintendo person is someone who gets good grades. Someone who plays it safe. Sega people were edgier. The Genesis you don't play in front of your parents. It's like a dirty magazine. Sherri: If you wanna go save your princess who's in another castle, you go over there. But if you wanna punch someone's heart out, then you over to Genesis. Hannibal: Yeah, Mortal Kombat was huge, man. Somebody could just keep on hitting you with the Sub-Zero freeze. - You don't remember that. - I had no idea that-- - I'm schooling you on it. - You would be more - 'cause like I never played it. 25. - How old are you? - Oh! - Before my time. That's why you talking to me like that. - ( laughs ) - Yeah. Marques: So, as Hannibal pointed out, I've never actually played games on the Sega Genesis. And I'm not much of a gamer. So, I've asked fellow YouTube creator Mari Takahashi of Smosh Games to show me the ropes. - So, is this fun for you? - No. How's he doing that? - This is the original Genesis controller... - Oh, yeah. - ...when it first shipped. - Oh, my gosh. The last time I held this controller was probably 1995. I was able to walk by that year, so that's good. What made the Genesis special? There are other consoles that were out at that time. I think it was their sort of like handshake to the generation that got lost with Nintendo stuff. For me it was the games like Mortal Kombat that seemed a little bit more graphic, a little bit more aggressive with like a tough guy sort of mentality. - Okay. - Being like a small kid I'm like, "Oh, I'm like a tougher person and that's why I like these sorts of games." So, I have never played any Sega Genesis games ever. You haven't played Mortal Kombat before? I have never played Mortal Kombat before. Oh, man! ♪ Sega ♪ My go-to was always Scorpion. I'm gonna go with hat guy. Hat guy? That's Raiden. You called the god of thunder hat guy? - Fight! - Oh, my gosh. Wow! I remember all the things that are so cheap. - Wait, okay, hold on. - Okay, sorry. I'm gonna play so cheap because that's the only way I played when I was a kid. Which is harpoon and then uppercut. - Excellent. - I remember being in a Mortal Kombat tournament at the local Blockbuster. - They hosted it? - They hosted it. I won the tournament just doing this over and over. - I was just being cheap. - ( groans ) Scorpion wins. I'm gonna figure some things out. Let me go with glasses guy. - Johnny Cage. - Johnny Cage. - Fight. - He's an entertainer. - He's a stunt guy. - No, not this again. I keep falling for this. I keep falling for this. - ( groans ) - All right, all right. I can't block so many times. Now you've got Sonya Blade. - Yeah. - She's got an awesome handstand. - ( groans ) - Ooh, I did a thing. That was a beautiful uppercut. - Sonya, no. - Nope. - I'm not getting anywhere near that. - Stop crouching, Sonya. Not getting anywhere near that. Sonya, I can't do my harpoon move. Wow. Mari, come on. Sonya wins. I think Sonya might be your person. I just remember with Mortal Kombat I had a connection to it 'cause it just sounds so Asian. I saw really strong women - and I saw, like, Asian characters. - Right. And you didn't see that so much in TV and film back then. In a lot of ways I think it might've, like, shaped who I have become. Feels like that's what set the Genesis as a console apart, is a lot of people are playing these games in their formative years and working up these feelings for it and figuring out your identity as a person. - And it's really deeply set, so... - Yeah. It's an icon. Marques: So, the Genesis' gameplay clearly left a mark on a whole generation of gamers. But it was Sega's aggressive advertising campaign that initially caught everyone's attention. Blake: Nintendo had 20 times, 30 times as much money as Sega did. So, Sega had to be clever, scrappier, and do things outside the box. ♪ Genesis does ♪ Adesina: Sega, they were going for Nintendo. They came out with this commercial campaign, ♪ Genesis does ♪ Announcer: What Nintendon't. Sherri: Such a cool dis. If this was a battle rap, everyone would be like, "Ooh!" Blake: This was significant because it was competitive advertising. Which didn't really exist in the video game space. Man: What if you don't have blast processing? And a big part of their approach was to concede that they were not gonna beat Nintendo at Nintendo's game. Nintendo is a company that even to this day has remained family friendly, very Disney-esque. Sega decided that their target market was going to be teenagers and adults. Sega! Sherri: Sega is actually making grounds against Nintendo. But something's missing. Adesina: So, Sega decided that it needed a mascot much like the Mario Bros. in order to really capture audience's attention. Blake: They had an internal mascot contest at Sega. Any employee could turn in anything they wanted. What kinda stuff would you pitch to try to beat Mario the Italian plumber? If I'm going against a plumber, I'm picking Gustavo the-- the drywall guy. They had rabbits. They had an egg. All this whacky concepts and the one that ended up winning was a hedgehog. ( music playing ) Sherri: Sonic, no one had ever seen anything like this. Just this blue blur ripping across the screen, running through loopty loops. His speed was the personification of the 16-bit era. Hannibal: Sonic had attitude. If you didn't move him for a bit he'd start tapping his foot, looking at his watch. Like, "Hey, I'm Sonic, do something. I can't just be standing around." Adesina: I mean, we all love Super Mario, but he's not really cool. Why can't it be more like that nice boy Mario? Ooh! Oh! Little brat! Sherri: Sonic put Sega on its back. It's like, "All right, hold on, folks, we're going for a ride." Now everyone wants a Sega Genesis. ♪ Sega ♪ Marques: Sega knew that in order to challenge Nintendo they had to not only release great games... - ( groans ) - ( laughs ) ...but also compelling peripherals and add-ons to make their gameplay as thrilling as possible. And now I'm here with my friend Jake from Gameranx. One of these serves as kind of an incremental update on an existing... Marques: He's an expert in reviewing - and testing all sorts of game gear. - ( yelling ) We're gonna go through and figure out which of these are good, and which of these aren't. This is dope or nope. So, console add-ons. - If I were to look at consoles today... - Yeah. ...Are these add-ons a thing? Has it become more of a thing? It's become less of a thing. It was wild. It was the wild west. Now you just see stuff like Microsoft putting out a cooler pro controller. We see Sony putting out their own adapters. So, this is number one. - This came out in 1994. - What? - Excuse me. - Is the Interactor virtual reality gamewear. "Feel the punches, explosions, kicks, uppercuts--" I don't know if I wanna feel those. It's like a little baby backpack. Look at that. That looks like a speaker. So it's gonna slap. This thing slaps. - Feel like a ninja turtle. - It looks like it's your birthday party. - Are you ready to get jacked into the mainframe? - I'm ready. I apologize in advance. - ( rumbling ) - That's a good start. I feel the footsteps are very light. - You feel the footsteps? This is amazing. - Yeah. - For me that's just the music just rumbling my entire spine. - Bumping? - ( growls ) - Yikes. Sounds like the entire game is underwater. If I was a kid, I think I would hate this. It's just chaos. I feel like you gotta try this. Turn it up. I wanna feel this. - This is-- - I like-- I like this. - All the way to ten. - Jesus. Yeah, you weren't kidding. Oh, my God. This is just nothing is even happening. - What? - Nothing's happening. There's no sound coming out of the TV and you get all of the sound coming out of the thing on your back and it sounds like 30 times worse. So, dope or nope? - No. - Nope. All right, next accessory. This one is from 1992. - Menacer. - Menacer. "This product contains parts which may be hazardous," you know to small children who are usually using gun accessories. Light gun tech hasn't really changed much and now we have VR stuff. So, the biggest thing that kind of resembles this is the PlayStation Aim controller. This is firing infrared - and this is an infrared receiver. - Oh, that. Oh, okay. - Oh. Impressive. - Oh, my God. - It kind of works. - Oh. A lot smoother than I thought it was gonna be. - No, you're just bouncing a ball. - That's really good. Like if you twitch it, like, picks it up. - You wanna add the binoculars. - I wanna John Wick this thing. Are we getting this? Are we getting this? - Jake: Pest control? - Marques: There it is. Oh, wow! Pizza? Is that pizza? This is perfect. You gotta save the pizza from the bugs. - Get away. - Oh, the bugs got big. Get away from my pizza. You know what's funny? Is that even though it's IR and it's so like hokey and old, it's actually just as fun as stuff today. I was impressed. It was responsive. - I'm giving this dope. - I will give this a dope. All right, our next peripheral comes from '93. It's called the Activator. The full body controller. "Better than standard hand controllers." Wait, better than standard hand controllers? - That's debatable. - Really? Just from looking at box two, that looks like a tripping hazard. Wait, Mortal Kombat, you don't just kick you like move around. You also murder people ( music playing ) That's pretty... that's thick. - Some assembly probably required here. - This looks rough. This feels like an escape room. Whoa. I've always wanted to build a Stargate. All right, let's plug it in. Jake: Character selection screen. Right, I know my character is Sonya. - You need to somehow wake it up. - Wake it up. - Or press start. - Somehow get it into the game. Step on it or something, I don't know. - Sonya. - Oh! I just picked Sonya. - Fight. - Two player Mortal Kombat. Okay, that's jump. Wait. I'm just jumping over and over again. Jumping. Jumping. What if you just freak out? Just like go crazy. - Jumps, jumps, jumps. She's jumping pretty fast. - I don't know. Do you wanna give it a shot? Breaking beams. ( music playing ) Wake up. Wake up. I'm trying to get in the game. I'm not even in the game still. There's no instructions, right? This is really truly like-- - There were instructions. Hang on. - Oh, there were. When setting up make sure the-- make sure the room has a constant light source such as natural light or floor lamps. Do not use activator in a room with fluorescent lighting. Like overhead lights. - Like that. - Like this room. - The lights that are here. - Oh. ( lights buzzing ) Basically, the way this is supposed to work is all these infrared blasters are firing at you and reflecting back. But in a room with overhead lights, like most rooms, tons of infrared pouring back into the receivers is just messing it up. - This would've ruined my birthday. - Yeah. - Not the best idea. This is a nope. - Nope. Marques: So, clearly, not all of Sega's peripherals were a smashing success. - I hate this thing. - But as the battle between Nintendo and Sega intensified... ( whistling and applause ) ...it was Sega's Hollywood-ification of video games approach that pushed them over the edge. Pre-internet era, you didn't really know when video games came out. And Sega really standardized the process. - Sega! - Blake: They created trailers and built months and months of anticipation and hype into it, Nintendo didn't care about creating that hype ahead of time. This is the exact same board and we're playing here together but she's at a different part of the board than I am. Blake: Sega was also very explicit in their attempts to "buy or borrow coolness." Joe: The celebrity endorsements of games was a whole new phenomenon. Sherri: You're getting Joe Montana football. You're getting Pat Riley basketball. You got Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. It's a new genre of video game. - Dance video games or a music video come to life. - Okay. Sherri: Sega, they figured out what Nintendo forgot. The whole point of home console at the time was so that you can play arcade games in your house. You got Street Fighter, Revenge of Shinobi, Double Dragon. You got Streets of Rage. Joe: Now we had the violence that was isolated to the arcade in the home. And that was a huge issue. Hannibal: There's probably some stuff we shouldn't have been exposed to at that age. Ripping somebody's heart out, even virtually is probably somewhat damaging. Blake: In December of 1993, Senator Joseph Lieberman launched congressional hearings into video games and violence. Lieberman: In the first segment, which is Sega's version, the player may then choose a method of murder ranging from ripping a heart out to pulling off the head of the opponent with spinal cord attached. Sherri: What happens after the hearing is the start of the entertainment software ratings board. The ESRB. Joe: The little E, the T, the M, and the A that's in the bottom corner of every video game, that is because of Sega Genesis. That was when Sega finally started passing Nintendo. Marques: Sega successfully positioned themselves as the sophisticated alternative to Nintendo. But holding onto that lead proved to be a bigger challenge. ( music playing ) Adesina: So, even though the Genesis was crushing it, the video game industry is constantly changing and evolving and everyone has to keep up. Sherri: So in 1999, Sega wants to step it up a notch and they release the Dreamcast. But a new challenger had entered the arena. Sony is now in the game with the PlayStation. Unfortunately, the Dreamcast was not well-received and they pulled out of the console wars. They lost. Adesina: And in 2001, Sega finally bowed out and stopped making consoles. ( music playing ) What would you say is the legacy of Sega Genesis? Blake: Why does Sega Genesis matter? It's because we would not have the modern-day video game industry. They expanded the demographic of gaming and showed that there was room for more than one console. Hannibal: The Genesis was a big part of my childhood. Spent a lot of time on it, man. It was-- It was dope. Sherri: It's the first console that ever threatened Nintendo's kingdom. Without Sega constantly innovating, Nintendo probably would've sat on its laurels for a long time. I don't think we would've gotten to 64-bit Gravis consoles in a reasonable time. Sega made Nintendo better because competition breeds innovation. Adesina: The Genesis showed me where technology and art come together because it was just so beautiful in terms of its graphic output. It's actually what inspired me to wanna become a video game developer. Sega really changed the course of my career and my life. Joe: Sega influenced how we play games because if it was just the Nintendo maybe we wouldn't have the cool, aggressive games that we have now. Assassin's Creed, the Call of Duties. Those games found their beginning with the Sega Genesis. Blake: The battle between Sega and Nintendo pushed each other to the limits. I think the victor is obvious. It's us. It's the gamers. It's the consumers. ( music playing ) Without Sega I'm not sure where the state of video games would be, but I believe that we're all better for it. And that's what will always make the Genesis the most important console, in my opinion. Marques: I really think if I was a gamer in the '90s, I'd probably would've been a Sega Genesis gamer. Not just because it was matte black. Although, that is pretty sweet. But because its place in history as this first big competitor to a goliath really speaks to me. Competition breeds innovation. It's true. And that's my favorite part of the legacy of the Sega Genesis. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys on the next one. Peace.

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Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 7,108,260

Rating: undefined out of 5

Keywords: Marques Brownlee, MKBHD, Vox, Tech, Retro, Retro Tech, Techy, Walkman, Mac, Macintosh, Sega Genesis, Camcorder, Dynatac, Cellphone, Polaroid, Sony, JVC, The Gregory Brothers, Uravgconsumer, Bill Nye, iJustine, Sega, Video Games, Hannibal Burress, Mortal Combat, Mari Takahashi, Smosh Games, Jake Baldino, Gameranx, Casey Neistat, Motorola, Austin Evans, Sara Dietschy, Karlie Kloss, Peter McKinnon

Id: PRVr1heimY8

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 23min 42sec (1422 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019