The Genesis (Mega Drive) was a great system and it was fun to be around at launch

Sega really screwed themselves over in the early 90's. They had a wonderful strategy in the Genesis and a huge head start on Nintendo when they released their console a full 2 years before Nintendo was able to respond with the Super Nintendo (SNES).

The Genesis, despite being extremely superior to the only other systems that competed with it, the NES, struggled to sell many units worldwide and especially in USA until 1990 and there were many good reasons for that. I was in my gaming prime in 1990 and it was a pretty exciting time to be into gaming because things were changing so quickly. I'll give a bit of a first hand account of what it was like to be there when it happened.

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The Sega Genesis was released in a limited fashion in 1989 in the USA but very few people actually ended up buying it. There were many corporate reasons for this in USA such as the fact that Sega didn't really have a presence in USA nor did they even have offices. The distribution and marketing of the Sega Master System (precursor to the Genesis) was handled by a toy company called Tonka, who did so very poorly. I say this because I didn't know a single person who owned a Sega Master System... everyone i knew had an NES. I don't actually even recall seeing a Master System for sale anywhere in stores, or even advertised at all.

The internet didn't exist so television and print ads were the only way people could be made to know that Sega was even a thing (Yeah, i know the internet existed, it was called ARPANET at the time and you had to be at MIT to use it though.) As time went by people started to buy into the hype, and the hype was very very real. The Sega Genesis and the 16-bit craze made this machine far better than the NES and eventually the USA (and Europe) caught on and were buying the system in droves by Christmas of 1990, which is when I got mine.

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You have to keep in mind that this guy didn't even exist at that point yet and it would later prove very effective when Nintendo finally joined the market in 1991. By the time Nintendo got involved Sega was millions of units ahead in sales, and they had a library of games that Nintendo couldn't even come close to competing with.

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By Christmas of 1991 (the first Xmas that both systems were available) Genesis had 10 games available for every 1 game available on the SNES. The Genesis was also seen as the "cooler" system thanks to the some pretty ingenious marketing.

By including the Sonic game with the console, Sega was able to take a 65% share of the console market by 1992. This is pretty hard to believe these days since Sega is a non issue and after the Dreamcast has no plans to ever reenter the console market and instead just throws out another rubbish sonic game every now and then. Sega, in the early 90's was the system to beat and if they had done i think basically anything other than what they actually did do, they would have remained kings of the castle for some time to come.

They had the most console sales, they had dedicated fans, they had a massive bank of developers that were making tons of quality games for their system and Nintendo, despite having a better machine and I would say better games in most categories, couldn't catch up. It was Sega's fight to lose or more specifically to give away. And boy did they ever give it away between 1994 and 1996 and unfortunately it would only get worse from that point forward.

My overall experience with the Genesis was one of awe. Just 5 years prior we had been playing Atari 2600 games with blips and bleeps and boxes that moved on our screens. Now we had fire and running hedgehogs bouncing around. It was an amazing point in the overall gaming timeline.

Were you around when the Genesis was launched in USA (or wherever you lived)? What was your experience?