Ex-Sega US President Gives The Inside Scoop

[Mulboyne]

[tatsujin]

Great article!

I remember the happy days as a Megadrive owner, some of the best games around came out at that time. Although I was too young tocare about the business side of things, I did always wonder why the "Genesis" didn't have the impact it had in America as it did in Japan.

I'll still never forget the first time I threw on Altered Beast (bundled with my pack unfortunately) and the end of level boss spewed: "Welcome to your doom!"

[CrankyBastard]

Sega are a class outfit.
I did a job for them a few years ago.
I wrote lyrics for the bgm of a game which would have been released had it not been for the bombing of 9/11.(The game had scenes of aircraft flying among high-rise buildings)
The game's release was cancelled, but they paid me handsomely for my work anyway.

[TobidashiChui]

I have to agree that Sega is a class act. I had actually a rough experience with them where a game cartridge that I had purchased (Electronic Art's Starflight) caused two of the contact slot's "teeth" on my Sega Genesis system to bend rendering the entire system useless to any other cartridges. I called Sega, Sega recommended a repair facility in my local area who would perform a non-warranty repair.

I went to the affiliate and was told that I owed them $65.00 US to repair the unit. The unit was repaired, then I returned home, popped my defective cart back in the system and the problem returned to the unit. Calling Sega, they caught wind of the fact that I had paid $65.00 for repair service from their affiliate which infuriated them. Aparently, they paid their "licenced repair facilities" a chunk of money that partially covered any and all repairs they sent their customers to. They expected me to be charged about $35.00 US.

They had me ship my system to them along with all the games I had played leading up to the initial defect in the system. Interestingly enough, they were 4 EA titles. The testing determined that StarFlight was defective. Sega repaired the system, replaced StarFlight, refunded us for the cost of the repair and shipping, and shipped us "Bulls Vs Lakers and the NBA Playoffs" and "NHL Hockey" at no extra charge.

The American company was extremely fan friendly. When I owned the "Sega Master System," they had a toll free tips and information hotline (800-USA-SEGA) which I called once every two weeks when I was stuck in Rastan, Zillion, and Phantasy Star. Several years later, when I shipped a broken "Sega Saturn" for warranty repair, with a Radio Shack switch mod installed, they replaced the broken Memory Card slot and left the Switch Mod alone.

I always thought that Sega really got the short end of the stick when it came to developer support. The Sega Master System has almost no third-party titles, The Genesis' launch titles were awesome, all the subsequent other titles gradually tapered in quality. The Sega CD and 32-X were complete garbage making the Sega Genesis into a Frankenstein-monster with only marginal quality increase. The Sega Saturn was an underappreciated gem of a system that suffered from a lack of good titles and was perhaps the only Sega system that actually garnered its best releases toward the end of its existance (Burning Rangers, Shining Force III, Panzer Dragon Saga/Azel). The Dreamcast had some decent titles, but most of them were Sega titles (the third-party titles generally stunk).