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What Scott and his fancy art might not know is that I was a Sega Master System kid. The SMS launched in 85, compared to 83 for the NES (both those dates are the Japanese dates) and maybe it should have been more powerful? Maybe it was? Sadly the games were just never as good as the NES’s.
There were a few titles that really shone, like Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon’s Trap (recently remade!) and Phantasy Star and maybe one of the Alex Kidds. But the SMS’s library never even came close to the size or quality of the NES’s library. The 16 bit generation (Genesis and Super Nintendo) only made the disparity worse. People may think that the console wars are hot today (xBONE ONE X lol amirite?) in a way that they were not 30 years ago but they are totally wrong.
“Sega Genesis does what Nintendon’t” and other classics (probably comparing controllers to genitals) were front and center. “John Romero will make you his bitch” actual advertising. Ok, I guess? Anyway, identifying as a Sega kid guaranteed you an appreciation for the underdog, because you could fanboy all you wanted but Sega’s offerings were undoubtedly inferior.
Did all of this set young Jon on a path? I can recall at 12 in the schoolyard moodily exclaiming “the Sega ads are better, but the games are worse” breathlessly trying to explain to the other children. The TV is lying to us. Were their worlds as devastated as mine was? I was an innocent child.
The SMS make me cynical.
The bed music during our advertising is an old loop by Dan of Steel!
The bed music while we explain what the episode is about is Son of a Bit “Chased by a Running Chupacabra” used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Finally, the song we use in the intro is “Shiny Spaceship” by the 8-bit Ninjas. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
