The Sega Master System was a complete failure in USA

When the Nintendo was released in the mid 80's gaming was what I consider to be an all-time high level of excitement. After years of disappointing releases from Atari and people generally losing interest in having video games at home at all, we finally had something to be excited about and almost everyone who had a child in their family had an NES. Gaming was fun again, and Nintendo was cleaning up. Atari was trying, completely in vain, to try to compete, but their name had already been tainted by years of arrogance and releasing of unfinished and terrible games. Most people try to attribute this to the E.T. game but honestly, as Johnny Cash said ' "I was there when it happened" - and it wasn't just E.T., it was a long string of horrible games rushed to market.

Atari was able to get away with this because they had no realistic competition in the industry until Nintendo came along and completely squashed Atair.

Meanwhile, overseas and unbeknownst to us Americans, there was a company called Sega that was taking on Nintendo head on and actually winning in many territories around the world. So when the Sega Master System was released in the United States, we didn't really know what to think of it and even though a great deal of my life was spent playing games with friends back in those times, I don't know a single person that even owned a Master System.

Why is that? It was a technically superior machine and had a similar price point to Nintendo, so it should have sold, right? Well I have a couple of theories as to why that didn't happen.

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For starters, and I think this is a very big point, the Master System was released nearly a full year after the NES and for most families, owning two different consoles was a ridiculous idea. I know this is very common these days, but back then owning two video game consoles was just a crazy idea. Combine this with the fact that the system alone was $200 or nearly $450 in today's money and you have an unaffordable situation in the minds of most parents.

Sega also had a dreadful advertising campaign that upon further research I discovered was managed and run by a mere two people for all of North America. Since Al Gore hadn't yet invented the internet at those times, there was a very good chance that us gamers were completely unaware that the system even existed. Sure, Sega was a big hit in Japan and other regions, but most kids in the US weren't even familiar with what SEGA even was, let alone that it was a better system than the NES.

Advertising has changed a lot since those days but I can't recall seeing a single advertisement for the Master System during kids' shows or in magazines that kids would read. We can't become interested in something that we don't know exists!

Secondly, Nintendo had some pretty predatory and borderline-unethical legal riders with their console, which was already wildly popular. If you wanted to develop games for Nintendo, you were legally bound to NOT do so for other consoles so essentially, Nintendo had everyone in their corner and Sega had to develop almost all of their games on their own. This meant that they were dealing with a very limited game library and when I would later play these games on an adaptor that sat on top of my Sega Genesis, most of them were not very good at all.

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While I didn't have access to very many of these games simple because they weren't even for sale, the only standouts that I can think of were Phantasy Star and After Burner, which were pretty fantastic.

Nintendo also had deals with major stores in the United States in that if that store wanted to sell their products that they were legally bound to not sell any products made by any competitors. This is illegal today but at the time this was breaking new ground that nobody really knew how to handle. Nintendo dominated the market, so no retailer was going to challenge Nintendo on this and simply complied. So when I went into my local shopping mall toy store to check out the games, we were once again, not at all subjected to the very existence of the Sega Master System.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, Nintendo hadn't really even attempted to "invade" Europe so by 1987 or so, Sega all but abandoned the North American market and focused on Europe, where the system became wildly popular. When I speak to people around my age who are from Europe they tell a story about how the situation was almost the polar opposite over there: Everyone had a Master System and they barely ever saw an NES.

At least Sega kind of learned their lesson about being too late to market in the USA and Canada, and kind of flipped the script on Nintendo when they did the exact same thing in reverse by releasing the Sega Genesis a great deal of time before the Super Nintendo. This resulted in them briefly having a larger market-share than Nintendo that they would very quickly squander with a series of really bad decisions over the course of the next decade that would result in them leaving the console wars completely. That's another story though.