Retronauts - Retronauts: Live At Midwestern Gaming Classic 2016

Episode Date: April 18, 2016

Jeremy and Bob hit the mean streets of Milwaukee to talk about the SEGA Master System on the eve of its 30th anniversary. Featuring special SEGA expert guests Greg Sewart and Dylan Cornelius. Special thanks to 249 Studios for the live recording! Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, for all my rage, I'm just a snail and a maze. episode of Retronauts. We don't number them anymore because we don't know what numbers they are. But I am the host of this week's panel podcast, Jeremy Parrish, and this week we'll be talking about the Sega Master System. For those of you who came out to see us specifically, thank you very much. And for those of you who just had a really good seat here in the bar area, we are a classic gaming podcast, almost running for 10 years now. I'm one of the co-hosts, Bob Backy down there, is the other. Oh, thank you so much.

Oh, please, oh, please. And you can check out the podcast on iTunes or usgamer.net or retronauts.com. Easy to find. We're everywhere. So anyway, we'll just jump straight into this week's topic. This episode follows the original Retronauts episode of Sega Master System by about nine years. It's been quite a while. It's 2007. And people still are very, very angry about that episode because they feel that we failed to give the master system sufficient love.

So in order to make up for that, and to make sure no one ever complains about the way we talked about Sega Master System again, we have flown in to Sega experts. Immediately to my right is Greg Seward. Hello? I'm Greg Seward. I'm formerly of Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Currently, one of the hosts of the Player One podcast, which has been running about the same length at the time as Retronauts, and also run a YouTube series about the history of the Genesis called Generation 16. And next to him is one Mr. Dylan Cornelius. Dylan, what are your bona fides?

I'm bona fides. I run a site called Sega does.com, and I'm currently in the process of reviewing every game ever released for Sega console and I've gotten through about half of the master system library from 85 to 89. That's Japanese, European, and American releases. So hopefully I can provide some insights here. And then there's Bob.

Hi, everybody. I was told this podcast would be about ALF and ALF related products. We are talking about ALF. Okay, good. I'll be it briefly. I rewatched the entire series for this, so I'm ready. Even the movie, Project ALF. So anyway, the Sega Master System was released in America in 1986.

It was the direct competitor to Nintendo's Entertainment System. Okay, we got that much. But I specifically called Dylan to take part of this episode with us because the history of the master system really goes back further than 1986. To really understand the master system and kind of how it came to be, you need to wind back the hands of time to about 1981 when Sega first test marketed. marketed a game console, which would eventually come out in 1983, called the SG-1000. And Dylan has actually played through every single SG-1000 game ever made.

So, Dylan, why don't you tell us a bit. Why don't you... He's a hero. He is a hero for our times, the one we need and whatever. Yes. So yeah, tell us a bit about the SG-1000. Like, what was cool about it and what was not cool about it? What's cool about it?

Well, it was released on the same day as the Famicom in Japan, which was a terrible... Actually, that's not cool. That's actually kind of bad. Yeah, that was a terrible idea. If the system had come out in 1981, it would have been amazing. If Sega had just... I don't know what the deal was there with the test marketing and why it took two years. But by 1981 standards, it was amazing.

It was a Colico vision. Like literally it was the same hardware as a Colico Vision. And it would have done great, but it came out in 83, up against the Famicom, which was a much more capable system. Right. You know, on the Famicom you had pretty clean arcade ports of Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., fairly modern titles. And then on the S.U. 1000, a lot of the games were from three years prior. There were Sega arcade games, like borderline, safari hunting, which is different than safari hunt, things like that, but they just, they couldn't compare. And so the SG-1000 really struggled.

Yes, sir. Did the SG-1000 not have scrolling? Yeah, it's Flick screen. Right, flick scrolling, yeah. Which, I don't know how it looked to gamers back then, but to our eyes. It looks very, very choppy. I don't know what you would compare it to, Jeremy. I mean, you know, you saw a lot of that, like pitfall, you know, had that kind of screen-by-screen scrolling.

So it was very much sort of like a previous generation concept. One of the Famicom design principles, like, you know, the hardware designers sat down and said, we need to give this thing scrolling. So it has clean horizontal scrolling, which became really important. You see it in a lot of their early games. And the SG-1000 launching alongside that was, it was looking kind of rough. And, you know, another thing about the Famicom's launch is that it had Donkey Kong, like you said, but it was a really good port of Donkey Kong, whereas the SG-1000's ports were not that accurate.

It had Wonderboy, but it was a flick-scrolling Wonderboy with, like, one-color sprites or two-color sprites. Congo-Bongo was just bafflingly terrible on S-G-1000. Yeah, absolutely terrible. It doesn't even resemble the, there's no isometric perspective. They couldn't recreate that whatsoever. And so it's just this flat screen and this horrible pastel graphics, which is pretty, that's just the SG1,000's bread and butter pastel graphics. So yeah, the arcade ports, Sega really tried because that was their, that was kind of their

selling point, would continue to be their selling point through the years, but it just, the tech wasn't there. And I should say that despite the fact that the SG-1000 had a pretty rough start, and it was really kind of hobbled by the fact that it was a day-to-day, day one competitor with the Famicom. And then a few weeks later, the MSX computer standard, which was kind of like a more advanced variant

of the SG-1000 came out. So it really was kind of fighting from behind. But despite all of that, Sega still considered it a success. They didn't really have high expectations for it. I think it sold like 100,000 units in the first couple of months. And that was like two or three times what Sega expected. And they said, OK, yeah, we're not really competing on the same level as Nintendo yet.

But there's a business here. And so they continued to pursue the SG-1000 and continue to refine it. They released the SG-3,000. Do you want to talk about that, Dylan? Do you mean the SC-3,000? Oh, yeah. Sorry, SC.

There was Sega Game 1000 and Sega Computer 3,000. Right, and that was Sega's only home computer they ever released, and it actually sold better than the S-U-1000. But, yeah, that was one road they went down briefly, and then there was the S-U-1000 Mark 2, which came out in 84, had a complete console redesign, and the controls were better. The original SG-1,000 controls had this little joystick thing in the center of the D-pad, very stiff. I just, yeah, well, okay, so the SG-1000 originally had a really bad controller, like it's intimately terrible, and everyone who's ever used it hates it, but it was hardwired into the system, and it was very fragile. So if your SG-1,000 fragile controller broke, you were stuck with a console that had a broken controller that was hard-wired into it. So it was a huge, huge

problem. And the SG 1000 Mark 2 really, it showed Sega looking at the things that the Famicom did better and said, all right, let's do some of that. So the control system was better, you know, it had a deep pad that you could screw a control stick into if you were really old school, but you didn't have to use like that same fragile controller. It kind of moved some things around. It was basically the same hardware inside, but it looked nicer and it was more reliable and just a better piece of kit. And the SC-3000 that we mentioned, that's very comparable to a Colico Adam if you're familiar with that.

So it was kind of an expanded capabilities for the game system and used the console as the heart of a computer. So that was kind of a trendy thing back then and that did pretty well for Sega too. But eventually, is there anything else you need to say about the SG-1000? Yeah, there was also Sega being Sega that couldn't help but release peripherals, just up the wazoo. There was the card, I believe the card catcher came out in 84, and similar to the master system cards, they started, Sega used these things called my cards, and eventually

I think they were just so cheap to produce that all the S-G-1000 games started coming out on these my cards in around 85. Yeah, those are very comparable to, you know, turbographics, who cards. about the same size, like a credit card with a circuit printed on it. And those eventually did kind of come to the U.S. There were a very few handful of games or a master system released on the card format. They weren't compatible with the SD-1000 or with other regions, but you could kind of see that vestige carrying through.

And the card catcher might be comparable to something like the StarPath Supercharger in the U.S. where you have something you plug into the system and then a game that plugs into that. It was basically a cartridge peripheral into which you plug the game. So it was a much cheaper and more effective way to distribute game. Yeah, and the Mark 2 had the card catcher built in. So that was another improvement upon the original design as well. And, you know, Sega did do some arcade ports on the SG-1000, but you also saw them creating some original games.

A guy named Eugene Naka created a game called Girls Garden. Is that any good? It is. It's really good. The story is a little questionable. You play this little girl, and your goal is to collect flowers in this field to prevent your boyfriend from running away with another girl. And at the top of the screen, there's this, like, little meter of the boy getting closer and closer to the girl. And if he reaches her, you know, love is over.

So it, story is kind of crazy, but yeah, the gameplay is actually, it holds up even today. Probably one of the best, if not the best. Yeah, and the SG-1000 had some other kind of notable, familiar game to add a port of Space Invaders because every system did. It had a port of Saxon, which didn't work out that well, but it's admirable that it was there. Let's see, Monaco GP. It had a Galgo-13 game, I think, one of the first anime console games, which was based on the kind of long-running James Bondish, sniper, manga, very adult, very hard-boiled. Of course, the SG-1000 game was nothing, no sex, no murderer.

It was just like, no. Shooting, right? Just sniping out windows on a train. It had games like bomb jack that you might recognize from the Nias Lode Runner. And I think the final game was the Black Onyx, which was released in 1987. So that system had a really long life. The Black Onyx, of course, being sort of the first, you know, true RPG, made for Japan showed up on a lot of computers and a lot of consoles and eventually

even made its way to SG 1000 but eventually it came time to leave the SG 1000 behind and you know there was the mark two but it was basically the same system and for the mark three they could decide and let's really build on this thing let's really improve it and this launched in October 1985 so by that point the SG 1000 was two years old and the NES the Famicom was just first coming to the US as a test market device in America as the Nintendo Entertainment System. So that kind of gives you an idea of when the Mark 3 showed up in Japan. And it was really Sega's attempt to take its console and make it better than the NES.

Yeah, and the Famicom launched with Donkey Kong, right? It did. The Master System launched with Teddy Boy, which is a very different experience. Well, we're not talking about the Master System yet. Oh, the Mark III. Did the Mark III launch with Teddy Boy? I don't know. I think it did.

I tried to tune out Teddy Boy. You seem really obsessed with it. I love Teddy Boy because it has three strikes against it. One, it's based on an arcade game no one in America had heard of. Two, that arcade game is referencing a pop song in Japan no one in America had ever heard of. And three, Teddy Boy is referencing a kind of fashion from the 50s from the UK. So it's three strikes against it. Not leading with your strongest foot.

So the Sega Mark 3, they dropped the name SG-1000, it was just the Mark 3, was not an entirely new piece of equipment. It was not an entirely new piece of hardware. It actually used the exact same processor as the SG-1000. But what Sega did, maybe this is kind of like a precursor to the way they designed the Saturn. They actually added a video processor that was many times, like three times more powerful than the core processor. And most of the work of the master system was done by that video processor. And the video processor actually had much, much, but notably better capabilities than Nintendo system so you know they really kind of worked within the the sort of limits that they had but pushed beyond what the competition

was doing and it was a in my opinion a pretty clever approach to to kind of refreshing their hardware line without totally changing the nature of their business and without you know having to completely design a new piece of hardware from the ground up which takes a long time and it also makes if I'm not mistaken, it makes the Mark 3, the world's first backwards compatible console. The Atari 7,800 wouldn't launch for a few months after that. I think it's great that it's backwards compatible, but one of the things that you can sort of look at now, too, which is something that was sort of the downfall of Sega eventually, when you think about the timeline you've just described,

we were going in the space of what, two and a half years. We've gone through three console iterations already. Yeah, it's great that the backwards compatible, but, you know, Sega was just constantly moving forward, it seems and sort of leaving everything behind as it happened. Yeah, I mean, I think we're starting to see that again with talk of like the PlayStation 4K and things like that. This idea that, oh, maybe console should be iterative and tough luck, tough early adopters, that's too bad. Sega ahead of its time once again. But the Mark 3 made a lot of changes to the hardware. On the outside also, it had removable controllers, which were much more like the Famicom had.

and very much in that style, much more usable. They couldn't use the exact cross pad because that was patented. So it has like a square pad, which I've never really been that big a fan of because my fingers tend to drift toward the diagonals, which is really bad. And it came like zillion where you have to like run and crawl because I'll crawl at the wrong times. But it was a big improvement over what had come before. And again, that had the little thumb stick that you can screw into the center of the D-pad if you wanted to go old school. A few weird things like the pause button was actually on the console.

I think that was the case with the Mark 3 as well as the Master System. Yeah, in the face of the one in two buttons usually double the start button, which is confusing when you pick it up the first time. Yeah, but I sat down and I made some comparisons here between what the Master System could do and the NES could do, the Mark 3, the same fundamental hardware. The Master System had 32 colors on screen at once versus 25 for the the NES, a 64 color palette versus 52 for the NES. It could do 16 colors per sprite, which was a big deal. The NES could only do four. It had multiple video

modes, you could have sprites in four different sizes, and it had much more memory. It had 8 kilobytes of RAM versus Nintendo's 2 kilobytes, and it had 16 kilobytes of B RAM versus Nintendo's 2 kilobytes. So a much more capable system. With a better color palette, do more on screen at once. Things could look better. Sound, I think we're going to give it a pass. It wasn't as good, in my opinion, but it's a matter of taste. We were talking about this yesterday, and it kind of shows where Sega was going with what would eventually be the Genesis sound processor. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, one of the, I think, one of the biggest problems, we're going to get into the master system itself here in a minute,

but one of the biggest issues, I think that the hardware suffered when it came over here is that they actually got rid of the ability to use the FM synth. I think it was an expansion in the original hardware than Mark 3. But that's one of the things that I found back then and even now is that you play Master System games. And they've got kind of a really screechy, not all of them do, but a lot of them have a very screechy sound.

It's a very high-pitched music and sound in general. And when you get to listen to some of those games using the FM sound, it's night and day. It's unbelievable how good it could have sounded. Yeah, that's something kind of interesting, is the whole idea of the console expansions. I think the ones that Nintendo had available, you know, through third parties mainly,

for the NES, became pretty well known. Like, you know, the VRC 6 chip that ran Castlevania 3 in Japan and had really great music. But that was on a per cartridge basis. Whereas for the master system, or the Mark 3 anyway, it was actually a hardware expansion that you could just plug into the system. And if a game was programmed to take advantage of it,

for instance, Fantasy Star, then it would have this really great sound. Like again, it really brought it closer to the Sega Genesis and sounded really great. And, you know, there are some collections, I think, of games that include the FM option for Fantasy Star. So if you ever have a chance to check that out,

I'm highly recommended it. It's a night and day difference. It goes from being like well composed, but maybe a little irritating music to like, yeah, this is great stuff. Absolutely. So, of course, the most important thing about the Mark 3 was that it came with a built-in game called snail maze. Do you guys want to talk about that?

What's to say about snail maze? So, yeah, if you don't have a cartridge plugged into your console, it just starts you up and you control this little snail and you have to get out of the maze. And you're given this, I think it's 60 seconds. And then you can keep going, but it doesn't regenerate. It regenerates very little of your time for each level. And eventually the snail never gets through the maze. Is that more or less entertaining than snake?

I would say less. Yeah. The biggest drawback to the Mark 3 wasn't really anything to do with the system itself, but because it did take so long for Sega to get to that point, like Greg said. By the time the Mark 3 came out in Japan, the Famicom had been out for two and a half years and had really just dominated the market. Like third parties were blocking to the Famicom, and Nintendo started to kind of lock down its publishing rights

and got a lot of exclusivity. And as a result, Sega found that no one wanted to publish for its console, even though console was more powerful, more capable, and it was a really nice system. Everyone was kind of onboarded with Nintendo, which already had the really big install base, And, you know, for market reasons and also for, you know, Nintendo's own business strategies and limitations and contracts, Sega couldn't really get any people on board to publish

for them. Yeah, as a result, I think, like, most of the Master System games are made by Sega, correct? Yeah, Sega, okay, the Mark 3 had two games published for it by a third cardi called Salio, which was actually just a Shell Corporation front for Tecmo. That was Tholomon's Key and Riga. But those are the only two third-party published games. Everything else was published first-party by Sega, even if it was a game like Ease or R-type or whatever that was developed by someone else originally,

Sega would actually do its own version in-house or work with one of their kind of, would you call them second-party studios, like Sims and Aspect? Yeah, and compile, I think, did a lot of work for them as well. But that's also something, again, laying the groundwork for Sega right through. the 90s in that, you know, because they had to do that sort of thing, you get like all the way into the early days of the Mega Drive and the Genesis where you've got Strider, which is obviously a big Capcom arcade game released by Sega, fools and ghosts, forgotten worlds, that sort of thing.

Like, that laid the groundwork. I mean, pretty smart when you think about it, you know, if you're being hamstrung by your competition, then go around them. Yeah, and one of the advantages there is that Sega knew its hardware really well. So those ports were actually really high quality. Like the master system version of our type is amazing. That's the first time I ever saw the game. And it holds up really favorably to the arcade version or the PC engine version.

It's actually better than the PC engine version in some ways because you get the whole game on one cartridge as opposed to two cards, two separate purchases, like it was for probo graphics. Yeah. I mean they did make some good stuff, but I think the reason that Master System games have a lower batting average, I think, than NAS games, is because Sega was spread very different. thin. Just reading about it, apparently like it was not uncommon for a game development to take like six weeks, just six weeks for one game, which is kind of crazy, even back then. Yeah, and I think for

maybe for like the first half of the system's life, Sega's real passion was arcade game. And I think they started to take console development more seriously as the master system matured and they started to look toward the genesis. But, you know, that was that was right around the time, 1985, 86, but Sega was really starting to become this super dominant arcade powerhouse making games like outrun, quartet, afterburner, super hang-on, like that was kind of the golden age of Sega's arcade business and I don't think that they necessarily neglected the console business but I really think that's where they kind of poured their resources first and foremost with was to the arcade hang-on has a great master's

important too yeah I mean that was a that was a pack-end it does make mock riders like crap apparently. Yes, although Mark Ryder does a good job of that itself. So anyway, the Mark 3 ultimately in Japan was kind of a non-starter. It sold I think 1.7, 1.8 million units total in its lifetime. I guess you could add the hundreds of thousands of units that the SG-1000 and SC-3,000 sold. But that system was less than 3 million units altogether. The Famicom, by comparison, in Japan had 20-21 million units.

moved in this lifetime. So, you know, it's kind of like the same as the master system NES market ended up here, with NES having 90% and master system having 10. And that was just something kind of unavoidable. You mentioned, Greg, something about the genesis, kind of having those first party developed and published ports of third party games initially.

But I think it eventually broke out of that. And I think that was because of the EA. wasn't it? Electronic Arts? Yeah, I think EA had a big, I mean, EHA chose Sega over Nintendo, really, and it all had everything to do with the fact that they could sort of, they could dictate terms with Sega because they were, you know, they were in a much worse position, so, but I think that was sort of the beginning of the change around there.

There was also a lot of other things happening at that time, though. There was the U.S. looking into Nintendo's business practices, so it was around the end of 1990 that I think Nintendo started to loosen up a little bit, and you started to see third parties coming in, a claim coming in, Sunsoft, that sort of thing. But yeah, I think it became pretty clear to Sega pretty early on that the Mark 3 just didn't have what it was going to take to beat Nintendo in its own game.

So they began not to build another version of the system, yet another system, but instead to look to the international market, the same way Nintendo had with the NES. So they started to take the game first to the US, and then they would be on that to the UK, Europe, and Brazil, where it became a really big deal. But the US was first, and that was kind of their next attempt to build a big market.

So that's where we come into the master system. All of this has just been a preamble leading up to the master. Thank you for watching the pre-show. Yeah. So now we can actually have the podcast. Hi, guys, welcome. So Master System, what do you guys want to say about this thing? Master System, it's a fantastic console, developed console,

but the games just aren't there. Like Bob was saying, Sega would just spread way too thin. And they had the arcade ports. Many of them, they would re-release on the Genesis because the hardware was better. And so you might have a game like Space Harrier that comes out on the master system. And it's not at all like the arcade,

but it's fun for 1987. Then they released Space Harrier 2 in 89. for the Genesis and you're like I don't need to play space here you're on the master system anymore so and then a lot of their a lot of the games produced specifically for the console though like Fantasy Star were fantastic because obviously they pulled more their their resources to I don't know that you call them blockbuster games but but just it just felt like they knew they it was it was more ambitious than just your traditional arcade style shooter or whatever yeah they were they were brave enough to put a Tommy LeSort on a video game so no you really see if you look at the life of the the master system you really see the quality of the software improving the same way that it did you know on any as there's there are fewer games for master system so there's not as much of a kind of a spread to look at I think

it's like a hundred fifty games versus what is NES of Famicom it's like twelve hundred or something Yeah, yeah. So I mean, definitely kind of a difference of a magnitude of order, basically. Or an order of magnitude, yes, whatever. Anyway, but you know, you do see that evolution. You see Sega getting more comfortable, starting to make games that are better suited to the console. There are less arcade boards and more games that you can really sink your teeth into. By the end of the life of the system, you had stuff like Fantasy Star, which was mentioned. You had Golden Axe Warrior, which was a great Zelda clone.

You had Zillion, which was a brave attempt to mix like Metroid and Impossible Mission. You had Fantasy Zone 2, which was a sequel to an arcade game that did a great job of just, you know, converting that shooter gameplay into a console-specific experience. It's so good, in fact, that developer M2, who does all the Sega 3D ages, has actually taken the master system, Fantasy Zone 2, and, turned it back into an arcade game for like the 3D classics where it's running on the arcade hardware so I think that is a testament of how good that game was like if it's good enough for them to give that kind of treatment it's definitely

worth your time today so so it is it's really in Sega kind of cutting its teeth and getting a handle on the console market so that when the genesis came around that could be just a fantastic system all up and down yeah like you can really when you when you consider you look at things like black belt and um well i can't from the other one in but Kajakoa, I forget what it was called here, but that was, they were on the master system, and then there were sequels to those on the, on the, the Megadrives, Genesis, and you can start of, you can really, if you start at the beginning of the, the master system's life and move through the Mega Drive, you can really see Sega coming into its own as a console

game manufacturer. I mean, the arcade boards were getting great as well, but, but like, for side-scrolling action games in particular, they just got much, much better. Like, their first, their first attempts weren't great, but as you got, you know into up to Sonic basically like you can really feel that that that quality rising yeah and I really like the way that they go reworked the hardware for the US they really went for that like they just said it's the 80s let's go all in on 80s design and the hardware went from being this kind of like white and gray and blue sort of soft rounded very safe and friendly looking console in Japan to this

stark angular black machine with red green rids on it. It has like this weird diagram silkscreened on the front that I don't actually know what it means. It's supposed to represent like the game experience and the controls or something, but it's how to hook it up. It's there and it's cool. And then of course you have the packaging, which... So, Master System packaging gets a lot of derision. I'm going to pass this around so everyone can appreciate it up close. I have a theory about this, Jeremy. So, you know, people laugh at the master system because it does have... the packaging has this really stark simplicity to it but it's kind of weird

because even though it's just like white with a silver grid on it and text and these tiny terrible clip art graphics like there's kind of a lot of love and care given the typography is very reminiscent of what Apple was doing and its marketing that kind of like old Garaman you know kind of Roman type base and then like even though there's very little on that cover like it's mostly white it's not just a simple printing process if you know printing you know that silver ink is not one of the things that is part of the normal print process so that's actually like a special five-color spot

process it's weird and wasteful but but at the same time like it does set the system apart and it does say like they have branding in mind like there's more consistency in master system packaging than any other console like yeah it reminds me of the Yeah, NES, the first NES black box games where they had a cohesive style. And if the NES stuck with that, I would have been happy, you know. Maybe it was not as evocative as, you know, a weird Mega Man could be. But yeah, like my theory is that Tonka, they bought a clip art package and rolled up their sleeves one afternoon and got to work.

But I mean, the pro wrestling one is weird. It's a guy holding his own head. But I think the actual weirdest one is the box art Brazilian, which is a screenshot of the game not aligned in any particular direction. It's a screenshot of the menu, like of the pause menu. So, like, what, what? Pause menus were new and innovative back. I guess so.

I mean, this was like 87. You had to get up and pause the game, I mean. They didn't even call it menus. They called it subscreens. Oh, subscreens, I see. New and exciting and scary. But yeah, there were some weird kind of mis-kews with the Master System marketing, but at the same time,

I think their heart was in the right place. And whatever you want to say about Master System, Like, you know you're looking at a master system game immediately when you see that packaging. It's iconic, it's bold, it's distinct, it's different. So, you know, I think that kind of did the job. I don't know if it actually sold any games, which is kind of the other part of packaging design.

But it's a good start. Yeah, I mean, it's, and you look at it now, it's something that in the mid-90s, everybody went to. Like, all of the Nintendo's boxes, especially on the spines, started to look the same. Sega started doing the color-coded thing with their four million different systems. And like today you see the same thing, right?

Like you've got the 3DS, Microsoft, Sony, everyone does it. So, but yeah, I'm just convinced that the art on the master system boxes was just a joke none of us were in on. Like, they had to know that those things were terrible, but yeah. Yeah, the Sega Master System launch in America took, I think it took some cues from Nintendo's launch

with the NES. And in some ways it actually won up what Nintendo did. You know, they had a light gun as to pack in, just like Nintendo with the Zapper. But one thing they didn't do was change the size of the cartridges the way Nintendo did. If you're familiar with Japanese Famicom cartridges, they're about half the height of NES cartridges.

And NES cartridges are actually just empty space on the top half. They just wanted the games to look bigger because they thought Americans need bigger things. And they designed the boxes so that they would be more like VHS tapes and people would not think of them as video games, but instead as entertainment options. options, sit alongside video cassettes on your shelf. Well, Sega didn't do that with its

cards, but it did take the packaging and made VHS size clamshell packaging instead of cardboard packaging, which was like kind of the premium, you know, rental market only VHS packaging. So they kind of went to an extra step of effort to make their packaging stand out. And I think that was one of the best choices they made because you can go and you can find Sega Master System games complete and an amazing condition these days. Buying NES games complete in box in a box with a good condition is really difficult.

It's expensive because of the collector bubble that's hit Nintendo harder than Sega. But also, it's just harder because those NES boxes took a lot of abuse. Master System boxes, man, unless you, like, soaked them in water, they were pretty much indestructible, and they kept the game safe, and they kept the manual save.

So they really, I feel like Sega really thought, you know what, this system is going to be played by really dumb kids who don't care about their stuff so let's let's accommodate that for that you know account for that and work around it and they did and it's something to carry through into the Sega Genesis into like 1984 or 94 it was distributed by Tonka and they probably had some hand in the packaging aren't they known for like durable toys like giant trucks you can just smash into the ground these are the Tonka trucks

of video game packaging so yeah the US system at launch supported both cartridges it wouldn't actually play Japanese cartridges they were a very slated different shape, so they weren't compatible. And it also supported the card games. Not very many of those were released in the US. In Japan, the card game, the Mark 3 could support play SG-1000 games. Since none of those came out in the US,

Sega didn't really bother with compatibility, so there's a system bios change or something that makes SG-1000 games on playable on a master system. Right, yeah, there's, I don't even think it's possible. I mean, I guess you could mod it or try to mod it, but yeah, it's not.

Yeah, it's not easy. So kind of a mixed launch for the system. I think Sega's biggest problem in the US was kind of like what they faced in Japan, which is that Nintendo had a head start. And it wasn't so much that Nintendo had a head start in terms of time, because the NES made its wide American launch in June 1986.

And the master system was October 1986. So that's just a difference of, what, like three, four months, five months maybe? So it's less than half a year. So it's not, you know, an intractable lead. But the problem was Nintendo had a different kind of start in America, and they had more systems in place. They had more distribution in place, more partnerships. You know, they had been distributing their own arcade games since RadarScope.

That went really badly for them, but then Donkey Kong came along and went really well. And that allowed them to set up, you know, direct retail distribution, or, you know, not retail, but they set up a network. cross-country in the U.S., and Sega didn't do that. Sega mostly published its arcade, I think all of its arcade games initially under other imprints like Konami, didn't Frogger come out under Konami's imprint, or was that a Konami game? Okay, that's always confusing, but they worked with Grimlin and maybe Centauri and a few others and kind of let other people do the heavy lifting of distributing arcade games in the U.S. and they didn't have the toy connections that

Nintendo did, because Nintendo had the game and watch system that it sold through toy shops and electronics shops, and Sega kind of, they kind of lacked that in that Nintendo did. So Nintendo did have this advantage, also with marketing. They just, you know, they were entrenched in the U.S. by the time the NES came out. Yeah, and I think Nintendo had the Fun Club, which would eventually become the propaganda arm known as Nintendo Power. Sega had nothing similar for a while. I mean, I think the Sega Visions magazine didn't come around until the Genesis a few years

in, I think. Right, yeah, the fun club news was, and the fun club, that was Nintendo kind of taking advantage of the networks and the systems and connections and partnerships that it had built in the first half of the 80s to really, really push their system. And Sega just was coming from behind. They didn't have that kind of deep entrenched network

in the US, and it really hurt them and worked against them. Well, when you think about the fact that even up until around, I think the launch of Sonic Sega was still struggling to get in some of the major retailers then, yeah, they didn't have that. And there was another Sega, it was like a Power Club thing that came out. I think it was the last couple of years or the last year of the Master System. They did have something, I forget what it's called, but it's what morphed into Sega Vision.

I believe, was that the Sega Challenge newsletter? Yeah, Sega Challenge newsletter. And there was actually, they had one game that you could only get through ordering it. The newsletters called Power Strike. Very good, shoot them up. Which, yeah, that was Aleste. So if you're familiar with the Aleste series, by Compile, right? Compile.

Yeah, so anything, you know, shooter by compile, you know it's going to be good. So, yeah, it's one of those, there were a lot of good games on Master System. I don't think we're going to have time to really get into the Master System library. We're going to record kind of a supplemental segment to this panel later that'll be released in just a podcast episode. So we'll talk more about the games in that. You know, the U.S. market ended up being kind of a non-starter for Sega also. I think they sold about 2 million here. So it did a little better than in Japan, but not really that much.

But Sega did have huge, huge success in the rest of the world. They didn't do well in America, they didn't do well in Japan, where Nintendo had a great foothold. But eventually they took their system to the UK and Europe, and the system exploded there. It sold like 7 million units, I think. units, I think, in Europe, and then another five in Brazil. I don't know why it was specifically Brazil, not South America, just Brazil. That one country had just a huge love for master system,

but Sega did eventually find its audience, and the system did much, much better in Europe than the NES did. One of the things in Brazil, a bit of insight into that is that actually one of the reasons it was so big in Brazil is because tech toy licensed it. It wasn't Sega, that went to TechToy was the other way around. TechToy was licensing toys. And the very first toy that company ever licensed was the Zillion gun. And Zillion was on television, or I think TechToy

was instrumental in getting Zillion on television down in Brazil. But the key thing there is that there were huge tariffs on anything that was foreign that you brought into Brazil to sell. So what TechToy did was set up its own manufacturing plants, run by, like Sega oversaw that, obviously, so they could sell at a much lower price. Plus they had crazy customer support, kind of like what they had

with the NES in North America where you had these third-party licensed support group like support stores, these little mom-and-pop shops that they were licensed by Nintendo. TechToy did that with Master System in Brazil, which is one of the reasons why it was so huge. But they were still releasing games for that thing.

Like 98. Street Fighter 2 was a game that came out on the Master System in Brazil. And in the UK it was kind of the same thing. I mean, it was one of the nice things about, or one of the things that I think is kind of sad about the master system in the U.S. is that it came out here in In 186, Japan stopped supporting it in 88.

It was only a two-year window that we had here, but when the UK and Europe lashed onto, you had all those sort of bedroom coders that had come up through the microcomputer, through the Sinclair, and that sort of thing, getting in there and really messing with the system. And if you go and you check out a lot of the games that came out post-1988 in the UK, there's some really impressive stuff for the system. Yeah, the only Japanese console, I think, that has kind of a similar release, library to the Master System is maybe the N64, because it was so big in the U.S. versus where it was in Japan and Europe. So, you know, that ended up having just a ton of Western developed games for it, much more so, you know, proportionately than other Nintendo consoles.

And Master System was very much the same way. Half of its library came into being after Sega really kind of stopped supporting it much in the U.S. I mean, they continued selling it and you could buy games. retail if you were able to find it into the early 90s, but, you know, they really were happy to jump over to the Genesis as quickly as they could, because that was a much more viable market. But in Europe and Brazil, it just kept going and going. Greg, weren't you saying that in Europe, they pretty much went from master system to Saturn. A lot of people just skipped over the Genesis altogether. No, that was, I don't think that's how to happen. The Genesis is actually pretty popular in Europe. Oh, you lied to you. I might have lied to you. I wanted to make a fool out of you up here in front of everybody. Mission accomplished. No, but again, Brazil is the main one, but also the master system is, while the genesis was really popular in the UK and Brazil, the master system was still popular as well.

And it was also actually in Australia, I'd say that too. A couple of people that I've talked to in Australia for generation 16 talk about how, you know, the experience for a lot of us in our generation here where, you know, everybody had an NES and you had that one kid at school. that had a master system and that's kind of weird but like in those areas it was completely different you know like everybody had a master system and you had an NES like you have one kid that had an NES or something like that so yeah it's so it's really interesting to see how it's completely reversed in all those other regions but in North America and Japan obviously not so much so we're running a little short on time here so we probably need to start wrapping this up

for the next panel but I would like to just kind of wrap by talking about the system legacy. What do you guys, do you think there is a master system legacy? I'd like to hear it in your words. I don't want to be the only one talking here. Bob, you're laughing, so I think maybe you have to talk first. I'm just thinking it's great that there's a console in Japan named Mark and a console in Japan named Marty. So that's all I have to add. But I do think the odds were against it. I mean, I only saw the master system in one department store, the defunct Hills department store. I'm not sure if they were in Milwaukee or not, but that was the only place I ever saw it maybe it was for a year so after that it was just like

oh Nintendo is the video game I play now so there was not even a chance I mean this might seem kind of obvious but I just without the master system without Sega producing 90% of the library you'd arguably they wouldn't have been the games wouldn't have been as high quality right away on the mega drive and the Genesis and I think they while the marketing was instrumental in getting the Genesis popular in America. I think the games were there. Sega just needed to let people know that they existed. But the master system, you know, definitely paved the way for better things. And I would say too that, yeah, well actually I agree with what Dylan said. I mean,

they had to take care of the system themselves. It's kind of interesting to see that Nintendo's getting into a similar position now where they have been with the Wii U, where they're the lion's share of the great games that are created for that system are created by the system manufacturer but that was kind of the position that Sega was in in the home right through but the other thing is to the legacy of the master system is the game gear I mean the game there was a master system that's all it was a master system but better but better it had a 4,096 possible colors as opposed to 64 that's an improvement a little bit not that you can necessarily see it on the

screen at that size but the potential is there yeah and yeah I mean the game gear had a ton of pretty much straight ports of master system games scale to the different screen dimensions, but you had stuff like Master of Darkness or vampire or whatever you want to call it, which was a pretty good Castlevania clone. I think there was even like a Gunstar Heroes port, which that's not a master, well there was a master system version of Gunstar Heroes, wasn't there? Well, a lot of those master system versions were actually the ports back to the master system from the game here.

Dynamite Headney is another example, and I think Earthworm Jim as well. So yeah, and you know, you did see Sega kind of giving giving the master system some special treatment even late in his life you know even though they kind of just continued it for the most part in Japan in 1988 you still have a completely unique version of Sonic the Hedgehog that a lot of fans really like they really think the master system version of Sonic the Hedgehog is a great game it's different than the Genesis version despite being like the same concept same physics and design in general different levels different challenges

and that sort of thing it was a program by ancient which is use of Shiro's company If you're familiar with that composer, he and his sister and his mother own a company. And they did a few games for Master System and Game Gear, and they did a really great job of it. Like, everything he touches is great. Yeah, I mean, they gave it one last shot there at the end of 1990. When they released the Master System 2, which we haven't really talked about, was just a sort of a stripped down, got rid of the card slot and everything, and saw a couple of them on the vendor floor today.

But that was late 1990, and I think 91 was Sonic. I think that was the last U.S. game released for it. But it was like a $60 price deck at that point. So they were still going for it. But, you know, they also had the power base converter for the Genesis. So there was still some value there. Plus, they got to say they were backwards compatible when Nintendo wasn't. Yeah, I mean, that was a great example of Sega doing what Nintendo don't.

Absolutely. The Super NES was originally supposed to have an NES cartridge slot. And then Nintendo said, I mean, they even picked the Super NES processor because of its backward compatibility with the NES. But then for whatever reason they just said, no, let's cut that out. I'm sure they just wanted to save costs and beat up price again. But Sega, you know, they took a different approach and said, well, we'll give you a module that lets you play all your master system games on Genesis, which you own any.

I'm sure made a lot of parents happy. Well, it did, and it's funny because it's been said by Sega executives at the time that the power base converter was the greatest peripheral no one bought. I mean, it never sold anything, but it was great PR for them to be able to say, because there was a big uproar when the Super Nintendo was released in the U.S. about how it wasn't backwards compatible. Everyone had tons of games, and they wouldn't be able to play them, and Sega's over here saying, look, we've got this.

I mean, do you think the Super Game Boy came around because of the Power Base Converter? Do you think Nintendo would have come up with that idea if they hadn't seen Sega doing that and said, yeah, maybe. Oh, yeah, we could do that. Yeah, maybe. But that's pretty great. Anyway, I think that pretty much wraps it up for us. Should we take some questions?

Are there any questions in the audience? Does anyone... Oh, there are some questions. Okay. I know we know a lot about the business side of Sega during the Genesis years because of the Console Wars book, which has recently come out, but during the master system, was the U.S. arm, did they have their own presence there, or were they more so being licensed out from Japan through Tonka and stuff like that? They did have their own presence. I don't know personally how many people there were. I actually spoke to Al Nilsson about a week ago, and I didn't ask. any specifics, but there was an arm of Sega, but it was a completely marketing arm, and it was a tiny, tiny team. So if the master system was really popular in Brazil and lasted for so much longer, were there any, like, good games for it that came out there that didn't come out in other territory? Well, they rebranded a lot of the good American games, like they rebranded Wonderboy.

Boy, to be Sapo the Frog, which is like a Brazilian cartoon. I think they did that with two Wonder Boy games. And then, like Greg, I think mentioned earlier, they were the ones that brought out like Street Fighter 2 and Earthworm Jam. There's even a Virtue Fighter animation, which is surreal to experience. So, yeah, they kept the fires burning, and they were surprisingly decent. Like, they're better than you would think. So yeah, I would definitely recommend checking some of those out.

I think there's a collection of like a dozen or so games that are exclusive there. And a lot of those also, there were some re-skins of like I think Wonderboy or something like that with various Brazilian properties like Terma Delmonica. There's a Woody Whitpecker game that I think was exclusive to Brazil as well. So yeah, there's a few. There's a Mickey Mouse game that's exclusive for Brazil as well, and Mickey's Ultimate Challenge or something like that. Not great, and really hard to get. Apparently those games are really hard to get complete a box.

All right, maybe one more question, then we'll call it a day. I myself collect for the master system, and I've had a lot of fun actually importing games from the UK because for whatever reason, I can just play those PAL games on my US master system. I don't think there's any other system where you can hope to achieve that just because of the signal conversion alone. Do you know why the technical reasons and why that's even possible? that I can do that with this machine and maybe nothing else I know of.

I have no idea what reason that would be. Is anybody, any thoughts? No, I don't. I don't know. I took the microphone just to say that. Yeah. Yeah, I know that Powell games run more slowly on US systems. I remember getting a copy of Zenon 2 and thinking, why is this game so sluggish and crappy until I realized

it was a UK release and it was supposed to run like 10% faster. So that's why. I think I have no idea why they would do that. But yeah, there wasn't like a lockout. It was just the games would run at the refresh rate of whatever TV standard you were using. So, or whatever system it was running on. I don't know. Kind of interesting, though.

Anyway, I think that wraps it up for this panel. So thanks everyone for coming out. Like I said, we're going to record a little more about Master System, talk specifically about the games, and put this whole thing together into a podcast. That'll be out in about a week. So you can look forward to that. And otherwise, so Master System, fun little system. I've always had a soft spot for it, even though people think I hate it for some reason.

hopefully we've divorced you of that opinion, and I hope you enjoyed this panel. So thanks again for coming out. Yeah, thanks so much. Be sure to listen to retronauts on the internet. We're everywhere. All right, and so we're here after the Midwest Gaming Classic panel on the Sega Master System to talk some more about Sega Master System. Hi, it's Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, Hey, it's Bob Mackey.

Hey, it's Dylan Cornelius. Greg Seward. And anyway, Master System, games. We didn't really talk about those. Actually, there were a few things we didn't talk about. Before we talk about the games, why don't we talk about the gadgets? There's some pretty crazy gadgets with the master system, Mark 3, SG-1000, the peripherals.

You had your light phaser. That's normal. But then there's other weird stuff. Dylan, I think yours is, your favorite is... I don't know if I'd call it a favorite. It's a favorite. 3D glasses. Those are cool, yeah.

Yeah, they weren't your typical 3D. Yeah, it wasn't the red and blue. It's anastropic. Anastropic. Anastropic, yeah. Yeah, I can never remember that big word. Anyway, so Sega released about half a dozen games of middling quality, I would say, there was a Zaxon 3D, Maze Hunter 3D.

Xaxon 3D was actually better than the master system, the original master system conversion. It was a whole new game. It was much simpler, but really took advantage. I think it was one of the key titles that took advantage of the glasses itself. There was also Missile Command 3D, which was the only game to use the 3D glasses and the light phaser at the same time. So if you can imagine how cool that kid must have been who owned all that and just was. you know, probably had his mom take a picture of him while he was shooting. And that makes Lucas in his power glove look like a goofus.

Right. So I read how the glasses work and it sounds like that could not have existed in 1986 because apparently the shutters alternate flashing left and right. I'll say alternate opening and closing left and right based on the image on the screen. Were they powered or something or like how did that work? Yeah, they draw power from the same bus as the controller. So your glasses are wired into the system itself. Wow.

It's the card cat. It's the card slot. Which is why they won't work with Master System, too. Well, Nintendo had those, too. They had the shutter-style glasses in Japan for the Famicom, and there was 3D Hot Rally and a couple of other games. I'm just thinking of Rad Racer. I didn't have the glasses, so I was like,

hitting Select makes the game ugly. You can play Ugly Mode. Yeah, I just bought a copy of Rad Racer, and it doesn't come with glasses. Oh, I've never seen those glasses. You told me it was complete. You liar. Anyway, actually, I thought you were going to talk about

the tricicle handle the bike handle yeah that was the tricycle handle is that what we're calling it really does look like a play school that's what's so great thing it looks like something yeah that you played with when you were three years old

it's just this like red plastic box and I'm assuming it's super it looks really small from the photos and like little tric handles and a gear and then a couple buttons and it was specifically for Hang-on in Japan. But as far as I know, you could use it up through the Mega Drive racing games.

So they made it run for a while, but it never came over to the States. If you're listening, you should Google a picture, because it looks like one of those things you buy for a kid and put off of the car seat, it's like, now you're driving like Daddy, you know. That's what it looks like to me. It really does. It's a strange little device. My personal favorite Sega 8-bit peripheral,

It never came to the U.S., but it's, I can't even remember what it's called. It's a, crap, it's a wireless TV adapter, and it sounds like something, again, that should not have existed in 1986 because it's doing something that people are just now starting to do with HDMI transmission where you can have like a wireless signal from a console or Blu-ray player or whatever to your television without having a wired connection. that uses Blu-ray that didn't exist in 1986. So instead, this device was actually just an RF transmitter. You know, RF was the standard that most people used to connect their systems to televisions,

and it's RF because it's radio frequency. It actually was like in that little wire and the little cage around the end of it was sending a radio transmission. That's why there was so much static and interference in old game systems like the NES. so this was actually using that and using the RF unshielded and throwing it at a little satellite receiver that would plug into your television

so you didn't have to have your master system or Mark 3 or maybe it was just the SG 1000 I can't remember which but you didn't have to have it plugged in directly to your system but of course that thing was totally susceptible to outside transmission interference and it never came out in the US because the FCC I'm sure it was just like no

It sounds like you were basically running your own pirate master system TV station in your house. Radio-free Sega. It's the beginning of the let's play video. Oh, yeah. So you just send it to everybody around you. Just tune in. Hey, everyone. It's like live streaming.

Yeah. Thanks for watching. Any other peripherals of note? I was not of note, but one of the things that I finally got my hands on today was the arcade stick that came out for the master system, which I always thought was bizarre. Have you ever seen a picture of it? It's got the buttons on the left, and it's got this big. bulbous stick on the right and but it's it's this really really minuscule little I

always assumed it was as big as an NES advantage but today I learned that it wasn't it's just it's this really tiny and it's really bizarre and it's got the buttons in the wrong spot and it just I don't know it but it's got this sort of that same sort of space age look that everything that Sega did back then had like this is the future as we see it in 1982 you know what I mean it does look like the gear shift and kits that thing it kind of yeah yeah that's what I was thinking about when I saw the picture. Sega had an affinity for putting buttons on the wrong side.

They did that with the sports pad, which was a track ball, and then buttons one and two on the left-hand side again. But the standard controllers never did that. They always had the buttons on the right side. Exactly. So what their reasoning was, I'm not sure. Well, sometimes SIGA does weird stuff. Why we like them.

But our left-handed friends must love them. Shigeria Miamoto was like, oh, if only we could do this. I didn't know he was left-handed. That explains everything. So, yeah, that was kind of a big deal when they switched around Twilight Princess. Because everyone was like, well, Shigeru Miamu is left-handed and he can still play. I never heard that argument. Wow. It was always a bad idea to be in one.

Anyway, so peripherals, okay, that's fine. But the meat of the system was really the games. And I've kind of looked over at the library and grouped things into like five different categories. There were a lot of arcade conversions. There were a handful, like a subset of that, which were more faithful arcade versions than were available on the NES, which are worth calling out. There were sequels, exclusive to master system, to arcade games. there were ports from other systems and PC

and then there were the original games so we should probably talk about the arcade games first because I mean that's kind of Sega's bread and butter in your opinion what's the best arcade conversion the outrun probably I don't care for after burner really as a game period but particularly the master system

just can't handle that game's tech whatsoever Yeah, After Burner was really impressive and cool and like the way the stick vibrated and everything, but as a game, it's not actually... Well, and the experience is, yeah, it's the arcade experience that I'm going for. You're not going to sit at home. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely worth 25 cents. That was like, I mean, that was what Suzuki kind of went for, just the flashy kind of immediate experience, even though they were better games than Afterburner. They were just really meant for you five-minute, you know, five-minute gameplay.

Yeah, I mean, there was a super hang-on, which had that crazy arcade cabinet where you sat. down and like the cockpit turn like tilted and that's how you controlled the game you can emulate that with the the M2 re-release of that game it's not the same though not that I've ever actually used that but I can't imagine that you know tilting your 3DS is the same

as physically throwing your body I like that they put that in at least yeah no it's cool it's cool but I mean that that really was kind of SIGA's thing but you know despite that they still made hang on the pack-in game right yeah they made hang on and they made

a combo pack with it was Hangon and Astro War and Safari Hunt Yeah The Hangon was kind of of the duck hunt of the master system

Not that it was a like-on game Safari Hunt would probably be Yeah but I mean Duck Hunt shows up on like all the multi-parts Yeah Yeah hang on was Hang-on is decent What I like about Hang-on

is that it's amazing in the arcade using the motorbike but it's equally as fun to play on it on a console just because it controls so well. But I don't care as much for the Master System version. It's OK. Actually, the SG-1000 version, which is called Hang On 2,

controls better than the Master System version. And while obviously it doesn't look as good, it runs really smoothly. There's like no, as we talked about earlier, a lot of flick scrolling for SG1,000 games. But that one, I don't know what they did, what kind of trickery they pulled, but That one just feels like a smoother experience in the Master System version.

The Super Scalar stuff did not work as well in Space Harrier for Master System. It's kind of gross. Yeah. Isn't Thunderblade? Is Thunderblade on Master System? Or is it the Genesis version? Okay. It's the Master System version.

It's such an abomination. I've never even seen that. I think the Genesis one looks bad. Yeah, it does. But, I mean, that one had, like, buildings that you were flying through in the arcade. And that just, it did not work. Yeah. like the sense of illusion of depth.

It was a cool trick for the arcade. Yeah, it was. It was just like billboards, basically. It's not really that fun a game, but again, it's like after Burner where you're just like, I can't believe I'm doing this. I'm literally Tom Cruise. Or like the pilot of Airwolf, but sure. What do you think of the master system port of quartet?

I have no opinion on that. I thought it's called like duo or something. It's double target in Japan, but the quartet was called quartet because you could play four players in the arcade, but when they released it for the master system it was only one at a time. It was two at a time.

Two time, okay. Yeah. Still missing half the fun. Missing half the fun. Not a bad port, though, I would say. I mean, maybe the appeal of playing four at a time is lost, but I still think the main meat of the game holds up.

Okay, that was my question, because I think most people get hung up with the fact that, hey, I'm missing two people. Yeah. Like, is it still a good game? I like that they changed the name because some, you know, publishers would not be that charitable. Like, Final Fight for the S&S should be called. Well, it was still called Quartet in the U.S., wasn't it?

It was? Oh, I was wrong, then. Okay. Which I think Japan had the better move on that way, probably a double target. Shinobi turned out pretty well on Master System. They added a life bar, which makes the game a lot more fun. I just love the pacing of Shinobi, too.

It's so different than, like, Ninja Guide and, where you're constantly having to fend off, you know, recurring enemies. Shinobe's, I don't know, it just feels very like, like there's one guy up here, one guy up here. Yeah, there's more breathing space. More breathing space, yeah. It's got more of like a Castlevania rhythm than Ninja Guy didn't. Yeah, it's a good, good thing.

Although if you want a Castlevania clone, there's Vampire or Kinsaten. Both of those are pretty like... Oh, Kinsaten. Very... Yeah, it's rough. But, I mean, both of those very much have that Castlevania aesthetic to, it. Yeah. That was clearly a big influential game at the time, but we're not to

that yet. We're still talking about arcade conversions. Ninja Gaiden is one that I've always meant to play. Did that come to the U.S.? I don't think it came to the U.S., and it wasn't a conversion of the arcade game. Right, but it's completely unique. It's like the NES version, but it's new

content. But totally different, and it's surprisingly good. It's hard as nails, just like Ninja Gaiden. But yeah, actually that's one of the master's system games. through the years that I've put a lot of time into just because I just really, really dig it. It's, it looks kind of like the NES game, but it feels and plays a little bit differently. It's better than Ninja Guidon 3? Yes, absolutely. I'm sure that game's really expensive, but it's one that I'd really like to check out sometime. I didn't get to

play it before this. What other? Oh, our type, of course, was like a great. Such a good version. Yeah. I don't know if Sega did that or compile or who, but whoever converted it did a fantastic job with it. Art type is one of my two favorite games for the system along with Fantasy Star but it's just yeah

like you said the conversion is amazing and the fact that there's like no slowdown it's just the pure masochistic experience from start to finish it's just unbelievably good yeah I'm really impressed if they managed to pull that off and that was

that was really the game that I had a friend who had a master system and we'd always argue about whose game systems were better. That was the game that really made me say, man, I kind of wish I had a master system. Yeah. It was, then I played it and I was like,

this is really hard. He makes it look so easy because, of course, he played it obsessively over and over again and got just, like, totally perfected it. But, you know, it was really cool. And there was a Famicom port for that, but it never came to the U.S. for whatever reason. No, and I don't, I mean, I don't think the quality was nearly as good. I don't think we missed out.

And then there were two arcade ports in particular that were much more faithful to the arcade versions than the NES versions of those games were. First was Strider, which really very carefully copied the arcade version, which is that

kind of like cinematic action platformer where there's constantly something new being thrown into the mix. That's a tall order for an 8-bit game. I don't know that the master system really pulls it off, though. Have you guys played that yet? I haven't gotten to that.

I have not played the straighter. No, I haven't either, actually. It's like, it's really weird. It almost kind of feels like it's just going through the motions. Like, you play it and you're like, oh, I know all these parts, but it just, it's not, it's not well done. I don't know. It's really hard to describe.

Like, even though all the bits are there and all the scenes and the encounters and the traps and everything, it's all just very flat. And, you know, playing that, you realize maybe Capcom had the right idea with the NES version just to do a different game because the system just doesn't do it justice. And of course, you know, as a Genesis or a Sega fan, you had the Genesis version of Strider, which was phenomenal. Although it's worth pointing out, actually, the NES version of Strider, it wasn't done

because they didn't think the N.S couldn't do it. It was actually from the start planned to be a different game. Well, I'm sure a lot of that decision did come from the fact. Yeah, I mean, Capcom took that approach with a lot of their image. conversion. Actually, all of them after a point. They were just different game. And, you know, Strata was no different. But what I say was from the start.

No, it is part of that polymorphic content. It was tying with the manga and everything. It was like a three-pronged thing. Arcade game, and then there was a manga and NES game that were both very closely related. Whereas the arcade game was kind of its own standalone thing. Of course, the manga never made it to the U.S. and the NES game never made it to Japan. Oh, weird. That's so weird.

Yeah, really. They bungled that. It was weird. It was supposed to go to Japan, but it didn't. I think, on the other hand, Double Dragon is much more successful. I don't know if you guys have played that. I have that one. Yeah, I take a kind of a negative toned on that one.

I really don't care for the Mass System version of Double Dragon. I back that up. What's your favorite console? Well, I don't know that there is, I mean, I guess I prefer the NES version. Me too. I'll admit that it's completely broken, but I just am too attached to it. You know, like the music and how it looks,

the weird experience point system that doesn't really matter. Right, but the master's system version is more faithful to the arcade system. I think the thing is I don't like the arcade game as much as I like the NES version. That's a fair argument. But, you know, I think a lot of people did want, just like, I want the arcade experience. The Master System version has two-player simultaneous play, which the NES did not.

Which is one of the reasons that I actually bought it was because of that. And having played that recently in two-player mode, yeah, it's there, but it's a flickery mess when you play in two players. So it's, it's like nearly unplayable. Does it look like super dodgeball on the NES, that kind of flickery? It is. It's really, you're seeing enemies just completely disappear. Yeah. And it's like, nah, it's not really successful.

It's been a while since I've played it, but if I'm not mistaken, don't you have to hit an enemy, like, six or seven time to get them to go down? Yeah. I mean, it's just like, it feels like a slime. Yeah. Fair enough. But I do like the fact that they converted the arcade content, but they really used the NES style aesthetics for the sprites and everything. It's this kind of midpoint between the arcade game and the NES game.

So to me, it's interesting in that regard, at the very least. Okay, but, you know, so that's the arcade games. The master system also had a lot of conversions from other systems. We talked in the panel about all the down conversions from, like, you know, Genesis games that were taken to Game Gear. and then Converted into Master System. Yeah, like, I didn't even know a lot of these existed

because they never made it to the U.S. They were just, like, in Brazil or Europe. Like, of those, which do you think works best? I mean, it's crazy that Gunstar Heroes is on Master System, but is that a good idea? I've never actually played Gunned. We were talking about this last night, and I've never played Gunstar Heroes on the Master System,

and I'm curious as to where, yeah, I've never played it. Streets of Rage was actually quite good. The Streets of Rage Conversion is pretty successful. I've heard Streets of Rage 2 isn't great. But the first one, it's a really solid port of Streets of Rage. Sonic, of course, as we talked about in the panel, is more or less a completely different game. But successful, successfully so. I played a lot of the Sonic Game Gear games at a friend with the Game Gear,

and one thing I got really hung up on is when you get hit, only one ring falls out of you, which makes the game much, much harder. It's weird that the technical limitations makes the game harder. It's rare that that ever happens. Yeah, yeah. outside of that I mean I don't know

there's actually one that I was sort of discovering as we were getting ready for this show and that's Road Rash I don't know if anyone ever I don't know if you have any experience

with Road Rash on the Genesis even I played a bunch on the Genesis yeah love that game it's fantastic I mean it's sort of it's very technically

impressive on the Genesis oh yeah play the Master System version it's wild how good it is like and how good it looks it looks very close to the Genesis game

it runs at a lower frame rate but it's really impressive what they pulled off with that And it's kind of something that I was getting at, trying to get at during the panel, or when we hear this later, is that it's a shame where the Japanese support for the master system ended so quickly after it came out in the U.S. And then, of course, it ends so quickly in the U.S. after that.

Because when you get into, like, the third and fourth generation games, you're only seeing those in the U.K. and Brazil. And, like, Road Ratch is an example of that. Like, you've got these coders who are really sort of getting down to the metal and figuring out what the system can do. and over here we didn't get to see any of it it's too bad there's a lot of stuff like that that road rash is one really that end of life content on a successful system

is always just like how did they do this you look at you know like you know to compare the NES you look at Urban Champion and compare that to Mighty Final Fight and you're like oh this is the same console that's interesting and we never got to experience that here where you know like using Nintendo as an example even when the Super Nintendo came out in 91 you're still getting really good NES games Forby's adventurers, and some of the best ones.

That was 93, 94. Yeah, 93.94. Some of the best ones came out in the next couple years, right? And same thing with Super Nintendo versus N64. So it never really happens with... Sega abandons their... When they abandoned them, they abandoned them so completely. Yeah.

Especially in Japan. Yeah. It's just... I mean, that's how they did the Saturn here. Yeah. They were like, ah, you guys, it's okay if we go a year without releasing any games for a Sega system. That won't bother you, right?

Yeah. Sorry, and you go back to your original question about conversions from the Genesis, I think Dylan, you talked with this before, Castle of Illusion. Oh, yeah. It's quite good. And it's different, too. It's a completely different game with different levels and I kind of miss

I kind of miss that time in gaming history I guess in like the late 80s, early 90s when there were just different versions of what seemed would be the same game like we talked about Sonic and pretty much all the Disney games were different

between Super Nintendo, Genesis, Master System. I mean Aladdin. Aladdin Yeah, I kind of miss that you get different experiences depending on the console you had, and nowadays everything's so homogenized. Yeah. Yeah.

Some other, you know, some of the other really notable games on Master System came from other systems. Gollelius, I think, started as an MSX game. MSX game. And I can't remember the exact relationship the American version had with the Japanese MSX game, but it was, like, changed in some ways and improved in some... Yeah, improved in most. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't remember the specifics, to be honest, but I do know that the master system version is considered like a quintessential one. Is it? I thought there was a, they took the master system version and converted that to MSX2, and that was considered quintessential. Yeah, that might be the case. But the one for the mass system is just, it's brilliant. It's great. Yeah, it's like, it's the master system, Zelda, basically. Well, no, that's golden axe warrior. Aztec adventure. No. That's like bad secret of...

Get out. Hey, I know what they were trying to do. Yeah, they did it really badly. But Galvelius is great because it's like top-down Zelda and then side-scrolling Zelda 2. Although I guess it's more like Dragonbuster, because it's really linear. There's two types of dungeons. I mean, there's the side-scrolling dungeon, and then there's the top-down, horizontally-scrolling dungeon where it kind of turns into a shooter a little bit.

Because it's compiled. Right. Yeah. And the dungeons aren't as great as Zelda's, but I really actually prefer the overworld to high rule. Yeah. And the characters are sassy or two. They are.

They call you a waste roll if you don't have enough money, and they're short. That's a big word. And that was also the first platform, I think, that an East game was published on. East just one, not one and two. Just one came to Master System, and a generation of children, grew up thinking it was y apostrophe s because of the misprint on the label wise but um you know the definitive the definitive u.s release i think was the um the turbo duo version and you got going ease in the beginning oh it's not wise um but you know before that like that was uh that was kind of a

a taste of something that was getting pretty big in japan and that was pretty obscure over here So you don't really think of Genesis and Master System as the Sega as kind of like RPG mavens outside of Fantasy Star. But there were these little like moments where Master System kind of touched on like action RPGs in ways that you didn't see on competing systems. We do have to talk about, is it Wonder Boy 3 or Monster World 3? Oh, we'll talk about that soon. That's my burning thoughts. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The one other kind of unique little novelty that you see on Master System was sequels to arcade games.

I mentioned Fantasy Zone 2 in the panel. The tears of Opa Opa. Yeah. Tears of Opa Opa. So sad. Why? But there were a couple of others. I mean, basically all the Wonder Boy games were sequels to an arcade game.

A very different arcade game. Yeah, I mean, the first one was Hudson's Adventure Island. Yeah. Actually, Hudson's Adventure Island was Wonder Boy. But then, you know, the second game was, I think the master system version was a pretty direct conversion of Wonder Boy 2. But then starting with Wonder Boy 3, it just kind of went off in its own crazy direction. And Wonder Boy 3 is definitely my favorite Master System game. It is like everything I love about Metroidvania games and then some.

It's like a cross between, I don't know, Hazanadu and Little Samson and Zelda 2, just like all. all these games combined into one, it looks great, it has a really great overworld. Your hero is cursed to change into, like, a dragon or something, like a dragon kid. But then you gain the ability to change into other animals. And, I mean, the Chante series is such a tribute to Wonder Boy 3. It's not even funny. No, it's my favorite. It's such a good game.

Yeah, I think it holds up the best out of any of the Master System library. I mean, Fantasy Star is still a really great game, but it's still also. also an archie chief from 1987. It feels like one. Yeah. But I think it's Wonder Boy 3, right? Wonder Boy 3, Monster World 3 is a shooter. There we go.

There's, okay, there's Wonder Boy. We need an episode. Wonder Boy 2 in Monster World. Wonder Boy 3, the Dragon's Tramp. Monster World 3, which is the shooter. I need visual. Isn't there one on Genesis? It's called like Wonder Boy 3, Monster World 2 or something.

And there's a report for that for Master System 2? I don't believe so. I think Wonder Boy 3 was the last Wonder Boy game on the master system. Yeah. And Wonder Boy, or Monster World 3, I think, started as an arcade game. Yes.

One of them did. That whole format where you're walking along going into the doors and everything like that, that was an arcade game originally. Yeah. And Wonder Boy 3 actually saw ports to other systems. It showed up on Turbo CD, I want to say, as Revenge of DrenCon,

which is a crazy expensive game. pretty much a nicer looking version of the master system game that sells for probably 20 times as much. It's ridiculous number of Sega games on the turbographic CD, like altered bees outrun, there's a Power drift, yeah. Didn't they re-skinned

some Wonder Boy game with like a bug theme like an anime bug theme? And you can get both that version and the regular version on virtual console. I forget what it's called. Yeah, that's Revenge of Drunk. Okay, that's what that is, okay, yeah. I'm pretty sure. There's like three versions of the game for different systems. It's kind of weird, but

I mean, it's a great game no matter what. But the master system is where it started and it's fantastic. And that was developed by West One. That was another studio that worked with Sega as a provider of content. And one of the

creator is making a new game. Yep. Which is very much in the Wonderboy. What is it called? Like Monster Boy? Monster Boy? Yeah. It's stepping around that IP. It's not Monster World. It's not Wonder Boy. It's Monster Boy. But who owns that property? Probably Sega Okay

Hudson owned Adventure Island Like Oh yeah We could do a whole episode This is gonna be an episode later I'll make it if you know Yeah But anyway

Yeah It's a worthwhile diversion Because it is such a good game It's really good But it's certainly not the only Great game Like original game For Master System

There's of course All the Alex There's Fantasy Star There's Fantasy Star There's fantasy star It's awesome So correct me of him wrong But was fantasy

Was that I think that was the first First real sort of a JRPG released in the U.S., wasn't it? It was. In Japan, it was released, I think, the same day as Final Fantasy. It was after Dragon Quest. It was after Dragon Quest, but it was like the same week or like the week after Final Fantasy. It was right there, right there with Final Fantasy.

There's also Miracle Warriors, which I'm not sure. They're very close as far as, like, which one came first. That's true. And it's not like it's very well documented in the West. And nor should you play. No, that's such a weird game. Let's just go with fantasy star then. Miracle Warriors is really strange.

It's like, it's kind of abstract. Like the overworld exploration, you have this little window of your characters walking. But you're not controlling your characters because they're just walking as a little scene. Instead, you're controlling a cursor moving across the overworld. It's so painful. Sounds very USPC RPG.

Yeah. Right. Which, I mean, a lot of JRP grew out of that, right? Wizardry, wasn't it Wizardry? That was, like, a hugely influential game over there? Yeah, I mean, that's what gave rise to black onics. Right, yeah. So, that was a big one.

You mentioned Mace Hunter 3D, which is not great, but it's on the Sega 3D classics collection, or 3DS, which I've been working on a review for, and it makes sense that they would convert that. It's a weird, obscure master system-only title, but it was, you know, about the 3D glasses. And it took me a little while, but I got used to it, and it's okay. Yeah, it's not bad. It's kind of simplistic, and there's not much content there, but it's okay. The word classic only means it's old, not that it's good. I mean, Echo the Dolphin was a classic. I don't consider that game.

Oh, Echo, come on. It's so hard, it's so mean. I just want to be a fun dolphin, but then they immediately drown you. That's it. It's teaching you the real world play of the dolphin life is mean. You get caught in a tuna net and die. I could read a handful of it about that. Yeah. Echo was on the master system as well.

Wow. I wonder what that looked like. I'm sure it was great. It's funny to develop, side note, developers of Echo eventually went on to make Jaws Unleashed, which is crazy. I love it, though. A game where you're...

Finally revenge. Yeah, you're an autonomous star getting like card keys and stuff. It's crazy. It's awesome. Right. No betrayal. So, okay, Bob and I talked about Wonderboy 3. What is your favorite Masters of the game?

Oh, man. I don't know. I mean, I would have to say it's not Alex kid I don't think Miracle World is as bad as people want it to be

it just is not quite there yet Yeah Yeah that was really their attempt To do a Mario thing And it's just not as good as Mario Yeah I actually think the Genesis one is worse Than the Master System was

Oh far worse Yeah Cars just run into you Five seconds into the game Yeah Chanted Castle Yeah It feels like a huge step back

Oh me too It's terrible Yeah But no I mean I don't know I don't really have a game that stands out. I mean, Fantasy Star is kind of there because it's Fantasy Star, and it is really good for what it is. But, I mean, there's a lot of different, there's a lot of other games. Like, I love Choplifter.

I love playing Chop Lifter on the Master System. That's one of those arcade conversions. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, and it is technically an arcade conversion. It's so hard. It is so hard, but it's so hard. It's so hard. And I really, really dig the Streets of Rage conversion. Jurassic Park, of all things.

I really, really like the Jurassic Park conversion on the Master's System. What is it a conversion of the Genesis game? It's just its own game. I shouldn't say it's conversion. It's its own game. Is it like the Genesis game? Kind of in that it's a side-scrolling platformer, but that's kind of where they depart.

But can you play as the Raptor? No. Okay. But it's just one of those. It's nice because it's a side-scrolling action game, but it's one of those ones where every level is kind of unique. Like, you're running through a forest and there's dinosaurs jumping out of the bushes,

and you're tasing them or something. You don't kill them. They jump back into the bushes. and then you'll go into this next scene and there'll be... Lightning will strike a tree and suddenly the whole world's on fire because you're in the middle of the jungle

and you're dealing with jumping from tree to tree as everything's burning down and it's like really ambitious for a master system game it's bizarre but it's great and then probably I would say outrun it's definitely up there for me too it's a really good conversion although it's taxing the system

big time. Especially when you take a curve or you go into those arches because it's funny because it's the camera's locked to your car 90% of the time in an outrun but when you get to that famous section where you're going under the stone arches

the screen locks instead and you're moving left to right on the screen and it's very disorienting there's no warning for it and there's no warning for when it's going to stop but eventually the camera will lock back to your car again because it's just the way the system handled it but it's really well done from the version

Dylan how about yourself bearing in mind that you've only made it to 1989 sure it does our type for sure I like punishing shoot-em-ups and there are a few that have really challenged me as much as that one has. The only one I can, this one is not as challenging

life force on the NES, but it's the only thing I can compare it to if you've never played, if you've never played R-Type, it's like, obviously they're different series, but just the amount of crap that's happening on-screen asks you to deal with is just... Yeah, R-Type has a... a very distinct pace. It's this very slow-paced shooter where you have very

finite controls, and it's very, very pattern and numberization based, even more so than most shooters. And very challenging in that front. It was actually, it really inspired a lot of clones. I mean, the infamous zero wing with all your base. That was a total R-type clone.

It was certainly not the only one. There were lots of those. Gradius is more like a fast-paced kind of free-form, free-wheeling shooter. You know, some power-ups, you kind of have your choice of how you build your ship out. Our type is much more limited. You have kind of your power-up to begin with. You have that bit that sits in front of you, that you can move over behind you and use it as a weapon, use it as a shield. So there is

a lot of versatility, but it's with a more limited tool set. Right. So, and kind of just with the tools you have at the beginning. So, yeah, like you said, it's a really good good conversion to master system so I guess that's really about it we've gone on a full podcast length between this and the panel so hopefully the panel sounds good enough to include here otherwise it's just going to be a little

short episode about us talking about Master System games ain't nothing wrong with that I think it will make up for the sins of the past apparently people are still steamed we're so sorry we're doing the full battle all of us together Our heads are scraping the floor. Yeah, Boers.

So anyway, for Retronauts, this has been Jeremy Parrish. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on iTunes at usgamer.net. On Twitter as Retronauts, et cetera, et cetera. This podcast is supported by Patreon. In fact, we're here in Milwaukee with two guests that we flew in through the grace of Patreon. So everyone who supports this podcast makes events like this and productions like this possible, where we actually get experts from out of town and have them

come and talk to us. How about that? Can't beat that. Your money is being put to good use. We're not just buying toys and video. Actually, we're not buying any. We need experts because I only want to talk about elf. You didn't talk about Alf at all. Well, I felt ashamed after I brought it up. Oh, God. People aren't going to like this podcast either.

Man, well, stay tuned for my Elfcast. All right. There you go. So, anyway, Greg, Dylan. Tell us about yourselves where we can find you on the internet and so forth. You can find me on the Player One podcast over at Player One Podcast.com coming up on our 500th episode. Wow.

Very soon. Looks out it's just Baby Stripling with compared to you guys. Yeah, right. With a couple of other Exif Davis hosts, Chris Johnston and Phil Theobald. And you can find me at Generationhyphen16.com, which is my history of the Genesis YouTube series. Yeah, it's a chrono-gaming series. Yeah, it's really good.

I like it a lot. been enjoying it. Thank you. And Dylan? You can find me on Twitter at the DylanV or on Sega does.com where I am going through every game ever released for a Sega console starting from SG1000 until I decide to quit out of exhaustion. Yeah, I mean, if you listen to this podcast and you're curious to know more about

SG1,000, Sega does is a place to go to learn more. It's exhausting. I'm sure, especially exhausting. It's exhausting. Yeah. Where are you now in the chronology of master system? Like what's the most recent game you wrote about? Shoot, put me on the spot here.

Well, what's coming to mind is bomber raid, and that's totally not accurate. But I know that when I start up, I'm going to, I think, jump into a European-only release. Like, I think it's already to that point, early 1990. well who knows right because the europeans don't have concrete release dates but 1990 is when you start seeing a lot of the european-only games so yeah and bob oh i just realize like everybody in this room has their own chronological project i guess we're all wired that way i do so it's not about video games no i have other interest gasp uh that's not cool yeah so i do talking simpsons it's the chronological simpsons podcast on the laser time podcast network go to

laser time podcast.com or look for Talking Simpsons in your podcast thing. And also you can find me on Twitter as Bob Serbo and you can read my writing at usgamer.net and something awful.com. That's it for me. And I, Jeremy Parrish, write at usgamer.net. And of course, I have my chronoseries, gameboy.world and goodnintensions.com, which detail the complete life of the Nintendo Game Boy in its full, full detail. Japan, Europe, America, everything. Good intentions is much more sane. It's just NES games released in America

in the order in which they were released here, regardless of when they originally came out in Japan. So you can find me there, or on Twitter as GameSpite. Not GameSpite. They keep seeing people refer to me as Game Sprite. They're like, hey, check out this cool video by Game Sprite. No, I don't know who that is, but it's not me. So anyway, that's it for us.

Thank you for listening. And if you were one of the cool people who came out to our show at Midwest Gaming Classic to hear us talk about Master System. Thank you for doing that. For everyone else, we'll probably be doing a live performance, live panel this fall. I'll be performing.

Bob will be juggling for us as probably most likely at Portland Retro Gaming Expo. So you can look forward to that this fall. And in the meantime, you can check us out at Retronauts.com and we do podcasts weekly. Next week, we'll have a regular podcast, a normal episode, followed by a micro.

So stay tuned. Thanks a lot. And we'll be back soon.