Growing up with Nintendo, I was a die hard fanboy and hated the competition. I don’t even know why my parents chose Nintendo over Sega but Nintendo was my jam. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love the competition despite hating it and with a company that oozed cool like Sega it was hard not to envy the attitude that it had. So here are some Sega Megadrive / Genesis memories from a Nintendo fanboy. As that was not going to be enough to keep me from playing and loving the Genesis.
I remember when I got a Super Nintendo, it was something amazing, it didn’t look like crap like the NES, the characters actually looked like the characteres were supposed to. And one of my big sister’s friend wanted to see what it was all about since he was a gamer. He convinced her to lend our SNES and Super Mario world and he would lend us his Sega Genesis and all the games he had. And so for a few weeks I was in the posession of a Genesis.
I will always remember distinctly the controller and how alien the c button was to me, the design also felt edgy and cool at least since I was still making the conversion from the NES controller and hadn’t gotten too used to the SNES one. I played for a while and I mostly remember playing Sonic The Hedgehog, Golden Axe and Altered beast. I’m sure there were other games but I can’t remember but I’m guessing at least one shoot em up game. when I got my SNES back I tried to pretend that none of that had happened as I didn’t want my SNES to know that i had cheated on it with a Sega..
Through out the Genesis life cycle I never got to borrow it again but that didn’t mean my Sega adventures ended there. If I was ever at stores I would look at all the games that were being released for the Genesis imagined myself playing them. I would also play Sega Genesis whenever I got my hands on one whether at a store kiosk or at a friends house, but never at a place where I could get a lot of gaming done on them. I distinctly remember playing Vectorman. To me the model 2 is the version of the console that I remember, I do find the Model 1 vintage looking which is cool and the model 3 just looks modern.
I was always jelous of Sega and in a way I didn’t understand their universe, it wasn’t as colorful as Nintendo and I always thought Sega CD was a different console. I was curious to what the 32x really was and how innovative Sonic and Knuckles looked as a concept. I never asked my family for a Sega console since Nintendo was my thing but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t ask for sega related things. I remember wanting all the McDonalds Sonic figure and watch the DIC Sonic Cartoons in the 90s to get my Sega fix.
But lets talk games, Genesis always had cool looking games and seeing a better version of Street Fighter than the one I had even if an upgrade would come later I didn’t know, it just seemed they got more. Of course i Loved the Sonic games and Sonic the Hedgehog 1 is likely my favorite game in the series because of how often I got to play it. Sonic 2 as well and loved the addition of tails. Others I did not care as much about like Sonic Spinball and Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine but I’d play them if it was what was available.
Thankfully because of all the Sega Genesis colections I’ve been able to play the majority of the Genesis library from the Sixth generation with the Gamecube/PS2 and in other collections made after. Overall the games are not as strong as say Nintendo ones but they have their charm and I can see how in the 90s the fun factor would’ve been much much higher. In general the realism of them that gave them a unique look also dated them and they’re far more short arcade experiences but with games like Flicky, Ecco the Dolphin, Gain ground, Phantasy Star, there’s enough to play and understand why the Genesis was such a classic console. To me Sega will always have that deserved spot as Nintendo’s main rival in a caring way. If life had been different and I’d had a Genesis instead of an NES I could see how I would’ve been a die hard Sega fan. Genesis just looked futuristic.