Episode Details

Sega is not a Japanese word. It stands for Service Games, a company that began in Honolulu in the 1940s supplying slot machines to US military bases before moving to Japan when the machines were outlawed in US territories. This episode follows the company's repeated reinventions: the 1960 dissolution after a US government investigation, the 1965 merger under Air Force officer David Rosen that created Sega Enterprises, the accidental move into manufacturing through repairing secondhand machines, and the 1966 electromechanical hit Periscope that helped standardize the 25-cent arcade play.

We trace the Gulf and Western acquisition, the 1982 arcade crash, the management buyout by Rosen and Hayao Nakayama, the Master System's failure in North America under toy company Tonka, Tom Kalinske's razor-and-blades strategy for the Genesis, and the design of Sonic the Hedgehog, from Sega's Pantone blue to shoes inspired by Michael Jackson and a personality modeled on Bill Clinton. Then comes the 1993 Night Trap congressional hearings and the rating council that led to the ESRB, the self-cannibalizing 32X and Saturn launches, the Dreamcast's built-in modem and the 2001 exit from hardware, the 2004 Sammy pachinko merger, acquisitions like Creative Assembly, Sports Interactive, Atlus, and Rovio, and the 2022 sale of Sega's Japanese arcades.

• How Nintendo's exclusivity contracts starved the Master System of games in the US while Sega won Europe and Brazil
• Why Genesis does what Nintendon't captured 65 percent of the US 16-bit market by January 1992
• How Nintendo's Howard Lincoln used the Night Trap hearings against Sega on national television
• Why the Saturn could not play 32X games and how that confusion opened the door for Sony's PlayStation
• Former executive Hiroyuki Miyazaki on why fans love Sega as an underdog despite its former dominance