The key moment in Sega's early
history came in 1952 with the advert pictured to
the bottom. The world was just getting to grips with
the new idea of advertising
slogans and clever marketing, and when Sega's design
team came up with the
classic "They're happy because they play
Sega" campaign, the advertising world
was rocked to it's very foundations, and it took the
company to a whole new level
of public awareness.
However, it wasn't until two years later that Sega
released their first games console
the Sega Game-O-Matic. Of course, technology wasn't
too advanced in 1954,
and the large building-sized console could only play
one game, which was based
upon memorising a sequence of binary integers and
extrapolating the mean
correlation average. Unsurprisingly, with a $12,999
price tag and one
mathematical game, the Game-O-Matic failed to catch
on. Sega stopped
producing the machine in 1956, and went back to their
core fruit machine business.
Undaunted by the failure of their first games
machine, Sega continued with their
development into the new gaming territory, and the
result was the release of the
Game-O-Matic II just in time for the Christmas rush
of 1960. The Game-O-Matic
II was unique in the fact that it had it's own
built-in TV screen, however the two
inch screen was notoriously unreliable, and reports
of radiation sickness and
blindness lead to a swift end to production in 1961,
and Sega went back to their
core fruit machine business.
It wasn't until 1968 that Sega ventured back into the
home gaming market - the
revolutionary Psychadelitron used a complicated
system of flashing lights and
effects to produce a 'drug-free' hallucinogenic
experience. However, after a series
of high-profile test failures, resulting in the need
for several emergency lobotomys
among Sega development staff, the Psychadelitron
never received a public launch.
Unsurprisingly, Sega retreated back into their core
fruit machine business.
Eight years later, and the ever-increasing technology
levels of 1977 meant a new
direction for Sega - the huge data storage potential
of the eight-track tape device
lead to a new machine, the SuperEight, which was
aimed primarily at the
educational market. The basic machine was little more
than a suitcase-sized box
with a slot for inserting the eight-track tape
cartridges, and this was the first Sega
machine that plugged straight into a normal
television. The games were strictly
non-interactive - the educational nature of the
software was more like a stream of
information and figures, with more complicated tites
coming on as many as nine
cartridges. Unfortunately, due to manufacturing
delays, the SuperEight was
released just as the initial excitement surrounding
eight-track technology was
fading, and after 18 months of manufacturing, and
sales of just a few hundred in the
UK, Sega pulled the plug on the SuperEight and
returned to their core fruit
machine business.
1981 saw Sega changing direction once again. This
time a portable pocket-sized
machine called the Game and Go! which was obviously
based on Nintendo's
popular Game 'n' Watch toys. Sega had the innovative
idea of making removable
battery packs which could be recharged whenever
needed (the first ever
rechargable battery), but the chemical used in the
recharging process was linked
to cancer and birth defects, and
shortly after the machine's launch the batteries
were banned by the United Nations Health Council.
Even though Sega countered
the problem by releasing a mains power adaptor, the
damage had been done, and
Nintendo's much-criticised simple but effective 1982
advertising campaign "Sega
gives you cancer" (pictured) put the final nails
into the Game and Go!'s coffin (and
started the Sega/Nintendo rivalry), and Sega returned
to their core fruit machine
business.
