A love letter to Sega.

Sega lost the console wars. They won mine. The SG-1000 came out the same year as the Famicom in 1983 and got buried commercially. Almost everything Sega shipped after that followed the same arc. Outclassed Nintendo on paper. Marketed harder. Made weirder, riskier, more interesting hardware. Lost the bigger war anyway. It's hard not to love a company that kept choosing interesting over safe.

Master System hardware was a generation ahead of the NES. Mega Drive owned the West for half a decade on the back of EA Sports and Sonic. Game Gear was a backlit colour handheld two years before the Game Boy bothered with a backlight. Mega-CD opened the door to FMV. 32X was a beautiful disaster. Saturn was a 2D god and a 3D casualty. Dreamcast shipped with a modem in 1998 and a library most consoles would kill for. Then Sega left the hardware business and the world got duller.

This site is where the receipts live. Every cart, every box, every condition note. The Pico isn't even hardware Sega made, but Sega's name is on it, so it's here. Cult-only, Brazil-exclusive Tectoy variants? Here. Nomad batteries that lasted four hours? Here.

How I got here

My first console was the Master System II. By the time I got one (for a birthday/Christmas combo, the way only kids with a December birthday understand) the hardware was already cheap, already past its prime, already getting buried by the 16-bit generation. Didn't matter. It came with the Sonic the Hedgehog box with Alex Kidd in Miracle World built into the BIOS, and that was the whole world. Press the reset button with no cart in, get Alex Kidd. Janken. Octopus. The haunted house. I still think about that ROM more than is reasonable.

Sonic was the patron saint. Mum made me a Sonic cake once: blue icing, those weird eyes you only get when a parent is freehanding a cartoon character at midnight. I have no idea what happened to the photo, but the cake is still in my head.

Then there was Sega World Sydney, at Darling Harbour. Indoor theme park, Sega-branded everything, Rail Chase 2 cabinets the size of small cars. As a kid it felt like Sega had built a whole building just to prove a point. It closed in 2000. I'd give a lot to walk through it one more time.

The closest I've come is Joypolis in Daiba, Tokyo. Sega's still-standing flagship arcade, on the waterfront, three floors of attractions you can't experience anywhere else on earth. I've been more than once. I'll keep going back. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a pilgrimage site.