Having only seen games on the computer, game boy, game gear and NES before as child it was breathtaking when I could play the Mega Drive for the first time and see Sonic run across the screen. The colors, music and especially the thrill from how fast things were moving around were incredible.
I don't think any console generation after that left a comparable kind of impression on me as turning the Mega Drive on for the first time (might be a side-effect of my age at the time though).
I consider myself a Sega fan, even if my first and only Sega console was a Dreamcast. However, I never liked Sonic. Too fast. It seemed to me like there was little control on what you did on the screen. Maybe I was too slow for it? Shamelessly I preferred the mechanics of Mario.
EDIT: my mistake, I also owned a Game Gear, if only for a couple of months and then I had to sell it.
the problem gameplaywise for sonic has always been (especially compared to Mario) that it's not geared towards new players. For people who are unfamiliar with its gameplay it simply sucks because it feels quite clunky, the jump-mechanic is not very fun nor exact when going slow. Additionally, you can't go fast because it's nearly impossible to react fast enough if you don't know the levels; this means it's a game for people who like to memorize the levels. For those people who know the levels in-and-out it's a very different game as the speed to crash through the levels makes it that much more fun (not that i ever came that close, i rather played mario).
I always found it strange how the second zone of sonic 1 suddenly threw up lots of things blocking your path and having to wait for blocks to slowly move into position.
Absolutely. The marketing, the irreverence, even the way they announced "SE-GAAA!" all made (for me) the Genesis supremely cool, and the Nintendo supremely lame.
I think you'd like that Netflix retro gaming documentary. I think it's called 'High Score'. They go into details about the Nintendo & Sega marketing campaigns.
Sadly, it's sold out - all of their books are top notch, i own a few and don't regret getting any of them (unlike other Kickstarter ones from France (not naming names...)).
"Sonic" was the first holy-shit game for me. (I'm 38.) It blew away any console game I had seen to date. It was truly amazing: the speed, the irreverence, the colors, the music.
Genesis spoke to me as a gamer in a way that NES and eventually SNES couldn't: I didn't care about strategy games or long adventures, so Genesis' hardware decisions were right up my alley. I liked NBA Jam, not Zelda.
Another really amazing piece of tech that I think goes underdiscussed is Sega Channel, which was both awesome and way ahead of it's time.
The section talking about the first commercial doesn't seem right to me. By September 1990 the system had been out in America for over a year. And there were quite a few earlier commercials that did not have the "Genesis does what Nintendon't" slogan.
SEGA lost the chance to dominate the home console market by the simple fact that Megadrive did not have sprite scaling and rotation.
This fact meant subpar coinop conversions for SEGA'a flagship games like Outrun and Powerdrift.
Not that the Megadrive didn't do well. It did, but it could have dominated the console market if it could do a decent version of those pseudo-3d games.
I don't think any console generation after that left a comparable kind of impression on me as turning the Mega Drive on for the first time (might be a side-effect of my age at the time though).