By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Landale_Star on 31 October 2019
Edit Thread
Hiku said:




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEESjUQPhws&feature=youtu.be

At the start of the first commercial, you can hear both "16-Bit" and "Third generation" as examples of things that Ninten 'don't'. Because NES is a second generation 8-Bit system.
Once SNES was released, they instead started talking about 'Blast Processing' as seen in the second commercial.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Sega tried to re-enter the second generation with the Genesis/Mega Drive, and the market just defied them and considered it a direct competitor to SNES instead, despite their efforts to remain a 2nd generation console in direct competition with the NES. (While claiming it's a 3rd generation console in the commercial.)
As far as competition with the NES goes, imo this only occurred because SNES wasn't released yet in the same markets.

Feel free to discuss this, or any console generations for that matter.
I don't expect this topic to go anywhere though.

Aside from the NES already being a 3rd gen console (SNES/Genesis are 4th gen), this commercial clearly isn't using third generation in regard to console generations, it's talking about the "third generation of the hot arcade hit Shinobi".

Sega's intention was probably never to fit into one generation or another, they simply wanted to surpass the current market leader. Although we now have a very clear idea of console generations, it probably wasn't such a defined concept in the late 80s, so it wouldn't do them much good to throw around generation numbers in an ad. Sega had been refining their previous hardware over successive iterations (SG1000, SG1000 II, Mark III etc) The Genesis/Mega Drive was a new concept, based around the System 16 arcade board so I think it's fair to say that Sega saw it as a completely new system. Though it began development under the name Mark V, Sega wanted completely new branding to stand out from their current batch of consoles and computers. Plus, even if the NA launches of Master System and Genesis weren't very far apart, Sega had been selling a variant of Master System hardware in Japan for as long as Nintendo had sold the Famicom, so if we need an arbitrary number of years between consoles, then the Master System was more like a mid-gen refresh than Sega's entry to that generation.

The Mega Drive is a fourth gen console, because that is how we've decided to categorise it, along with SNES, PC Engine and other consoles released roughly 1987-1993.