Which generation does the Genesis belong to? Gen 3 or 4.

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Hiku said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Just to clarify my viewpoint: I consider the Genesis a gen 4 system.  But Sega tried to make it compete directly with the NES.  It failed.  The Genesis sold poorly for the first couple of years, and didn't dent NES sales one bit.  However, the Genesis gave the SNES a serious run for its money.  Sega didn't get to choose which console it competed with.  The market decided.  All of this of course is referring specifically to the North American market.  (Back in those days, the markets for Japan and NA were out of sync and the Genesis/Mega Drive wasn't terribly successful in Japan anyway.)

So Genesis is gen 4, but it tried to be gen 3 (and failed).

I get the 'competing with NES' aspect of what you're saying. But not why that means Sega were trying to have Genesis be a Gen 3 system because of it.

At the time, NES was the only available/appropriate system for them to direct such a campaign ad against in North America.
That's why they went after it with that slogan. Their more appropriate competitor, the SNES, did not exist yet. Or at least not in the US.
Once it did, the Nintendo'nt "16-Bit" and all that wouldn't have the same effect, so they focused on Blast Processing instead.

One big reason to talk about generations is to talk about which consoles are competing with each other.  Genesis was trying to compete with a Gen 3 system.  It was doing so very obviously in it's advertising.

I mean, it's very possible to make a commercial without mentioning your competitor at all.  Game companies do it all the time even to this day.  But in the context of 1989, the NES had an incredible amount of market share.  NES was in fact the most dominant home console of all time.  Genesis wanted some of that market share, so it was trying to compete directly with the NES.  That is why I am saying they were trying to be gen 3 again.  They wanted a second chance to beat the NES.  

In the end though a company does not decide which generation its console is in.  Genesis was gen 4 even if it tried its best to compete directly with a gen 3 console.  This wasn't really obvious until the SNES was launched, but Genesis was really a gen 4 system the whole time whether they wanted it to be or not.