http://retro.ign.com/articles/974/974695p1.html

A great read. I never knew some of that info., such as why EA never worked on the Dreamcast, or Sega's chance to work with Sony, or  Sega's own DS, or...well, just read it.

I have read their history a millions times it's the same thing

Well some of it is new to me...

ill check it out

No way. I got to the bottom of the first page, saw that there were 11 pages total, and said "screw it".

I'm not reading through all of that.

Anyone care to post the interesting highlights?

Stuff that was new to me:

American head of R&D Joe Miller recognized the problem right away, and went to Tom Kalinske. Although SEGA of America generally stayed out of hardware, they needed to give Japan a good alternative, and they did just that. Kalinske recalls the first effort to steer away from the Saturn:

"We went down the road to Silicon Graphics and met with [SGI founder] Jim Clark. They had bought MIPS Technologies, and they were developing a chipset for use in a game machine. We liked it, so we called up the Japanese guys to come take a look at it. The hardware guys came over, and they really pooh-poohed the whole effort. The chip was too big; there would be too much waste; lots of objections from a technical standpoint. It was upsetting to us, because we thought it was better in terms of speed, graphics, and audio.

"So after we had this meeting, I had to report back to Jim Clark, who was then Chairman of Silicon Graphics and tell him that SEGA wasn't going to be buying, and he asked, 'Well, what should I do now?' and I said, 'Well, there's this other game company up in the Seattle area. I think their name starts with an N.' And of course, he did. He went up there and sold it to them, and that, of course, became the foundation for the Nintendo 64." -- Tom Kalinske

Kalinske was not yet defeated. He still had plenty of connections, not the least of which was Sony. SEGA had a good relationship with them, having worked together on the SEGA CD, and SEGA had helped them to get their feet wet in the software business. Sony had been working on a deal with Nintendo that had had recently fallen through and were interested in continuing their work on a game console. Kalinske tells of the Sony deal:

"We got together with [Sony] and defined what we'd like to see in our next hardware. We had this great idea that it should be a joint SEGA-Sony hardware system. If we had to take a loss on the hardware (which was the norm then), we'd split the loss on the hardware, but we wouldn't split software, so any software they did, they'd get 100% of the profits, and any software we did, we'd get 100% of the profits. It seemed like a fair deal since we were eons ahead of them in terms of software development.

"So we go to Japan, and Sony management liked the idea. Then we went to SEGA, and Nakayama hated the idea. [laughs] So that was the end of that, and the rest is history once again. Those were the specs that became the PlayStation." -- Tom Kalinske

That's right, SEGA had an opportunity to grab up both of the systems that would later be their undoing, but were denied both times by SEGA of Japan. Nakayama was a notoriously stern boss, abusing his executives verbally and even physically. He admired the success of the American branch, but that admiration may have made the American branch seem like the favorite son to many at SEGA of Japan, and doing things their way was a point of pride. "There were some guys in the executive suites who really didn't like that Nakayama in particular appeared to favor the US executives," Kalinske speculates. "A lot of the Japanese executives were maybe a little jealous, and I think some of that played into the decisions that were made."

Few people know about it, but there was also another system being worked on at the time. SEGA had taken a sizable chunk out of the Game Boy's market share, and with the green-screened handheld experiencing a lull (long before Pok?mon arrived to save it), SEGA had a golden opportunity to strike with a new handheld of their own. According to Kalinske, the system would have packed 16-bit graphics, a very high quality, higher resolution screen, and a touch-screen interface – years before the Nintendo DS, or even the Tiger Game.com. Unfortunately, the spec was a dream at best. The system would have been prohibitively expensive – $289 by Kalinske's recollection. SEGA chose to shelve the idea, leaving the Nomad -- a handheld version of the Genesis – as the Game Gear's only successor.