History Lesson: Sega Mega Drive 

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Somehow it seems like only yesterday that, sitting in a Biology lesson, Nintendo fans found themselves doodling Mario engaging in a special kind of plumbing - giving Sonic the Hedgehog a colonoscopy with something resembling a pylon.

That was back in 1991. The Mega Drive had already been out in the UK a year earlier and it could do stuff the ageing NES couldn\'t - pumping out sprites at breakneck speed, until our eyes bulged fit to burst like party balloons. And it made Nintendo fans jealous.

Many of them ended up buying one. It might have had the sophistication of a bag of rattlesnakes, but then that was the point - it was a monster of a console. An angry piece of kit, with its cheap plastic moulded into a permanent frown, it looked completely different from anything seen before. It seemed somehow more serious, less toy-like. And with its volume control and headphone jack at the front, it felt less like a toy and more like a real piece of electrical equipment.

Most importantly, though, it offered some serious firepower. For the first time these were console games that looked and sounded (and even smelled, in the case of Altered Beast) like \'real\' arcade games. A whopping 512-colour palette (only 61 of which could be displayed at any one time, mind you), 64 sprites on screen, and the ability to display the whole lot across four planes of parallax-o-vision.

It eclipsed the technical prowess of the PC Engine and was comparable to the Amiga 500 (the most powerful system at the time, but at almost three times the price) - and Sega was poised to make sure that everyone not only knew it, but were prepared to buy into it. Only in the weird and wonderful world of video games could that possibly translate to a super-fast blue hedgehog. But more about him later.

Even before Sonic, Sega already understood, much like another Japanese company would some eight years later, that gamers fed on a steady diet of Mario and Mega Man were starting to grow up, and would happily eat up any games console that would make them feel like big boys.

Still, NEC\'s PC Engine (renamed TurboGrafx-16 for the States) simply couldn\'t match up. Gamers lapped up Genesis, and although it was some way off Nintendo\'s astronomical NES install base (almost 30 million units at the time), Christmas was all about Sega. All thanks to a range of software that was seen as more \'mature\', somehow cooler.

Of course, they hadn\'t seen anything yet. In 1990 Sega hit marketing stride ("Genesis does what Nintendon\'t" being the most infamous slogan of the time), began to focus on an older, game-hungry audience and exploiting the fact that, with more powerful hardware, they could provide better looking software with unparalleled depth, something that became more convincing when third parties flocked to the console.

Developers, who had already built up a good reputation in the arcades, started to back the machine. Capcom\'s superb Russian-themed slash-\'em-up Strider joined in-house efforts such as Revenge Of Shinobi and Super Monaco GP - and even Disney licences such as Fantasia and Castle Of Illusion arrived to make gamers lick shop windows like zombies at full moon.

The revised Mega Drive 2 (or Genesis 2 as it was known in North America)

None were as important, however, as those games that were produced by Electronic Arts. These games became instrumental in the Mega Drive\'s success, primarily through the superb John Madden Football - and after it, the slew of sports titles that we know and love today. With the Mega Drive\'s cemented position as the home of cutting edge games, Sega went on to sell its first millionth console by the summer of 1990.

They weren\'t exactly home and dry though. Sega was facing intensified competition; a more powerful, graphically capable new Nintendo console in the shape of the SNES, and the ungodly might of Mario. Sega needed something to shoot back with, and as good (not to mention weighty) as it was, Madden simply wasn\'t it.

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