5 HUGELY Important Video Game Consoles (You Haven't Heard Of)

The video game crash of 1983 appeared to be the death of gaming in North America. Oversaturation of the market led to being flooded with low quality releases, most infamously the adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s ET that ended up in a New Mexico landfill. Believing games to be a fad that were over, retailers refused to touch them for several years and with the exception of Atari, no American company that had entered the market before the crash remained within it.

The centre of the market switched to Japan, where two manufacturers released new consoles on the same day in 1983 to contest the dominance of arcades. Nintendo’s NES would make its way stateside three years later, with the company taking a number of precautions, such as restrictive licensing agreements, to avoid repeating their predecessors mistakes. Sega’s SG-1000 would not, remaining Japan exclusive and struggling against Nintendo’s juggernaut, which went from strength to strength and revived gaming in America.

Sega switched focus to the Master System, which sold well in Europe, before they became a major player in America with the Genesis/Mega Drive, which beat the SNES to market by two years in 1988 and captured a large player base as a result.

The company were synonymous with gaming from that point until the discontinuation of the Dreamcast, owing this success to being patient and learning from the mistakes of the SG-1000, which few would be able to cite as their first foray into the market.