--- kurt.woloch@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> On April 19th, A. Davie wrote:
> Or does anyone know other backgrounds here, why Sega
> didn't make it as big?
> Are their systems maybe harder to program for, or
> are there other reasons
> unknown to the public?
Well, I don't know about Japan, but for America,
here's my reading of things.
1) Nintendo of America had an exclusivity clause in
the contracts of all official third party developers.
Anything made for the NES couldn't appear on another
system for two years. As a result, only a couple of
games like "Double Dragon" made it on both systems.
And with the NES having the lion's share of the
market, developers didn't want to work on the SMS.
You're probably thinking: doesn't the US consider
that an anti-trust violation? Well, they did after a
while. After accusing Nintendo of creating an illegal
monopoly, the judge ruled that they had to make
resitution in the form of rebate coupons to Nintendo
customers. Whoopee. Plus, the exclusivity clause was
gone. The first game to benefit from it, I think, was
the Genesis version of "Batman."
Also, let first couch this by saying this is rumor and
I have absolutely no proof whatsoever this is true. I
was working at a department store just as the Genny
was gaining steam. According to the department
manager and another employee from electronics,
Nintendo of America had representatives say that, if
the store gave shelf space to any other system, like
the Genny or the then-up-and-coming Turbo Grafx 16,
Nintendo would pull its support. Since the NES was
still the big seller, this struck me as extortion.
This is also way none of my Nintendo systems (and only
a few games) were bought brand new from the store.
They were used, and the money went to a person, not
the company. But I digress.
> On the other hand, same could be said for the VCS...
> I think there were also
> gaming consoles at this time which were more
> promising hardware-wise, but
> never reached the VCS's popularity...
It seems the most popular system is never the most
advanced one. The Playstation, if I remember the
specs, finished second to the Sega Saturn at the time,
but...well, you know how that turned out. I am
unaware of the Mac OS having as many bugs as Windows
does. In fact, until the SNES took the crown, I don't
recall it ever happening. The Intellivision was
certainly more advanced than the Atari 2600, but the
VCS still ran rings around them.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send online invitations with Yahoo! Invites.
http://invites.yahoo.com
--
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
