History
Although the Sega Master System was a success in Europe, and later also Brazil, it failed to ignite much interest in the North American or Japanese markets, which, by the mid-to-late 1980s, were both dominated by Nintendo's large market shares. Meanwhile in the arcades, the Sega System 16 had become a success. Hayao Nakayama, Sega's CEO at the time, decided to make its new home system utilize a similar 16-bit architecture. The final design was eventually also used in the Mega-Tech, Mega-Play and System-C arcade machines. Any game made for the Mega Drive hardware could easily be ported to these systems.
During development the hardware was called "Mark V", but Sega CEO Hayao Nakayama officially named it "Mega Drive". The name was said to represent superiority (Mega), and speed (Drive), with the then powerful Motorola 68000 processor in mind. Sega used the name Mega Drive for the Japanese, European, Asian, Australian and Brazilian versions of the console. The North American version went by the name "Sega Genesis" due to a trademark dispute.
Read more about this topic: Sega Genesis
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)