"Sega ran blindfolded into hell after 1993"
Annonymous Urban Dictionary Author

The Sega 32X

The Sega 32X was released in late november of 1994 and retailed for $159.99. With the holiday season in full swing the 32X was a huge hit and sold out in almost every retail sotre.

However disaster soon struck as disaster always does for Sega.

As the holiday came and went many people swamped the stores to return their 32X. Why? Well, first off it was hard to install and many people had great difficulty getting it to work with older TVs and older Genesis versions. For example take a look at this quote I found on the blog of that person who got cussed out by Paulos:

"I got a 32X just so I can play Night Trap for the Sega CD 32X.  Well, it took me a while to put it all together.  First I bought Night Trap Sega CD 32X thinking it had backward compatibility with regular Sega CD.  I thought wrong. Then I bought the 32X system for my Genesis/Sega CD.  Hooking it up was a bitch! There's THREE AC adapters now.  I took me 20 minutes to put those steel thingys into the Genesis's cart slot so that it holds back the doors."

On Christmas morning there aren't many parents who can stand to put up with that kind of difficulty with screaming kids wanting to know when they can actually play their game.

However the true death blow came for the 32X with the release of the Sega Saturn. Sega had originaly stated that the system would be released on "Saturn Day" September 5th, 1995 but they actually jumped the gun and released the system in may. Now Sega had a grand total of SIX game consoles and add ons on the market wich sent a very confusing message to consumers and third party developers alike. Gamers didn't know which system Sega expected them to buy and developers didn't know if they should continue support for the older systems or the newer ones.

To add insult to injury very few of the games available for the system were actually original titles. Most 32X games were simply mildly "upgraded" versions of existing Sega Genesis games. For example look at these two boxes below:

Its almost exactly the same on the inside too.

By the end of 1995 all game production and development for the 32X had stopped with only a meager 34 games released. The Sega 32X is without a doubt Sega's worst failure ever.

The Sega CD

The Sega CD was released in 1992 and as such had much more time to build up a library of games than the 32X did. It eventually reached somewhere around 150 games.

However much like the 32X games very few were actually original titles. Many were simply mildly "upgraded" versions of exisiting Genesis games. Even worse some games actually required you to own both a 32X and a Sega CD in order to play. Luckily there were only a handful of games like this and they were so awful that you would never want to play them anyway.

The greatest insult of all was the $300 price tag. Despite the fact that Sega claimed Genesis add-ons were supposed to be "low cost altertnatives" to buying a new console like the Saturn this huge price tag still disgusted most consumers.

The Sega CD eventually met the same end that the 32X did at the end of 1995 when third party developers ceased to support all of Sega's many many bizzare hardware ideas.