A few days ago, a news item attracted a lot of attention, sega was forced to sell the arcade hall in Akihabara Electric Street, Japan, which was forced to sell, and completed the replacement of the logo "GIGO" of the new company. This news landed on Twitter's hot search, triggering a more sad sigh of Japanese netizens, who said that their childhood memories were missing one less.
From the giants of the host industry in the early years to the "broken arm to survive" to sell its industries, Sega has gradually fallen lonely, and the reason for this is not only because of the epidemic factors that are visible to the naked eye, but also those "riot operations" in his early years are also worth mentioning...
An era of arcades
Sega's origins can be traced back to Service Game, a company founded in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1940 (sega abbreviation from which it is derived). In 1951, Service Game moved to Tokyo, Japan, to develop and distribute coin-operated jukeboxes, game consoles, and slot machines.
Vintage slot machines
In 1965, Sega launched the arcade game Periscope, which was a huge hit in the market. At that time, arcade games were not the electronic games we see now, but more like "mechanical toys" like doll machines. Sega's first arcade video game was 1973's Pong-Tron, a model of Pong, developed by Atari in 1972, which is considered to be the first arcade video game in video game history.
pong-tron (left) pong (right)
By the 1980s and 1990s, Sega's arcade video games were at their peak. According to the financial report at the time, Sega's annual revenue climbed to $200 million. The classic arcade "Iron Fist of Fury" that we are familiar with also originated from this time period. The "Iron Fist of Fury" that we played in the game hall should be the third part, and we can run and sprint out of the ShengLong Fist. This game can be said to be the pinnacle of the MD platform's mid-level version of the game.
"Arcade" is a very emotional word for post-80s and post-90s players. The dim and narrow arcade hall, the noisy tapping of buttons, and the familiar game footage are all in the memory. I still remember when I was a child, the cheap hall was seven coins a dollar, and the expensive one was 5 coins, and when I ran from the east of the city to the west of the city in order to play the game, I was robbed when I was unlucky, "Children, do you have coins (steel hammers, hammers), all pulled out." , once the partnership beat up the little who snatched the coins, the guy called the black pressure to suppress a large number of people... It's a lot more exciting than the game. Now that I think about it, it is still very clear, funny, and may be red in the face when I say it (I was caught and beaten home) "The people and things in the arcade hall" is a very special paragraph in my memory.
However, with the popularity of computers and the popularity of online games, it is difficult to see the traditional "game hall" anymore.
The classic Dinosaur Kombat. Later, Sega also produced a copy of "Cadillac and Dinosaurs 2"
Back to the point, the "golden age" of arcade in the late 70s and early 90s (a little later on the mainland) brought about a wave of video games, in which legendary game products such as "Space Invaders" and "Street Fighter" were born that represented the four words of "video games". Sega has taken advantage of the tide to become one of the most profitable game manufacturers, and as an emerging industry giant, it will certainly not stop here, and then Sega has set its sights on the business of home game consoles.
The mainframe battle and Sega were defeated
In 1983, Sega released the first home console, the SG-1000 console.
The experimental home console sold hundreds of thousands of units as soon as it was released, far exceeding Sega's expectations. However, as an old rival of the arcade era, Nintendo has obviously also discovered the market for home game consoles, and in July of the same year, Nintendo also launched its own home console , family computer or FC.
fc Super Marie
Compared with Sega's water test product SG-1000, the design of FC is more user-friendly and excellent in all aspects, and in just one year, FC has sold millions of units. And later when it was introduced to the American market, it was changed to a red and white tone that was more in line with the aesthetics of Americans at that time, that is, the "red and white machine" that we are familiar with.
The success of the test and the huge market proved next door made Sega decide to invest more in the development of the main engine. In 1988, Sega's MEGA DRIVE was released, when home games generally used 8-bit processors, and Sega's MEGA DRIVE can be said to be the world's first 16-bit processor home console with cross-era significance, and its game graphics can already be close to arcade games at that time.
MEGA DRIVE
The game "Tanglewood", which was specially produced for the old console in 18 years, is not outdated in the picture now
Once this console was released, it quickly caused a hot discussion around the world, and many foreign players also realized the capabilities of SEGA through this console. The console is also listed in the United States alongside Nike and Levi's as the most popular brand among young people.
After the popularity of Sega game consoles, our old friend Sony found them, and Sony said that he only wanted to honestly develop his disc business, hoping to add an optical drive accessory called "Playstation" to the Sega console. Sega did not want to cooperate, worried that the optical drive accessories would affect the price of their cassettes and rejected Sony (Nintendo also rejected Sony: ）。 This made Sony decide to develop its own game console, which later became playstation.
Before the wolf and the tiger, Sega fought a console war with Nintendo and Sony, from price to quality. The poor sales of sega Saturn, the new generation of hosts, have put Sega under pressure. They then made a lot of efforts to develop Dreamcast, but paid too much attention to console development and ignored the audience of the game console, when Japanese RPGs were still the mainstream games in Japan, and there were no Japanese RPGs on the DC console that could be competitive enough. The 3D action game "Shenmue", which wants to please European and American players, has a mediocre response, and the DC console has not sold a good result. More seriously, The development cost of Shenmue's 2 billion yen plus the cost of publicity of 200 million US dollars has left Sega saddled with high debt.
Sonic, designed to compete with Nintendo's arch-character Mario, has also been tepid. After the two highly anticipated consoles of Saturn and DreamCast suffered consecutive sales failures, Sega gradually became unsustainable in the 2000s, and the appearance of the PS2 completely cut off its hopes of turning around in the home console field, officially announcing the suspension of console production and sales in early 2001, and continued to exist as a third-party software vendor (but still retained the arcade operation).
"Japanese games are not japanese" outrageous Sega
The commercial failure made Sega a bit hesitant and made a lot of unknown operations. Shenmue 2, which took great efforts to develop, did not give priority to the release of its own game console DC, but chose to debut on Microsoft's XBOX console. This annoyed DC players all over the United States, and they boycotted it, resulting in the Xbox version of Shenmue 2 only selling more than 2,000 copies...
The confusion of the company's operation and decision-making has led to rumors, and a major example of the "infighting in the company" is that Dr. Koshi Ogawa, the former chairman of Sega, who has always supported the home appliance project, donated almost all of his family property to Sega DC before his death. As a result, as soon as he died, Sega announced that he would abandon DC, and the home appliance department was collectively forced to resign.
85 billion yen was donated, or about $500 million, in 2001
There is also a matter that was complained about by Japanese netizens, when Sega released Shogun 2 in the international market, it was actually released without Japanese, can you understand that a game full of Japanese culture does not have Japanese? Although customarily, most people think of the All War Series as CA and not SEGA, this wave of operations is still outrageous. Replaced by the domestic environment, this is the pig factory goose factory agent a strong Chinese style game such as "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" or "Immortal Sword", for domestic players to issue TMD actually did not Chinese...
Shogun 2
Scene substitution I can't hold back, a little backbone to ask the studio to add a Chinese (Japanese) should not be a difficult thing, it is really not OK, you yourself find someone to do a localization translation is also worthy of domestic players...
Square Enix, which also has serious internal problems, is obviously better than Sega in game localization, SE's national localization is in place, FF14's Korean and Chinese clothes can survive independently under the suppression of local games; FF14's European and American popularity remains high, which is the result of SE's emphasis on localization (I should say it is because of Tifa).
The financial report released in February 2015 shows that the company's performance in all aspects has fallen sharply, and it has reached the brink of crisis.
Restless status quo
In the face of the company's crisis, Sega finally came back and formulated a drastic restructuring plan, and on April 1, 2015, it established a wholly-owned subsidiary "Sega Games" to integrate its game business and propose to further strengthen investment in related works.
In fact, Sega's performance is not bad, the sales of "Persona 5" launched in 2016 exceeded 3.2 million sets, the quality of the game is superior, the word of mouth is also broken, and the big sales of peripheral animations and handmade have also made Sega return a lot of blood.
Looking like it was time to regroup, "Like Dragon 7" and "True Goddess Rebirth" were also scheduled to be done step by step, as if life was back on track, just as fans expected. But in a few years, the idle Sega came out to do things again, first of all, in 2020 to engage in the "shock industry" fog game, said tall to change the industry, the result is actually to use the idle computing power of the arcade machine to "dig and mine", but with the current configuration of the arcade, this road is obviously not feasible...
In 2021, looking at the blockchain is hot again, want to enter the blockchain field, how to say it, but anyone who has a little relationship with the game can see Sega's busy figure...
Every once in a while there was news of Sega XX, which made me a little numb. In fact, there have been many new games from Sega in recent years, including many hardcore works with good reviews such as "Goddess Rebirth 5", but the popularity of these works often does not last for a few days, but Fan Sega puts the strength to "shock the industry" on this game.
In any case, the game company ultimately needs to rely on its own game quality to win the hearts of players, since it was decided early to cut off the hardware host to do a software development company, then do not be half-hearted to engage in some "riot operations", Sega may not need some new eye-catching ways, he has so many original IP, classic game series, good polishing may not be the next "Zelda Wild Breath" it.