♥FH: The Master Base (2019)
When department stores sold videogames
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The poor, overlooked SEGA Master System was the primary competitor to the famed NES, as far as one could consider there even being competition. I remember going to Macy*s as a kid, back when they had an electronics section. The one local to me had two small 13” or so televisions on display side-by-side. One was running the NES, the other the SMS. They were just there and you could pick up and play freely whatever game was in the machine. So I stopped by this Macy*s a few times, playing a variety of games over the course of what was probably just a few months but felt like forever as a kid.
While I wanted and ended up with a NES on the strength of a number of its games and, let’s face it, social proof, I remember a distinct feeling that the SMS was actually the more capable system, graphically (though the NES soundchip was clearly superior). Playing games like Outrun on the SMS while NES had Rad Racer, forced this begrudging acceptance in my mind. It didn’t have the games that I ultimately wanted, but man if it did they could’ve looked amazing.
I learned later that the SMS and its later hardware revisions sold like gangbusters in Brazil, of all places, where it stayed in production through the early 2000’s, amazingly, and also outsold the NES in Europe, the NES being a particularly North American and Japanese phenomenon.
Learning that was fascinating in knowing there was an alternate reality of kids who grew up with this other system in their lives, a foreign concept to my Mario-trained mind.
