Electronics: PlayStation 1 & Sega Consoles

This will be our last blog about 90’s electronics, and today we will talk about the PlayStation 1 from Sony and the Mega Drive & Dreamcast from Sega.

The PlayStation1 (PS1) was designed by Sony in Japan and was released in Europe in 1995. Almost every console of the PlayStation series has three different versions; an Asian, Northern-American and European version, this is because there are also different television outputs in these different parts of the world. The PlayStation was the product of a failed collaboration between Sony and Nintendo; they initially agreed to make a cd add-on for the SNES but Nintendo ended this agreement because Sony would have all the rights to the games that would be on this cd, and that would not be profitable for Nintendo. Because the development of this add-on was in such an advanced stage, Sony turned to Phillips and they created the cd-i, which is placed in the PS1. The PlayStation dominated the 32-bit and 64-bit era, this was partly because the cd’s for the PS1 were relatively cheap and it was fairly easy to play illegal copies on it. The PlayStation 1 had a market share of 70,4% (in comparison: Nintendo had 22,7%). 

 

Sega released the Mega Drive in Europe in 1990 (In America it was called the Sega Genesis). The Mega Drive wasn’t very popular in homeland Japan, but it was very well received in America and Europe. The Mega Drive was technically better developed than then the NES, which give Sega a head start to Nintendo at the time. Sega released some add-ons and new consoles like the Sega-Mega CD, Sega X32 and the Sega Saturn, but when Nintendo released the SNES, the popularity of Sega and the Mega Drive dropped quickly.

Let’s see what the Angry Video Game Nerd has to say about a Mega Drive game:

The last console Sega released was the Dreamcast (1999 in Europe). The Dreamcast was one of the first consoles that allowed users to play online on SegaNet (America) and Dream Arena (Europe). The Dreamcast wasn’t very popular because similar consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo that released in the next decade had better features. This meant the end for the Sega consoles, and in 2001 they announced that they would retreat from the hardware market.

This concludes our week about electronics! We hoped you have enjoyed it and next week we will talk about Pokémon and everything that is related to it!