There’s also a similar but different (honest) machine called the TeraDrive that allows you to run PC functions and play Mega Drive games at the same time. Who on earth thought they needed such functionality? Plus, and I’m no historian or nothing, but seeing as the Internet wasn’t invented by Al Gore until 2003, if you had a Sega on the same machine then such once-popular activities such as calculating and processing words would now be obsolete. M’just sayin’. What I’m not just sayin’ was that such devices were actually credible forerunners to gaming PCs and the general adaption of modern machines as media centers and that they deserve more credit than has been afforded them in the paragraphs of this very article. Not sayin’ that at all. Stupid Sega PCs.
Sega also released a portable version of the Mega Drive called Nomad. I would have called it The Mega Boy (the “The” is mandatory) because I am better at names than Sega. Nomad ran the home console’s cartridges right in the back of its big ass self, required six batteries to fuel its reportedly limited play sessions and had no reset button, so completion of certain titles (most notably 1993’s X-Men) was apparently, impossible. Way to go. My hands ache just looking at it. Game Gear it ain’t.
Finally, the most humble member of the Genesis family, the ill-fated Genesis 3. Yes, it’s a beauty, but it had so much gear removed from its hardware that it was sold for, at its lowest, a mere £20. What’s that in American dollars, like, three bucks? A buck fiddy? Remember that £1,000 console I mentioned ages and ages ago? Well this one costs, like, a…hang on, yeah, a fiftieth of that (guess that Mega PC calculator would come in handy after all.)
The thing that baffles me about the Genesis 3 is that it was available until 1998 or so as I recall, which is a full three years after the release of the Playstation, and the same year that Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 2 were released. That they were still selling Mega Drives the year Resident Evil 2 came out says a lot about the console’s popularity, but more still about Sega’s failure to straight up move on to bigger and better things which would damage them in years to come.
A final Mega Fact – the console is so popular in Brazil that new games are still released for it (though obviously not developed by major studios or in any way legally). So, you could be playing brand new (but hideously outdated) games on your Mega PC, TeraDrive, Nomad or Mega Silly SuperContraptor or whatever the shit Sega was thinking all those years if you just moved to Brazil and bought a bunch of crappy machines no-one ever wanted.