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Through the turbulent early ’90s Sega of America underwent a massive transformation that resulted in market dominance. Employees of the company during this time took part in a roller-coaster of a business that rose and crashed almost too fast to comprehend. One person with a front row seat to these events was Scot Bayless, a former Technical Director and producer for SOA.
The march of new technology has managed to breathe new life into our old consoles, enriching our established gaming experiences and adding new ones to what most people consider to be dead machines. Matthias Hullin has undertaken one such project. His Retrode is a device that allows gamers to use their original Genesis and SNES cartridges with a PC emulator.
Capcom’s massive exposure during the early late ’80s and ’90s is the result of the hard work by Capcom’s marketing division, which was run by Sr. Vice President Joe Morici. During his tenure, Street Fighter II exploded onto the scene, Strider took arcades by storm, and a certain blue robot made his debut.
For more than a decade Michael Lubuguin was a part of Electronic Arts as it grew from a small PC publisher into a software powerhouse. He saw its rise and had a hand in creating several classic games for the Genesis, including Road Rash, the Strike series, and Crüe Ball.
Few people have as deep an understanding of what Sega was like during its transitional period of the early ’90s as Steve Hanawa does. An integral part of the U.S. team during the Master System era, he saw the company make the jump to 16-bit and grow into a gaming powerhouse. Sega-16 chatted with him recently about his experiences there.