A Day in the Life of a Video Game: A Visit to Sega (Sega Visions - May/June 1992)

What better way to kick off Vault 1541's 10th year than a post about Sega. Unfortunately, the main reason I thought to add more Sega to the blog today was due to the recent news that Sega co-founder David Rosen passed away on Christmas Day at the age of 95. Being a businessman, I don't believe he was involved in game production and is likely the reason that he doesn't appear in my magazine collection, as most of my issues do predate his retirement in 1996. Sega was a big part of my childhood and I still enjoy its games today, so I wanted to post something about Sega in his honor. Some related posts you might also enjoy include the Sega of America ads post, Sega Visions' History of Sega article, and Letters From Sega. This article from the May/June 1992 issue of Sega Visions could actually apply to any company; it's a general overview of how each department contributes to a game's development. However, while it isn't the most interesting piece, it does have a good variety of photos to check out.

UPDATE 2/28/26: Without writing yet another Sega post, I wanted to add that we unfortunately lost another key figure in Sega's history. Two weeks ago, on February 13th, Hideki Sato passed away. Mr. Sato was an engineer and a former company president who joined Sega in 1971, and he helped lead the development of the Master System, Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast.

[YouTube] Golden Axe

https://youtu.be/wMKr5c6VIOA

Released in late 1989 for the Sega Genesis, Golden Axe is a game I played over and over when I got it. It's rare that I try to be perfect at any game which is something I was attempting to do with Golden Axe when I was younger, though based on the scores I wrote in the manual, I never got through the game without dying a few times. Of course, I'm not as good at it anymore either, and in the video I'm using a gamepad rather than an arcade stick which is what I played with exclusively as a kid. The game itself isn't difficult but it's easy to make a mistake that will cost a life, whether it's falling off a ledge (rare) or getting cornered by multiple enemies, especially skeletons, that hack-and-slash the hero from the front and back at the same time. Also, being an arcade port, it's not a very long game and can be completed in 30 minutes or less. While Arcade is the primary mode, in the video I also play the much shorter Beginner mode and the Duel mode, where players can battle the computer in 12 rounds or challenge another player. 

Axe?

When the game ends it provides a score, strength rating, and letter grade. Based on what I wrote in the manual, my best score was 390.6 playing as Gilius Thunderhead and my highest strength rating was 118.3 as Ax Battler. I'm not sure how the scores are determined, though I believe the less magic you use to eliminate enemies, the higher your score will be. Since Gilius has the weakest magic and the strongest weapon with the best reach, it makes sense that players will get their highest scores playing as him. I'd noticed magic's impact on the score when I was recording the Beginner mode play through, as the less I used Tyris Flare's magic, the better my score. That stood out when I had what I thought to be a perfect run but ended up with a much lower score than my previous game in which I thought I played worse. In that perfect run I used the magic often simply because I wanted to show as many spells as I could for the video. Unfortunately, my Genesis started having issues as I finished up the recordings, otherwise I would have gone back through Arcade mode without using magic to see just how high I could score. This game was also a Sega CD pack-in title on the Sega Classics Arcade Collection disc and I own it but I can't test out the scoring there either. As I posted in 2019, my Sega CD also isn't functioning correctly and I don't know how to repair it.

Although the Sega Genesis version is what I'm playing in the video and I've never played the Sega Master System (SMS) version, I am including all the magazine coverage I could find on the game, which wasn't a lot, and there was a little bit more of it for the SMS release. From what I could gather, the primary difference is that the SMS version only supports one player and the only playable character is Ax Battler (referred to as Tarik by GamePro). For the Genesis' Golden Axe, I scanned a review from the December 1989 issue of Game Player's and part of a page from Electronic Gaming Monthly's 1991 Buyer's Guide that has review scores of a bunch of games, including Golden Axe for both the SMS and Genesis. The SMS coverage are scans from GamePro's March 1990 issue and the June/July 1990 issue of Sega Visions. 

Sega Genesis (EGM Scores include SMS)

Sega Master System

Gaming Ads: Backfilling #20 (500th Post!)

Vault 1541 launched nearly eight years ago on January 2, 2017. It began as a way to share video game ads scanned from my magazine collection. Over the years I wrote a quick, or sometimes lengthy, overview of each company responsible for the ads in each post. That included more than 230 companies, as well as separate posts for ads of hardware, retailers, and other game-related things that can be found in photo albums on Facebook and Google Photos. All of the working links can be found under the Game Ad Links tab and while there are links on each ads post, Facebook changed something that broke those links and I've only updated some of them. As you can see with a glance at the above tabs, the blog also has coverage of toys and a YouTube channel that I'm not too active on any longer. Surprisingly, I've made it to 500 posts! Not surprisingly, this 500th post is about video game ads... from Sega, of course! If you've read the blog even a little, you've likely noticed my love of Sega that began when I received a Sega Master System for Christmas in 1987. 

There aren't a lot of ads below since I posted so many already. Most of these are from the comic books I've been scouring this year in search of ads that I wasn't able to get from my game magazines. One ad isn't actually for a game though. It's a contest advertisement for Marvel Comics' 1996 Generation X television movie that has a Virtua Fighter arcade cabinet as the grand prize, which is why the ad is from Sega. If you want to learn more about that movie, I scanned an article from TV Guide that you can find in this "X-Men on Television" post. Also, Happy Thanksgiving!

Tokyo Game Show Fall 99 (Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine - January 2000)

Here is another post that relates to the Dreamcast's 25th anniversary, as well the Tokyo Game Show that is currently in progress and ends on Sunday in Japan. It's the Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine's coverage of the Fall 1999 Tokyo Game Show from the January 2000 issue. I scanned this a while ago on a copying machine because the magazine is oversized but these scans are a bit on the small side, and I'd rather not try to redo them on my scanner. It wouldn't be too bad if not for the orange print on a red background on the second set of pages. That's a poor color combination that makes it difficult to read, though you can easily see the game titles in white.

Dreamcast 25th Anniversary

Five years ago I went all out on Dreamcast coverage for its 20th anniversary in the U.S. and now I don't have a lot leftover that I can post for its 25th anniversary. Of course, it originally launched in 1998 in Japan so today is, again, a U.S. launch anniversary as Sega's final game console debuted here on 9-9-99. I'm going to post a few random scans I didn't use in 2019 and I'll provide links to the 20th anniversary posts below as well. 

From the June 2001 issue of Next Generation magazine is an article about the passing of Isao Okawa. He became president of Sega in 2000 and was the person who made the call to discontinue the Dreamcast, effectively turning Sega into a software-only company. Okawa-san actually wanted Sega to drop hardware before the Saturn launched and helped keep the company afloat using $500 million of his own money. The two other scans are interviews with Peter Moore (then Sega of America president) and Tetsuya Mizuguchi, producer of Space Channel 5 (plus Sega Rally Championship and later Rez).

All the Dreamcast posts from the week of 9-9-19:

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary: NFL 2K

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary: Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine

Gaming Ads: Dreamcast

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary: Press Materials

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary: It's Thinking...

If you're a Dreamcast fan and new to the blog, you might also enjoy this post about Shenmue! Lastly, it's worth noting that Limited Run Games announced a variety of Dreamcast merchandise today and has begun taking pre-orders for Dreamcast trading cards.

E3: The Show That Was (Next Generation #44 - August 1998)

While the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been canceled the past few years, last December the Entertainment Software Association not only announced that E3 would not happen in 2024, but that it was gone for good. Had there been an E3 2024, this would have been the week for it and many game companies are still using this time to hold presentations, as yesterday was the Xbox Showcase and earlier today there was Ubisoft Forward. I've always enjoyed the week of E3 and have written or posted about E3 many times since I started the blog in 2017. I'm not sure if this week will be my final posts in regards to E3 as I've got a stack of E3 show dailies that I could one day scan, and I might do at least something with some of them later this week. In any case, I think I am running out of E3-related magazine articles to scan. This article, appropriately (for 2024 at least) titled, "E3: The Show That Was," is part of Next Generation magazine's "Intelligence" column from issue #44 and it's not 100% E3, though I did scan all nine pages of the section. 

It's always interesting to see if games that made a good showing actually ended up being successful. Next Generation thought the 1998 exhibition had a lot of promising games and not too many disappointments. It viewed Trespasser, a Jurassic Park game, as one of the best of the show but when it came time to review the game, the magazine only gave it two stars out of five. 

A system likely long forgotten by now, there is a page about VM Labs' "Project X" which would not release until 2000 as Nuon. It also isn't exactly a platform per se, instead it is a technology that was incorporated into select DVD players that added game functionality. The company's CEO thought things were going quite well in 1998 with some strong interest from third-party developers. However, only eight games officially released for Nuon. Also, this issue was published a few months before the Dreamcast released in Japan, and there are a couple spots where an unnamed shooter is mentioned, even stating that it could possibly be a pack-in for the console. That shooter, later titled Geist Force, never released.

Nintendo & Sega Seals of Quality

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, below is the third page from the September 1990 issue of Video Games & Computer Entertainment magazine's "Story of a Nintendo Licensee" article. It discusses what Nintendo's Seal of Quality meant and primarily focuses on the financial aspect of it. There are some things in the article that I thought were fact, at least now but perhaps not in 1990. For example, the writer is unsure if Nintendo enforces a quota on the number of annual releases from a publisher. I'm fairly certain Nintendo did which is why Konami created the subsidiary Ultra Software Corporation. It also states that Sega hadn't allowed third-party licensees until recently, however, that had to do with Nintendo having most of the third parties under contract, plus it did have a few third-party publishers on the Master System. Perhaps things were more secretive at the time and the press were unaware of what was going on. 

The second scan, about Sega's Seal of Quality, is from the April/May 1993 issue of Sega Visions. Whereas Nintendo's quality seal revolved around control of the manufacturing and distribution of third-party titles, Sega's seal did actually apply to the quality of a third-party publisher's game. Sega of America had a quality assurance department that played in-development games from other companies and rated them across ten categories, and sometimes a publisher would have to make changes before Sega would approve the games for release. I'd guess Sega wasn't too strict because there are plenty of poor quality games available on Sega platforms. Today Sega doesn't have a seal since it no longer makes consoles while Nintendo eventually dropped the word "quality" from its seal, with game boxes now displaying "Official Nintendo Seal."

X-Men Advertisements

Continuing the X-Men coverage with a post of all ads. Seeing as how the blog began as a game ads project, I decided to put every ad featuring the X-Men I have in one place. Along with video game ads, I've got other product ads, some that also appear on the Vault 1541 Facebook page where I upload various things like food, apparel, and trading card ads. Even if they aren't specifically X-Men ads, I'll include scans of ads with X-Men characters, like Wolverine, too.

Non-Game Products

Video Games