The online gaming community is breaking out the party hats again, this time for the twentieth anniversary of the Sega Genesis arriving in North America (you may remember that we hit a similar milestone for the console's Japanese counterpart, the Sega Mega Drive, back in February). Ordinarily this is where I'd write a long personal essay about growing up with the console, but as I was a Nintendo fanatic as a kid, I really don't have much to say about it. I'm not one to send you away empty-handed though, so allow me to direct you to David Oxford over at Poison Mushroom where he's written a long personal essay about, well, you know.
I managed to get a second-model SEGA Genesis from Toys R Us with my own money, after I had begun working and driving. I think the price was around $100-120, but it came with a six-button Genesis controller, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and Sonic & Knuckles. Slightly disappointing was the lack of cases for those two games, a practice I had long appreciated and wished Nintendo took part in (and still do. The wimpy Wii Sports sleeve just doesn’t do it for me).
I still have that Genesis and those games in fact, plus one or two others, including Wolf’s old Sonic the Hedgehog 2, complete with case (but no booklet). In fact, I had to get Wolf to get all the Chaos Emeralds for me, because to this day, I still cannot get more than one or two of them at best. It will be a sad day when those batteries go, because I will definitely be screwed. And such a shame, too; I love the Doomsday Zone in Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
My Genesis experience was limited to whatever a friend of mine would rent back in high school, and he didn't rent games very often (and when he did, they were usually RPGs) and he only had a single controller, so we spent most of our time with my Super NES library of multiplayer action games which required my two controllers. I'm up to speed now on the best that the Genesis has to offer thanks to compilations for modern consoles and the Virtual Console's selection, thankfully.
