If you’ve got about 20-odd minutes and an interest in the history of video games, you should check out this “Sega Seminar” on the company’s hardware, delivered by Sega executive Hiroyuki Miyazaki. Released as part of the company’s ongoing 60th Anniversary celebrations, the “Sega “Seminar” contains a lot of Sega history trivia, especially the hardware generations of the late 1980’s and Sega’s 1990’s heyday.
The Sega seminar is fully subtitled in English (just turn on closed captions), and contains interesting factoids, including how Sega liked to name its 90s hardware after the planets of the solar system…except when it didn’t. The Game Gear was “Mercury,” and the Super 32X attachment for the Mega Drive was codenamed “Mars” …but the Mega Drive itself wasn’t code-named “Earth.” Instead it was code-named “Mark V” during development. The planetary monikers were applied retroactively as a way of unifying the documentation. And years later, in 2019, the Mega Drive Mini, Sega’s emulator-based retro console, was given the “Moon” code name. Unsurprisingly, the Sega Saturn carried the “Saturn” code name.
Interestingly, the Sega Seminar also mentions was a project seemingly code-named “Pluto,” apparently related to Sega’s exploration of a possible pre-Dreamcast Sega Saturn successor with built-in network connectivity. However, the project never saw the light of day, and Miyazaki was unable to located official documentation to confirm its existence or formal naming as “Pluto”. A fitting fate for a planet that is, at least in the eyes of the International Astronomical Union, not really a planet.
Will this all be on the test? Indeed it will, because aspiring game historians can take the “Sega Test” based on the lecture in January 2021.
Check out the full Sega Seminar on Youtube. Sega also made several free games available as part of its 60th Anniversary celebration. A live concert is set to take place on December 19th, 2020.
