SEGA

Long, long ago, in a time before time (that is, the 1980's), a terrible and brutal war began. It was a war which would pit brother against brother, kid against adult, Sonic against Mario, and the United States against Japan (again). I speak, of course, of no war more terrible than the CONSOLE WARS.  
 
By far and away, the most devious villain of the Console Wars was the sprawling international corporation known commonly as SEGA. From humble beginnings as the pet project of an American entrepreneur selling pinball machines to military bases, the company originally known as Service Games began stamping the acronym SE GA on the side of their machines, beginning the crusade for a seemingly meaningless word to eventually terrorize children, adults, internet discussion forums and the entire gaming industry with a campaign of lies, deceit and sub-par products the likes of which the world has never before seen. 

It is easy to try to root for SEGA as the "underdog" given their many and drastic failures throughout almost every stage of the Console Wars. In fact, that is almost surely the story you will hear from the tiny minority of Sega fanboys who survived the brutal conflicts of those wars. But losing the wars alone is not reason enough to consider SEGA an underdog, and no such form of Moral License fallacy would justify the vicious stream of lies the company unleashed upon the world, even upon their own devotees. As the facts I present this day shall show, SEGA was no underdog at all. SEGA was a traitorous and conniving liar of the most epic proportions.  
Or, as one former video game store owner described it...
 

 -Gord, Acts of Gord
 
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The SEGA Master System

As SEGA's first worldwide console, some of the most elder SEGA fanboys will still hearken back to this ancient system as one of the great 'Golden Ages' of SEGA. In reality, this is little more than a misconception caused by the bias of nostalgia and wishful childhood memories.
 
In fact, SEGA hadn't even come into their full stride yet at this time. The various versions of the Atari home consoles were still strong, but Nintendo widely dominated the market with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Virtually all the major third-party developers had exclusivity contracts with either Nintendo or Atari, leaving little for SEGA to work with. Their mascot at this time wasn't even Sonic the Hedgehog yet, but rather a forgettable character called Alex Kidd. 
 
One recent evaluation of the games on the Master System put it this way;
 

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The SEGA Genesis & The "Blast Processing" Hoax
 
SEGA launched the Genesis two years earlier than their competitors over at Nintendo could get the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) out the door. Those two years were critical for SEGA, giving them a powerful foothold in the market that they never had before, and would never enjoy again after this. The vast majority of die hard SEGA fanboys will cite this brief era as the true ‘Golden Age’ for SEGA, as they sat atop the throne of the gaming industry. But of course, it wouldn't last long, as Nintendo wouldn't remain complacent forever. 
 
Seeing the SNES upon the horizon, and recognizing it as their doom, SEGA devised a vile and evil scheme to blatantly lie to the public at large about the capabilities of their console versus the capabilities of their competitor. They gave this hoax the term "Blast Processing" and began an aggressive advertising campaign in which they swore that "SEGA does what Nintendon't!" SEGA claimed that 'Blast Processing' made the SEGA Genesis faster and more powerful than any other piece of technology without 'Blast Processing' could ever hope to be. Commercials for the Genesis heavily focused on this mythical speed, showcasing the new mascot Sonic the Hedgehog and his central theme of running fast. With Sega's strong popularity during this age, their throngs of adoring fans ate up this claim and even regularly repeated it for many years thereafter, insisting that 'Blast Processing' was the secret to SEGA's success. 
 
In reality, 'Blast Processing' never existed. It was a flat out lie, based on an exaggeration of a hypothetical capability the console may have had but which wouldn't have worked in many cases and was never actually used in a single SEGA game. The former SEGA employee who accidentally 'invented' this term (by making an unintentional comment to SEGA's marketing department) has even officially apologized!
 
In spite of SEGA's lie and the short-lived popularity of the Genesis, the SNES is still widely regarded as the "winner" of the Console Wars during this era. The SNES not only sold more units, but the games are vastly more memorable with titles that are still sought after even to this day, such as the Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, as well as in-house Nintendo games like the Super Mario series, Donkey Kong series and early Star Fox games. 
 
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The 32X & SEGA CD
 
As a user of the website Urban Dictionary put it, "Sega ran blindfolded into Hell after 1993." That process began with the short-lived and poorly conceived add-ons for the Genesis; 32X & SEGA CD. 
 
The 32X had a measly 40 games in total, of which six of them required both a 32X and a SEGA CD in order to be played. The majority of these games were simply rebranded versions of games that were already available on the Genesis or other platforms. One critic stated that the 32X "tainted just about everything it touched."

The SEGA CD had a slightly larger library of games and received a slightly better reception, yet both of these add-ons suffered from the same critical flaw; Neither add-on was expected to be capable of competing against the next generation of consoles, which were already known to be in development and nearing release within the next few years. Few developers wanted to risk wasting resources to develop games for a platform which was going to be unable to compete, making it difficult for SEGA to convince anyone to make games for these add-ons. Critics widely panned SEGA's decision to release these add-ons, pointing out that they were dividing their own market, confusing both third-party developers and consumers.
 
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The SEGA Game Gear & SEGA Nomad

During the same time period SEGA was still pushing the Genesis, 32X and SEGA CD (while still hyping the future release of the Saturn), SEGA further sabotaged themselves by making multiple ill-fated attempts to overtake Nintendo's iron grip on the handheld gaming market. This took the form of not just one handheld held system, but two of them at once; Game Gear and Nomad.  
Although both of these systems boasted color graphics and other supposedly "innovative" ideas, both were also widely panned by critics for their bulky shape, high battery usage and lackluster library of games. Both of these systems collapsed before the simplistic black & white Nintendo Game Boy, joining their kin in the graveyard of failed SEGA hardware. 

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SEGA Saturn

While the Saturn certainly wasn't a bright idea even on it's own, it's true destruction was at the hands of SEGA themselves and their own blunders in launching and marketing the system on the belief that they needed to beat their competitors to the marketplace with an early launch. SEGA had learned this strategy from those critical two years when the Genesis was unopposed before the SNES was released. Putting their faith in the idea that an early launch equals success, SEGA tried a bold but ultimately stupid strategy...

At the 1995 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Sega made the dramatic announcement that they were releasing the Saturn four months earlier than expected. But Sony counter-attacked even before the end of the Expo, when their entire press conference consisted merely of a single man briefly walking up to the lectern, announcing a price reduction for the upcoming Sony Playstation and walking away as the crowd went wild.

The Saturn died that very day. The Saturn launch was an unmitigated disaster because Sega wasn't ready for it. Meanwhile, the Playstation already had tremendous hype and hordes of adoring fans, who upon learning that the system was getting a drastic price reduction were glad to pass over the Saturn to wait for Playstation. The Playstation is widely regarded as the hands-down winner of this era of the Console Wars.

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SEGA Dreamcast

The Console Wars turned dark and bitter after this time, particularly for SEGA fans. Previously there had always been a presumed "balance" between SEGA and Nintendo, even if SEGA's success had been based on a lie. But with the repeated failures of the 32X, SEGA CD, Nomad and Game Gear, followed closely by the udder destruction of the Saturn at the hands of the newly minted Playstation, SEGA fans rapidly became jaded and hateful toward the new arrival. Nintendo fans weren't much happier, as the late arrival of the N64 seemed more of a footnote in the grand history of Sony's new dominance over the gaming industry. 

But SEGA announced the development of the Dreamcast anyway. Gaming missionaries of SEGA carried news of this new messiah out across the internet. Terrifying threats of the imminent return of 'Blast Processing' were issued and Sony fans (as well as those of us intelligent enough to prefer desktop PC games) were told to bow down to the master now, or face certain destruction at the hands of the coming onslaught. These messages were often met with the internet equivalent of an angry mob with torches and pitchforks, yet SEGA fanboys stood defiant against the majority opinion that their time had passed away. In these days some of the most vicious battles of the Console Wars were fought, tearing internet message boards and small websites asunder as combatants ripped into each other.
 
On September 9th, 1999 (9.9.99) "Dreamcast Day" arrived. Only a few months into the launch of the system, rumors already began to circulate that SEGA was considering abandoning the system and getting out of the hardware business entirely. On January 31, 2001, Sega announced that was exactly what they were going to do, and production of the Dreamcast would end immediately. Once again, Sega lost the Console Wars and Playstation 2 was declared the victor of this era.

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The "Beta-7" Hoax
 
But lo, though the inevitable defeat of Sega was already nigh, they still had one more vile deception to unleash upon the masses before the Dreamcast would go to it's grave. 
 
Having recently purchased a small game developer called Visual Concepts to use as an in-house development studio for sports titles, SEGA also hired an advertising firm called Wieden Kennedy to create a viral advertising hoax to promote an upcoming football game against the monolithic force of the Madden football series. 
 
Wieden Kennedy created Beta-7.
 
The entire saga of this dastardly hoax is too long to fully retell here, but suffice to say that an anonymous blog was set up to promote the idea that SEGA video games included secret subliminal messages which could force an unsuspecting victim to transform into a psychotic football player who would tackle (and possibly vomit on) their friends and loved ones. Small humorous videos of people being tackled in unlikely situations were used to promote this blog and the outrageous claims it made, while seemingly hostile opponents of the blog were also set into motion as additional false flags to cause further confusion. The blog was eventually taken down in an unceremonious fashion, while SEGA publicly denied all knowledge of the incident. 
 
The actual goal of this hoax remains unclear even to this day, as it was neither terribly competent as a form of advertisement, nor did it succeed in convincing anyone to purchase the game. Few people who saw the tackle videos even knew what game was meant to be promoted by the videos.
 
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Sonic the Hedgehog; The 6th Worst Thing to Happen to the Internet!

 
Sega Sammy Holding Co. Era
 
At the end of it’s lifetime, SEGA was finally sold to a Japanese gambling company with limited experience in the video game market called Sammy. The new Sega Sammy Holding Company continued to release video games under the SEGA branding, yet the company receives the majority of it’s income from the gambling business. The final survivors of the deadly Console Wars greatly lamented this turn of events as Sammy was widely considered to be even more unethical than Sega themselves had been, and was even rumored to have connections to the Japanese criminal underworld. In 2015, a Yakuza-linked shooting took place at the home of the Sega/Sammy CEO.
 
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Summary
 

First of all I am not saying that it is the best company it is a good company and with ad aslike these https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=65KFGzgSiQo they need to exist look I don’t stand a chance against him or her but I like SEGA so I will try. If they were so bad then they would have lost the consel wars early on but I do like Nintendo more than sega so I will ignore Nintendo for the debate and most of there games are fun and enjoyable like sonic 2 sonic and more plus the games are amazingly in depth and not too bad. 

I see a few problems with this claim.

Firstly, the actual existence of SEGA isn't really in dispute here. Most of my argument rests upon the historical fact that SEGA does exist and that their behavior throughout their history has been poor. I'm not trying to negate their existence, but demonstrate that they are a bad company.

Secondly, I'm not sure what the advertisement has to do with it. Is my opponent implying that the advertisement is inherently positive and thus justifies the necessity of SEGA? That would be like saying that OxiClean needs to exist because people liked Billy Mays. I'm sure that qualifies as some kind of logical fallacy, but I can't even wrap my head around which one at the moment.

Lastly, this really doesn't address my earlier points about SEGA's advertising frequently being dishonest, such as their blatant lie about 'Blast Processing' or the seemingly counter-productive Beta-7 hoax. 

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As a matter of fact, SEGA did lose the Console Wars at almost every stage in which they were considered a competitor, as I showed with my opening arguments. 

The SEGA Master System lost to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) quite badly and is generally remembered with disdain.

The SEGA Genesis was SEGA's most successful console, but still sold fewer units than the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). In addition, the games on the SNES are commonly remembered more favorably than those on the Genesis, as I pointed out in my opening arguments. On top of that, my opponent himself said that he feels Nintendo won the console wars, further implying that SEGA lost during this era despite the popularity of the Genesis. 

Saturn was destroyed on the very day it launched, as I cited in my opening arguments. 

And Dreamcast lasted only slightly more than a year before SEGA gave up the ghost. 

So SEGA lost every era of the Console Wars from the very beginning. The fact that they stubbornly refused to give up and continued to launch poorly conceived systems is actually one of my arguments against them. As one of the sources from my opening arguments points out, numerous high-ranking SEGA executives were of the opinion that SEGA never should have entered the hardware market and should have quit a lot sooner than they did. By continuing to fight these losing battles, they only further doomed their company by digging themselves into debt. 

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This is the main thrust of the Pro-SEGA argument which I commonly hear. Naturally, I've heard this point many times before and I've provided a rebuttal of it many times before. 

The first problem with this assertion is that it is a Moral License fallacy in the sense that it argues we can ignore all of SEGA's other faults because they made good games. 

The second problem with this assertion is that it ignores the obvious decline in the quality of SEGA games over time. We previously established that all the games on the Master System were terrible. Generally, when SEGA fans point to the supposedly great games SEGA made, they refer to those from the Genesis era most often, and less often a select few from either the Saturn or Dreamcast. Hardly ever does anyone argue in favor of any game made by SEGA after they abandoned hardware and became a third-party developer exclusively. The reason for this is very simple; SEGA's quality was at it's pinnacle during the Genesis era and has declined steadily since then. 

One of the sources I provided in my opening argument already highlighted the decline in the Sonic the Hedgehog games;

This is a common criticism of the way SEGA has changed the Sonic franchise and allowed it to decline in quality over the years. Even the most vehement critics of SEGA don't assert that the original Sonic games were poor in quality or were not fun to play (though they might compare them unfavorably against Mario games of the same time period). But the key factors which made the original Sonic games fun to play was their speed and simplicity. As the games have developed over the years, the simplicity was lost as the cast of "annoying" characters has expanded and the new three-dimensional games have been widely criticized for having poor controls and gameplay. 

The third major problem with this argument is that it is just plain wrong. Saying that "most" of SEGA's games were good is the mistake here, because while SEGA may have had a few games that could be effectively argued as "good" those games don't actually make up the majority of the SEGA library. 

When a lot of these "good" SEGA games are compared against similar titles on other consoles, it becomes immediately obvious that they aren't quite as "good" as people sometimes remember them. 

But that still isn't even the worst of it. The real issue is that during their heyday, SEGA was a prolific developer of software. And during those days, for every "good" game SEGA managed to produce, they cranked out probably a dozen absolutely awful titles that never should have been allowed to see the light of day. Let me give you just a few memorable examples;

Virtua Striker 2;

Zombie Revenge;

Spikeout: Battle Street;

Eighteen Wheeler;

Sega Bass Fishing Duel;

Sega Smash Pack;

NHL All-Star Hockey;

D2;

I could go on, but I believe my point is made here. Not every SEGA game, or even "most" SEGA games would have been considered "good" by any stretch of the imagination. On the whole, I'm confident in saying that the majority of SEGA games were bad and the "good" ones were few and far between. 

And when all of my original arguments still stand, on the subject of SEGA's dishonest advertising and their repeated failures in the hardware market, my conclusion remains the same; SEGA is a BAD company!

These are the reasons I’ve provided for why SEGA is bad;

1. Everything on the Master System, SEGA’s first (worldwide) console, was completely awful.
   
   
2. SEGA’s second console, the Genesis, was advertised based on the massive lie of ‘Blast Processing’ which never existed. Even this limited success was still paled by comparison to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
   
   
3. SEGA’s add-ons for the Genesis, 32X and SEGA CD, were both monumental failures commercially, poorly supported by third-party developers, and served to hurt SEGA’s overall market position.
   
   
4. SEGA’s attempts to enter the handheld market with the Nomad and Game Gear were easily crushed by the Nintendo Game Boy.
   
   
5. SEGA doomed the Saturn with their own stupid strategy of launching systems early. Sony easily countered this strategy by dropping the price of the Playstation, condemning the Saturn to the dustbin of history.
   
   
6. The Dreamcast lasted only a year before SEGA finally figured out it was time to get out of the hardware business.
   
   
7. SEGA’s dishonest and sometimes confusing advertising campaigns, such as the ‘Blast Processing’ lie and the Beta-7 hoax have given them a reputation as compulsive liars.
   
   
8. SEGA’s fans were some of the most obnoxious and ignorant of the Console Wars. Their belief in Blast Processing, obsession with Sonic the Hedgehog and desire to constantly troll the fans of their competitors made them an intolerable nuisance.
   
   
9. SEGA’s final fate was to be sold into the service of a crime-connected Japanese gambling company, also noted for their potential dishonesty.
   
   
10. Although the common rebuttal of SEGA fans is that all of the above should be ignored because of the “good” games, this ignores the fact that SEGA games declined in quality over the years, the honestly good ones were rare and SEGA regularly churned out a stream of awful games.
    

BOTTOM LINE;