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Comment by epidemian | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure the Sega Genesis also beat the SNES by a large margin here in Argentina too. At least i grew up with a Genesis and knew a lot of people who had one, while i only knew of one person who owned a SNES[1].

One of the possible reasons for this is that there were cheap pirated Genesis games available[2], which, i think, SNES games were much more expensive, probably not pirated.

[1]: The graphics and fluidity of Donkey Kong Country on that console were mesmerizing for a Genesis player though :D. But for some reason i always preferred the Genesis sounds and music. And, of course, Sonic The Hedgehog!

[2]: I actually didn't know about this till not too long ago. I always thought my Sega games were original! But learning about this explained why "save slots" didn't work on any game (the pirated cartridges didn't have a persistent writable memory).

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Sega handed Nintendo its ass during the early 90s in the USA by positioning themselves as the modern video game company for the 90s, full of rebelliousness and attitude. This was reflected in their positioning of characters like Sonic and their admittance of games with blood and other violent content like Mortal Kombat.

The only problem is 'tude only gets you so far, and without a cohesive technology strategy to see them through into the next generations, Sega faltered big time, stretching themselves too thin and spending resources on wacky go-nowhere strategies like the 32X. The Saturn had weak 3D capability but more memory, allowing for impressive sprite-based games the PlayStation wasn't capable of; yet such a system was difficult to position in the American market and Sega never recovered from that.

Also Nintendo realized that gamers were getting older and starting in the late SNES era, loosened some of its content restrictions, negating Sega's edginess advantage.

Still, I think more Gennys were sold to Americans than SNESes, so Sega may have been able to say in some sense that they "won" the fourth console generation in that market. The true pain for them would come from trying to stand against Sony in the fifth and sixth generation eras.

> the pirated cartridges didn't have a persistent writable memory

Wait so you had to beat every game in a single sitting?

Yes Sir :)

Yep, like on an arcade :). Or, you could also leave the Genesis plugged-in and take a break (or let other people watch TV) and then continue on. As long as the console was powered, the game state was preserved. But this prevented you from changing games, or other people form using the console, so it was seldom done.

Surprisingly few Genesis games had any kind of save game feature - off the top of my head, there was Sonic 3, RPGs (which were few and far between), and...that's about it?

Basically, yeah. A few sports games did as well, like some of the NHL Hockey games starting with NHL '95 I believe. (There was a "play a whole season" mode...)

Playing the 32X port of Doom with no save ability was a pain. The game inevitably crashed on level 16, but it took my brothers and I several entire Saturdays getting that far to realize it. I loved the game, it wasn't until years later that I realized how atrocious a port it was.

IIRC it was the same with many NES games, e.g. Super Mario Bros.

It was the same for arcade-oriented NES or SNES games, but not all games are such, both NES and SNES had numerous RPGs, or games with progress (SMB3, DKC) or unlockables (Mario Kart IIRC)

Some classic games would generate a "code" you could enter to resume the game, all codes would deterministically map to some game state.

Ghostbusters for Sega Master System did this. One day I had a typo in my code and ended up with obscene millions of dollars.

I always wanted to go back and RE that game's code generation algorithm...

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