Company: Sega

The first official crossover between a Nintendo property and a Sega property is often assumed to be either Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games or Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While these are indeed the first Nintendo-Sega crossovers within the gaming medium, there have been instances prior of crossovers in supplementary marketing material:

• A 1994 advert made by DIC for animation industry insiders showing their global reach through the Panda Club and Dragon Club TV blocks in China shows Sonic The Hedgehog waving through a TV screen while Mario pats him on the back, joined by Madeline from the Madeline book series and Billy Lee as seen in the cartoon adaptation of Double Dragon.
• The infamous Fight for the FoxBox promotional film made by 4Kids Entertainment in 2003, which utilizes existing anime and cartoon clips to make a new crossover story, shows Dr. Eggman and King Dedede as allies alongside Dial-bolic from Ultimate MUSCLE, Dr. K from Cubix: Robots for Everyone, and Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles working for Wayne from The Cramp Twins in an attempt to shut down the titular television channel. Although the villains do interact in this half-hour film, the heroes mostly do not, with Kirby and Sonic never sharing screen time in particular.

This is, of course, discounting instances of unauthorised parodies and mockery at the height of the console wars.

Relations between Sega and its various regional offices, particularly Sega of America, have been rather tumultuous throughout the company's history. This is perhaps most notable during the development of Sonic X-treme, where the conflict between the two played a major role in the game's eventual cancellation. Supposedly, some of this conflict originates from the 1990s due to former president Hayao Nakayama's admiration of Sega of America. According to former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske:


However, video game journalist Steven L. Kent has made claims to the contrary. According to him, Nakayama essentially bullied the American executives under the belief that the Japanese executives were the ones who made the best decisions. When asked if communication between the two was really that bad, he said:

The Sega VR is an unreleased virtual reality headset prototype add-on for the Sega Genesis announced and worked on primarily by Sega of America throughout 1991-1994. Its release was cancelled due to development issues and younger users inducing motion sickness and severe headaches from use. Only 5 games were known to have been announced or in development before its cancellation:

• Nuclear Rush: A simulation in which users pilot a hovercraft in a futuristic war.
• Iron Hammer: A shoot 'em up piloting a helicopter gunship inspired by EA's Strike series.
• Matrix Runner: Reportedly a cyberpunk adventure game inspired by Konami's Snatcher.
• Outlaw Racing: A vehicle racing and combat game.
• Virtua Racing: A port of Sega's 1992 Formula One racing arcade game announced as a launch title for the Sega VR. It's unknown how far this port made it into development, but Virtua Racing would later be released for the standalone Sega Genesis in 1994.

In November 2020, the Video Game History Foundation announced that they had successfully emulated the Sega VR's original hardware through HTC Vive with the help of fellow preservation website Gaming Alexandria by using parts of the source code of Nuclear Rush, as well as insight on the hardware and inner-workings of the cancelled games from some of their lead programmers.

Most Sega Codename Consoles were named after celestial bodies.

Project Mercury (also know as Sega Game Gear) was SEGA's first handheld to compete with Game Boy.

Project Venus (also know as Sega Nomad) was a handheld version of Sega Genesis.

Project Mars (also know as Sega 32X) was a add-on for Sega Genesis.

Project Jupiter was a 32-Bit Cartridge Base Standalone Console and it was also going to feature a CD Add-on like Sega Genesis and Sega CD. This early idea was scraped and SEGA moved on creating a standalone CD Base Console which is Sega Saturn due to CDs are cheaper and has more storage then Cartridges.

Project Saturn (also know as Sega Saturn) was a 5th Generation Console to compete with PlayStation and Nintendo 64.

Project Neptune was Sega 32X and Sega Genesis all-in-one Console. This Combo Console was never released.

Project Pluto was a second model of Sega Saturn with a NetLink Internet Modem accessory built in. Only two Prototypes was existed.

The only 2 planets that was not used by SEGA was Earth and Uranus.


Project Titan (also know as STV "Sega Titan Video") was an Arcade Board of Sega Saturn that used Cartridges instead of CDs. The STV was only used in Japan.

Project Janus (also know as Sega Picture Magic) was designed for Developers to edit pre-loaded pictures supplied on a smart media card.

The SEGA plastic bags that are given out to people for playing the UFO Catcher machine features a Morse code message on it. When translated, it reads "UFO Catcher is not a vending machine." This message was added by the bag's graphic designer and means that because a player may insert money into it, it doesn't necessarily mean that they'll receive a prize. The bags have been in use since 2014 and the message's meaning was confirmed by SEGA on their official Twitter account.

Sega makes more money from pachinko machines in Japan than game sales worldwide.

Prolific film critic Roger Ebert controversially believed that video games could never be considered art. While maintaining his position in 2010, he admitted he should not have expressed this skepticism without considering their future and being more familiar with actually playing them, saying:


He brought up the hypocrisy that despite his views, he did play and enjoy a video game once before: Cosmology of Kyoto, which he wrote a positive review for in the September 1994 issue of Wired magazine and is the only game he was known to have enjoyed. The only other video game he admitted to playing was Myst, which he said he "lacked the patience" for. Ebert also recounted a moment where a Sony employee offered to lend him a PlayStation 3 and a copy of the game Flower, but he admitted to intentionally stalling and declining the offer. He wrote one more game-related article in December 1994 for Wired, in which he visited Sega's Joypolis arcade in Tokyo, Japan, but only briefly mentioned their arcade games and focused more on the state-of-the-art rides and attractions.

In 1993, SEGA would sponsor two drivers on the Frank Williams F-1 team, Alain Prost of France and Damon Hill of Britain. Prost would go on to take the Driver's world championship that season, and Damon Hill would take third. SEGA also sponsored the British GP in F-1 that year, and images of Sonic would adorn the starting line. The trophy was also of Sonic.

Apart from video games, in Japan, SEGA also runs a number of restaurants, a couple of which are "Bee" darts and dining establishments. In 2013, a series of restaurants including ones run by SEGA were embroiled in a scandal after deceiving customers by claiming to have used high quality ingredients in their food when in fact they were using cheap ones, and charging high prices for them. SEGA issued an apology promising customers that it wouldn't happen again.

In 2001, Sega's president Isao Okawa privately donated all $695.7 million of his own company stock to save Sega from going bankrupt due to the failure of the Dreamcast. He died shortly afterwards from heart failure at the age of 74.

SEGA was the second company (after Nintendo) to be in negotiation with Sony to make a new console, but the idea was eventually rejected by SEGA. It was confirmed by Tom Kalinske (an employee of SEGA) that the console specs SEGA had proposed were used for the PlayStation. It was also the technical achievements of SEGA's "Virtua Fighter" that made Sony focus on 3D rather than 2D. SEGA essentially sealed their own fate in the console market by rejecting the plans and inspiring Sony to focus on 3D.

The word "SEGA" was created by taking the first two letters from each word in "Service Games", SEGA's original name.

In 2001, SEGA was granted a patent to displaying floating arrows in their games, seen in games such as Crazy Taxi.

During a presentation at SIGGRAPH 2024, Sega producer Yosuke Okunari revealed that Sega themselves did not know exactly how many games they owned the rights to as they had only started taking the preservation of their games seriously in 2023. This included the various IPs created by acquired companies such as Atlus, Sammy, and Technosoft. Notably, the slide addressing this suggested that Sega owned the rights to games produced by WARP, a game company founded by the late Kenji Eno whose status was unknown at that point.

Upon the release of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, Ken Penders, a former writer on the Archie Comics Sonic comics, sued Sega and EA for supposedly using Sonic character concepts he had independently trademarked prior - particularly the Nocturnas Clan, a futuristic echidna tribe which he deemed as too similar to his own Dark Legion, a futuristic echidna technocracy. This lawsuit came months after Archie Comics filed their own suit against Penders due to a breach of contract after the trademarking, causing Archie to allow their contract with Sega to expire so they could negotiate new terms for the rights to create Sonic comics. This legal fiasco ended in Archie settling the case with Penders, losing the exclusivity to produce Sonic comics after negotiations with Sega, and causing them to write the "Super Genesis Wave", a super-charged energy blast utilizing the Chaos Emeralds that acted as a massive continuity rewrite where over 500 original characters and concepts created by Penders and other writers for the Archie Sonic comics were retconned. The Sega case on the other hand ended in a stalemate due to the statute of limitations, and will not be able to continue unless Sega uses characters from The Dark Brotherhood again.

In 2009, a man held an elderly woman hostage at gunpoint for 10 hours in Brazil's Federal District. After the hostage was released safely, authorities found out that the gun was actually the Sega Master System's Light Phaser.

Sega was actually created by Americans.

SErvice GAmes started out in 1945 in Honolulu, Hawaii, as a partnership by father-son team Irving Bromberg and Martin Gerome Bromberg with James L. Humpert, who worked with the family to manufacture and distribute their slot machines and other coin-operated devices. Irving, already an innovator in the coin-op field, brought some of the first vending machines to Brooklyn (one of the five boroughs of New York City), Boston (the capital of Massachusetts) and Washington, D.C. (the capital of the US) back in 1933. Aimed at military bases for distribution, the junior Bromberg and Humpert were actually working in the US Navy Shipyard at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attacks of World War II. In 1952 Service Games needed somewhere else to sell their excess amount of games, as the US Congress had prohibited any distribution of gambling machines on military bases in 1951. So, they decided to set up shop around Japan, Korea, basically anywhere where US soldiers were stationed--and it worked well for them.

Meanwhile, in 1954, a businessman and former US Air Force officer, David Rosen, fell in love with Japan after the Korean War and decided to stay there. Originally meant to import art, Rosen Enterprises started to boom after it had imported some US coin-op photo booths. Rosen Enterprises expanded and also started importing other American coin-op games.

Having found huge success, with his imports being found in almost 200 Japanese arcades, Rosen wanted his company to grow even more, and went to Bromberg to do so. In October 1965, the two companies merged to become Sega Enterprises.