Platform: Sega Mega Drive/Genesis

In 2018, rapper Soulja Boy attempted to sell his own line of video game consoles, called the SouljaGame line, sold for $149.99 for a console and $99.99 for a handheld. Advertising claimed that the consoles would be compatible with a variety of consoles' games, including modern platforms like the PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch. They obviously did not have such compatibility, and were rather a generic retro emulator console one could find on small business-oriented retail websites such as Wish and AliExpress loaded with pirated and modified games sold at a markup. Game libraries featured included the Neo Geo, NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, and PlayStation. The only difference from these pre-existing consoles is a photograph of Soulja Boy printed onto the box. He would eventually stop selling SouljaGame consoles, with the website for the console redirecting to Nintendo's 3DS website.

The Sega Genesis had backwards compatibility with the Sega Master System if used in conjunction with the Sega Power Base Converter. The Sega Power Base Converter will not work with the Sega Genesis Model 3, Sega Nomad, or Sega 32X Add-on. The only Master System Games that aren't fully compatible with the Power Base Converter are F-16 Fighting Falcon and Alien 3. There are also several games that only work with the Master System Controller plugged in. These are:

• Alien Syndrome
• Bomber Raid
• Great Volleyball
• Montezuma's Revenge
• Penguin Land
• Shanghai
• Tennis Ace
• Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
• Wonder Boy in Monster Land

While the console was called the Sega Genesis in North America, the console was released to most of the rest of the world as the Sega Mega Drive. The reason for the name change in the US was due to the trademark for "Mega Drive" being owned in the US by a company known as "Mega Drive Systems", which specialized in storage devices for computers.

The Genesis was the first SEGA console to have online play, but it was only compatible with a handful of games and the lifespan for the modem device was less than one year.

In 1994, Sega launched Sega Channel, a service where users could download 20 Sega Genesis games every month through their cable company's "On Demand" service. Sega Channel lasted until 1998, the end of the 16-Bit generation, preceding the Xbox Live Arcade by over 10 years.

The Sega Nomad was based on the semi-portable Sega Mega Jet, a Mega Drive system that was designed specifically for use on Japanese airliners.

Due to its ability to accept full Genesis cartridges, the Sega Nomad was the first handheld console to feature online multiplayer. It achieved this by utilizing the Genesis's XBand modem.

The LaserActive by Pioneer was perhaps the most expensive gaming console ever at launch. The console cost $1,000 and required additional modules which cost an extra $600 each to play certain types of games. Games ran on LaserDiscs and the formats were Mega LD discs by SEGA and LD-ROM2 by NEC. The modules were also backwards compatible with Genesis and SEGA CD games on the SEGA module, and TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafx-CD games on the NEC module.

Due to South Korea banning Japanese cultural imports at the end of World War II, the Sega Genesis was distributed by South Korean company Samsung, and was named the Super Gam*Boy.

In the US, the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System's final official releases in the 1990's were the same game: a port of the original arcade Frogger made to coincide with the PlayStation and PC reboot.

"Blast processing" is a marketing term coined by Sega of America to promote the Sega Genesis as the cooler and more powerful console compared to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It was such an effective campaign that it caused Nintendo to spend millions of dollars to ramp up their own smear campaign to rebut the claims, helping to create the textbook example of a "console war" between two rivaling video game companies through aggressive marketing and advertising. It is true that Blast processing as presented in advertisements at the time does not exist in any released Genesis game, but its creation was based on a real, low-level progressive processing method that ultimately went unused by developers in their games.

The basic idea is that the hardware's video processor is "blasted" continuously, with the Genesis' 68000 processor working flat-out to change the color of every individual pixel during an active scan, a process where the "guns" on a CRT screen move from left to right and then down to the next line and so on. It was believed at the time that this function could be used to increase the Genesis' somewhat constrained color palette to showcase 256 color static images if timed right (this number would be exceeded by other developers like Jon Burton from Traveller's Tales who later discovered the trick).

Sega of America senior producer Scott Bayless claimed that technical director Marty Franz first discovered the trick by "hooking the scan line interrupt and firing off a DMA [direct memory access] at just the right time", as firing it off at the wrong time would result in the scan lines appearing out of phase. This timing/synchronization issue, on top of the more pressing issue of the feature using all of the 68000's CPU time (meaning that while you could run the feature, you couldn't actually play the games that use it), effectively made it useless for cartridge games, and no shipped Genesis games ever used it. It’s speculated that it could have been used for Sega CD games, as the add-on had its own CPU that could run the feature, but this also did not come to pass.

The people responsible for the name "Blast processing" are Bayless and Sega of America's PR team. They interviewed him about the specs of the console, and he described to them how the feature could "blast data into the DAC's [digital-to-audio converters]". When talking about how the name came about, Bayless assumed the PR team just liked the word "blast" without understanding what he was explaining, and Blast processing was invented by them to more easily and vaguely sum up the technical capabilities of the Genesis when marketing it. Bayless later expressed reservations about the phrase, calling it "ghastly".

It should also be noted that this feature was apparently not exclusive to the Genesis. In 2020, former Sculptured Software programmer Jeff Peters claimed that they discovered a similar technical trick on the SNES before Sega started using the phrase, but it was focused on audio rather than graphics. He claims that when porting Mortal Kombat to the SNES, Sculptured Software encountered an issue where the amount of graphics data being put onto the cartridge meant that sound had to be cut back drastically. To overcome this problem, Peters and his team used a homegrown system which allowed them to read sounds from the cartridge one at a time and blast them directly to a buffer in the sound memory. While the two tricks were achieving different things, it's interesting to note that both were possible on either console, despite Sega's insistence that only the Genesis could achieve Blast processing.

According to a 1998 interview with Sega R&D head Hideki Sato published in The History of Sega Console Hardware, the Mega Drive's design from Japan was based on the audio player's appearance, and presented the "16-bit" label embossed with a golden metallic veneer to give it an impact of power:

"We had a feeling that before long, consumers would be appreciating video games with the same sense with which they enjoyed music; moreover, since the Megadrive was a machine that you put in front of your TV, our concept was to make it look like an audio player. So we painted the body black and put the “16BIT” lettering in a gold print. That gold printing, by the way, was very expensive. (laughs) But we really wanted to play up the fact that this was the very first 16-bit home console."