MASTER SYSTEM
The Arcade Master
Manufacturer: Sega | Year: 1985
■ During the late eighties, Sega carved out its own slice of the console world with conversions of hot arcade games including Hang-on, Shinobi, and Wonder Boy. This powerful 8-bit system was particularly popular in Europe and South America, and survived well into the Nineties as a cheaper alternative to the Mega Drive.
Mark Cerny, Former Sega programmer/designer You spent some time at Sega working on the Master System, Mark, what do remember from that period?
for me, when I think back to the Master System, what I remember is… fun! I transitioned from arcade games to console games just as it was coming out, so it was the first console I ever programmed. It was amazingly fast to get up to speed on it – the manual was a few dozen pages of handwritten instructions, and there were so many tricks you could use once you had familiarity with the hardware.
Of course, the rest of the world was more focused on playing the games than creating them. the Master System did have a broad collection of games, from quirky to outstanding. Some of these titles, such as Alex Kidd, were created by names you probably wouldn’t recognise today. But the Master System was also the training ground for huge talent, such as Yuji naka. If memory serves, he was responsible for the ports of Sega’s biggest arcade titles while still finding time for amazing original work, such as Phantasy Star.
after I pitched the Master System’s 3-D glasses to management and prototypes were floating around the office, I came back from the new year break to find that naka had programmed a full blown ‘canyon run’ flight simulator, in 3D! Quite impressive. the only bad news being that in order to keep the framerate up, he had to shrink the size of the screen to the point where the graphics were just a postage stamp-sized area in the centre of the tv, and the rest was black. He volunteered that it was a bit too small, asked if I shared his opinion, and then reluctantly dropped the project. What a talent, though!