Cast your mind back to 1990. A prime minister once seen as strong and stable was looking increasingly wobbly, England went out of the World Cup on penalties and you had the tricky decision of whether to buy a SNES or a Sega Mega Drive.
2018 is doing a decent job of being a 1990 cover version by that metric. Sega has obviously glanced over at Nintendo making money hand over fist with its NES Mini and SNES Mini and decided it wants a piece of that retro action. At Sega Fes 2018, the company announced that it will be releasing a Mega Drive Mini to coincide with the console’s 30th anniversary.
Very little else was revealed, and even the name is subject to change. All we know is that, like the SNES Mini, it will come preloaded with a bunch of games and be cute as a button, as the picture above demonstrates. As for which games and how many – your guess is as good as mine, but it would be a big surprise if the usual mix of Sonic, Golden Axe and Mortal Kombat wasn’t order of the day.
If Sega is going down the same path as Nintendo, that’s a licence to print money, right? Well, yes and no: the main difference is that while Nintendo had never released any modern version of the NES and SNES until the two Minis, Sega gives third parties it’s blessing all the time. Right now, Argos sells not one, but two versions of the Mega Drive which plug into a modern TV sets. The company has also released a number of their retro hits for modern consoles – indeed the latest mix of Mega Drive classics for PS4 and Xbox One is due later this year.
What does the Mega Drive Mini offer that these answers don’t already provide? We don’t know, but if the answer is “the same in a cuter box”, then Sega may find that the licence to print money popularised by Nintendo has expired.
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