I think you're forgetting how insanely popular the first year or two of the Genesis campaign was. They nailed that shit so hard. The entire "Genesis does what Ninten-don't" bit? That was pretty solid, as was the "random dude shouts the brand name at the end of commercials" bit.

These days those would be hokey as shit (and in retrospect, you shouldn't even mention the competitor by name, really) but it resonated with me when I was the target demo.

Yeah, while they were a bit too into the the XTREME!!!!!! marketing of the 90s, it was, after all, the 90s. The first half of the decade, I remembered far more Sega commercials than Nintendo ones. Hell, Nintendo even ended up trying to mimic it with their "Play It Loud" campaign.

I was about to say the same...it was basically their marketing (remember "blast processing"?) and willingness to be bold that captured the US market for them.

In fact, it was *everything else* that they got wrong. SoA and SoJ were warring with each other to the point of actual sabotage, and the company came out with an insane amount of hardware instead of selling what they had. There had to be at least 4 or 5 variations on the Sega CD alone. Two different in-flight(!) consoles, and so on.

But they were loud enough that ten-year-olds took notice, and it did them some good for a while.

hey where'd everybody go

Sega Channel was awesome.