The Brink Plays Games With Sega

to present to you something special. You know. I did this a few weeks back where I brought up an old episode of Business on the Brink, the show that I used to do with aerial casting where we would take companies that were at a real inflection point, either they were just about to take off or they were just about to disappear and talk about what happened and how we got there. And a lot of those companies,

of course, have something to do with tech. So today I thought we would do the episode titled The Brink plays Games with Sega. I hope you enjoy Sega. From Slot Machines to Sonic the Hedgehog, this company played its way into people's hearts. But in the nineties they made a few key mistakes that would make them lose the trust of their gamers, and by the time they came out with elite new system worthy of consumers praise, it

was too late and the market was gone. Learn how this company spun out of control and out of the console game. This is Sega on the brink. Hi everybody, I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Arial Casting, and I want to apologize that intro had far too few puns in it. Game over area over. So this was a request from a from a Tony. Yeah, isn't your husband's name Tony? Yes, there may or may not be any relation to that,

but you know what, it's a really good suggestion. If my wife had made a suggestion, I would have gone with it too, So totally cool. I put it in listener suggestions because he doesn't work on this podcast, so it's a listener suggestion. Totally Yeah. So this is a great story to cover in the sense that it's easy

to forget it now. But Sega for a while was writing high in the video game console world, and for a brief period it looked like they could become the dominant name in video game consoles, and then everything went wrong. So it's to the point now where people who think back on the Sega consoles, they tend to fall into two camps. They're either the people who wistfully remember how awesome those game consoles were more there people who think

of it as a big joke. It's a little both, a little both because largely because of the very moves we're going to talk about in this podcast. But just in the interest of full disclosure, I was someone who got hold of a Sega Dreamcast system, which we're going to talk about in this episode. I got it after the Dreamcast had already made a splash and was fading from memory, So this was they weren't making new Dreamcast games by the time I got hold of the system,

it was all the used game market. But I was blown away by the Dreamcast. So when we talk about people who truly loved that system, I'm one of those people. I want to mention at the beginning of this that as much as we say that Sega has kind of fallen out of memory, people were saying they might make a comeback, and the fact that there's a Sonic movie coming out a Sonic movie that is rapidly undergoing massive

change is as we record this. The news recently broke that because of the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the Sonic the Hedgehog teaser trailer, they are going to redesign Sonics look, which is a pretty massive undertaking for a for a c g I movie. It is. I'm really rooting for them to get it right, because I think a Sonic movie. I enjoyed the stories when I played the games, and I think kids would enjoy a Sonic movie. I didn't

realize there was a story. Here's a story dr about Nick Steel's little animals and turns them into I just figured you ran really fast and when you hit stuff, rings popped out of you. I mean, which I mean that happens to me. Yeah, it's I mean, I get it. It's true to life. Well, let's talk a little bit about just a little bit about Sega's origins to kind of set the scene of how they were able to

climb in the home console space. Now, obviously, the story of Sega starts before there was a home video game console market. We're actually not going to start at the very beginning of the company that becomes Sega because it's a lot of little steps, it's not very important. There was a slot machine company made in Hawaii, and eventually the Army said, we don't want slot machines on US army bases anymore, which is where they were selling their machines too. So they went over to Japan where they

still could sell games, and they became Service Games Japan. Yeah, as service thus the nod to making games for like military installations. Yes, And when they went over to Japan, they're being run by Martin Bromley. Now, in nineteen sixty

that company liquidated and split into two divisions. I'm gonna pronounce this probably very poorly, Nihan Goriku Basan which traded under the name Automatic Inc. For distribution, and then Nihan Kaeso would traded under the name Sega Inc. Sega is short for Service Games, taking the first two letters of each. So they made slot machines, but they also made juke boxes, so that you know, obviously this is arcade game days. And where do we go from there. Well, eventually those

two companies recombine. Now at the same time, you've got Rosen Enterprises Inc. Also in Japan at the time run by David Rosen, who is another army man. His company started as an art exporting company, taking art from Japan, exporting it to the US during the Korean War, and then he became an arcade game importer in nine and then he became a producer of electro mechanical arcade games. So the precursor to video games, right, this would be

games that would actually have moving components to those. So a pinball machine is sort of a variant of these games, but you had all sorts of different ones. There's a great arcade game museum in San Francisco where you can actually see some of these electro mechanical and you can play them, these electro mechanical games. And it is funny to see how human ingenuity came up with ways to convince people to part with their change. I believe even and I would part with a lot of change there,

I'm certain. Now. Rosen was very successful at this, and in part because he had other engineers helping him from companies like Nihang Kupasan, and so he started looking for mergers and the one that panned out was with Nihang Kupasan or Sea, and they merged in n and I'm

gonna call it MGB. From this point, they acquired Rosen Enterprises and Rosen became the CEO, and they renamed the company Sega Enterprises, taking the Sega from m GB what they were trading under, and taking Enterprises from Rosen Enterprises. And at that point they were making the electro mechanical arcade games and jukeboxes, and they started coming out with their own games in sixty six. The first one that really got some traction was a game called Periscope, and

they even started opening up essentially arcades. They were called game centers, but I mean they're like arcades in the sense of like the video U arcades made famous in the nineteen eighties. Periscope, by the way, was so good that they started importing it to the US. Yeah, so there actually ended up being an international market for the game. Yeah. And then in nineteen sixty nine, Sega was acquired by Gulf and Western, who had been largely trading in pinball machines.

From my understanding, so now Sega has pinball machines. Yeah, so they start doing those as well. As a pinball enthusiast, I appreciate that I love pinball games and Sega was then trading on the US stock market, so they were now not just on Japanese markets but also in the US. In fact, primarily in the US by this point, and they had Sega Enterprises Incorporated and they essentially shifted their operations to the United States, although they maintained an operating

arm in Japan as well. Yeah, it was an ltd. After that, they started moving into video games, both in the arcade and at home and seeing the trend. There have been a couple of games that people have attributed to this. The one that is coming to my mind is Pong. So they saw Pong and they said, well, this is the way things are going. Let's jump on the train. And they even acquired the US gaming company

called Gremlin in seventy to help them expand into that market. So, you know, we kind of skipped over a lot of the early seventies, but that was more of the same. It's really when you get into the mid to late seventies where the arcade games, the video games story coming out, where this this story starts to change. Uh, they were doing pretty well, that division was doing pretty well, but

the overall parent company it was a different story. Yeah, So Golf and Western hit some trouble and they sold the U S division of Sega to Midway Games in at which point Sega became a primarily Japanese company again. Sega North America was absorbed into Midway. Midway is another company we'll have to do a brink episode on sometime in the future. Midway famous in the United States for the Mortal Kombat series. Midway is no more. So that's another story that has its own brink moment, but we'll

save that for its own episode, you know. And Saga does have operations in the US again, but at that time they shifted. So Rosen wanted this video game market that they had built, so he and some others bought it back from Gulf and Western. They buy back the Japanese branch, right, so the North American branch that's part of Midway. Rosen goes back to the Japanese side and

purchases that one back from the parent company. Yes, and in three Sega had its first console, the s G one thousand, which was I'm sorry if I offend anybody, nothing to write home about. They also had a micro computer come out at that time, which I think was the s G two thousand or three thousand. I covered this for a living, and I don't remember ever reading about the s G one. Yes, well, they had a really hard time competing with Nintendo because Nintendo already had

market share. And then in six Sega came out with their first successful console, the Sega Master System. Yeah, but then the Nintendo Entertainment System was still pretty much the dominant player in that space. I mean, remember that the Nintendo Entertainment System was the system that was able to bring the video game home market back from the crash

of three. Well, Sega realized that they were not necessarily going to get Nintendo's markets, so they focused on markets that weren't saturated with Nintendo already, places like Brazil in Europe, and they became the second most popular home system in the world, kicking Atari out of that spot, which I'm surprised Atari was even in that spot. I'm guessing it's from lack of competition. Yeah, no, because no one else wanted to get into the video game console market after

that crash, right, so Nintendo. Everyone thought Nintendo was crazy for getting into a market just as it had imploded, and Nintendo was able to prove that there was still a market there, but no one else had anything ready to compete in that space because they had all either gone out of business or had changed their minds about developing a console. So it was kind of open ground.

And so even though the Sega system wasn't catching on big here in the United States, so a lot of people in the US were completely unfamiliar with it, there was enough demand in other countries for it to be a big success. Well, all of that was about to change, well, at least the not being in high demand in the US part, because in eighty eight they came out with the Sega Mega Drive, which in the United States is

better known as the Sega Genesis. Yeah, and it was not only a really popular console, but it was also really the first sixteen bit console there was, which is probably why it was so popular. Yeah. It was a dramatic improvement over the eight bit systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System that came before it, and it got the jump start on the Super Nintendo, which was another sixteen bit system. Yeah. Along with that system, they implemented a

good marketing strategy. They had really good games, which we know is very important for the six US of a console. Yeah, you need to have a good launch library. Yeah. This is around the time we get Altered Beast. Yeah. I watched a long play of that just the other day and I forgot how bonkers that game. It is crazy. Yeah, it's pretty nuts. If you don't know what we're talking about, do a YouTube search for Altered Beasts Sega and uh. Yeah.

It's all about transforming into various types of monsters as you make your way through multiple levels, and it's really hard. It's a really hard game. But this gave Nintendo a fight because up until that time they had the mark share. By nine one, Sega was doing real well both in the arcades and in the home console arena. And the arcades, they were coming out with three D games like Virtual Racing, Virtua Fighter, virtual games. There was virtual Tennis. I remember

that was all under the Sega label. There is Virtual Virtue of Virtuous people now virtually Virtuous, and it's I can identify with that. By that time, Sega was in forty four countries and they came out with Sonic the Hedge. Yeah, kind of their answer to uh to Nintendo's Mario. It became like the mascot for Sega. Yeah, and it looks like Sonic might outpace Mario. Well you can run really fast, mao. Well, Sonic jumps higher. U. Now, Nintendo did gain groundback with

SNS when it came out. So Sega did a couple of moves that would spell to bring for them. One was the Sega thirty two X cartridge and the other was the Sega c D. Yeah, these were both additions to the Genesis. It was an attempt to boost the genesis is power and to extend the lifespan of the console by giving it additional capabilities beyond the basic system.

And essentially the company had a couple of choices, right, they could have gone down that route to try and augment an existing game console, or they could have designed the next generation console to have those things built into it natively and launched that. They decided to go with the augmenting approach, so more more like a computer where you would buy a new graphics card for it. Yeah. Shortly after, they did also design a console which was

a whole another problem. Yeah, the Sega Saturn. The Sega Saturn in ninety four. Now, Sega Saturn was a really big hit in Japan, and at that time they also launched things like in door theme parks and the Sega Channel, which is a whole story of its own. But Sega Saturn big hit in Japan, but not a big hit in North America, and the peripherals for the Genesis weren't selling. So these three moves are the things that brought Sega

to the brink. The stuff that would push Sega over are yet to come, but this kind of sets the stage. So with that in mind, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll explain a bit more about what pushed Sega over the edge. Alright, so we mentioned the Sega Genesis and the Purples, or if you prefer, the Sega Mega c D system. It was the Sega c D in the US, it was the Mega c D in Japan. So let's talk a little bit more about this peripheral and why it failed to really get

a lot of traction. This was the peripheral, the additional thing for the Genesis that would give it more capabilities. The Genesis when it released was a cartridge based system, very much like the Nintendo Entertainment System. Yes, s, even the Nintendo sixty four that would come out later was still cartridge based So what were the thoughts behind going to a CD based system? All right, Well, first, the Sega c D would allow for full motion video games,

which sounded good in theory back at the time. Yeah, but they were really grainy. Yeah, and a lot of them had very little to know gameplay. Let me let me tell you about one of them. Sure, I'm the famous One night Trap. Have you heard about this one? This? Yeah, it started a person who had formerly start on the

show Different Strokes. Uh. It's about a group of young women who are having a sleepover party and you're playing a super creepy neighbor I'm guessing who is looking in on the home while the women are having their party, and there's about a billion masked intruders trying to get in there, and you activate a series of traps in various rooms to stop the invaders from getting at the young women. And I'm talking about like crazy traps like

people are are. You're watching these guys sneak past a wall and you hit a button at just the right moment and then a video would play where the wall would like rotate around, possibly sending those intruders to their demise. You don't really know it was weird. And yeah, full motion videos sounded great because you're like, look at the

amazing technical capability. We can actually show full motion video, but it meant that we had to pre record everything, so there was very little control, Like you couldn't control a full motion video person imperfect motion because that capability wasn't there. You would essentially do a choose your own adventure kind of approach to games, which meant that there was very little gameplay to actually have. Yeah, the CDs were supposed to be able to store a lot more

information than cartridges could. Now on the flip side, you had companies like Nintendo saying we don't want to go down that path because we feel that the CD format is easier to pirate, And in fact, Sega would have problems with that as somebody who may or may not have come into possession of an enormous folder of pirated discs. I know nothing. Yeah, but there are other problems with the Sega City beyond being piratable. Yeah, and you're right,

they could hold more storage. They also had better audio because they used an audio D drive not a CD ROM for it. But these units were not universal. So depending on what version Genesis you got you'd have to either get a Sega c D that was compatible with that specifically, so some sat like completely underneath and some we're on the side of. So that's that's confusing to

the consumer. Yes, and then all of these peripherals had their own power sources, right, so so it's not like they even could just take power from the main console. You had to plug them in separately. And also it meant and I love that you have this note here

because it's it's a clear problem. It meant that you were already limiting your market right because the only people you can sell that peripheral to our people who either own a Sega Genesis or buying a Sega Genesis at the same time, and they just want to have the

full thing kitted out, which takes a lot of money. Yeah, So so you're essentially saying these existing customers I already have, I'm trying to up sell those customers, but you're not winning new customers with that approach, So you've already limited the amount of success you can have that product, as opposed to coming out with a brand new console that might win not just your existing customers but new customers.

And that ended up being one of those strategies that ultimately would come back to slap them in the face. And and we'll get to that because they did design a CD console it was a Saturn. But first I also want to talk about the thirty two X. It was actually made to compete with the Attari Jaguar, and I have very little software support. Yeah, which is kind of interesting because the Attari Jaguar, it turns out you didn't really need to compete against it now and that's

the only reason I wanted to mention. It was supposed to bring arcade quality games to your home. It was called three two X because you had the sixteen system system and that's cool, but again expensive. You can't really enter in if you've got to buy three separate machines unless you've got a lot of extra money. And the thirty two X only sold six and sixty five thousand

units globally. It sounds like a lot, but it's not. Also, uh, it couldn't quite match the quality of the arcade experience, and that was the big selling point, right They were saying, this is going to bring the experience you have at the arcade into your home, and the reality was it wasn't quite good enough for that, and so some of the people who bought it felt like they didn't get the promise that they were, you know, it wasn't delivered upon. Yeah.

So then we get the Saturn CD, which we previously said did really well in Japan and not so great in the US. Yeah. In Japan, it's sold almost five

hundred thousand units in the first month. But then they announced to be three in the US, and they were trying to compete with the very new PlayStation and the Nintendo sixty four, which we're both already out or just about to come out, and so they panicked and they announced that the Saturn was coming out six months ahead of schedule, and it was going to cost four hundred dollars instead of the around eight hundred that it would

cost you to get basic model from Japan. Yeah, so this was an attempt for them to try and steal some of that market share away from their competitors, right, Like there vastly under pricing the console is one of the strategies that a lot of console makers have where you sell the console at a loss and you hope to make it up in selling titles games. Except for they didn't have enough games because they didn't think a lot of the Japanese games would translate well to America,

so those didn't get released in the US. And then you've got all of these game developers who are trying to program these games for the release of the Sega Saturn, which is already a little bit more complicated to program for because it used dual CPUs, which is a redesign after they found out what the PlayStation specs were. Yeah, and so they're rushing to get their games out. And Jonathan and I are huge geeks. We've had all these

conversations about how rushing a game just leads to poor gameplay. Yeah, and that was true in this case. And so there was poor gameplay, there was a very limited library. And then they also didn't adjust their marketing for the gamers that were growing up. They were still focusing largely on teenagers. Yeah, and as it turned out, the people who grew up with games were sticking with games, and if you marketed

toward them, you tended to do well. And if you just kept on aiming for a constantly refreshing young market, it didn't do as well. And that really hurts Sega. Yeah, I I think the process of making it difficult to program,

like we've heard that before two. PlayStation three had a similar issue because they changed the architecture for the system, And if you were working for the company, So if you were working for Sega, if you were a developer and you worked for Sega, or you were a developer and you worked for Sony, you had a better chance

of developing a decent title for that console. But if you're a third party developer, and third parties are the ones that are making some of the most popular titles out there, certainly, and you in counter this problem, then internally you start asking yourself the question, doesn't make sense for us to even make a game for the system, considering how much time and effort it's going to take, Or should we just focus on making titles for a

competing system where we know we can turn them out faster. So it was a whole combination of things, largely on Sega's rushed decisions to try and compete more vigorously against the PlayStation in sixty four that really set them back well, and they couldn't even because this rush deadline also meant that their systems were in core supply shortly after they announced that their system was coming out early. PlayStation well, I guess Sony said, hey, our PlayStation is only two

hundred dollars and so three nine. So now they're coming out early, but they can't compete with PlayStation in price. Yea and Nintendo had better games and gameplay, it's more powerful, so it was it was like a double whammy. So you found a quote from the guy who had was CEO of Sega during this time, Tom Kolinski. He had an interview and his quote is I'm going to read

it out verbatim. Had we waited until we had more and better games launching with all retailers instead of with a few with marketing that could reach every player, we would have been much more successful, even if that meant waiting for a late October or November launch. So we usually put our lessons at the end of Brink episodes, but here's a lesson right in the middle of this one, which is sometimes being first is not as important as

being best. Yeah, and I'm sorry. We probably could have just said that quote instead of talking for the last seven minutes, But then you wouldn't have the Brink. You wouldn't have the braink But also around this time, our kid Attendant started falling. It didn't help. I mean, we still have arcades, but and they do better overseas than

in the US. But in the US, in the US, it used to be a staple, like every mall had at least one arcade, and now like there's only a few game centers or bowling alleys that that even carry video games. So yeah, it's they're few and far between in the States. And I believe that at the time, Sega was looking at a merger with Bandi, and in ninet that was called off, and all of these things led to downsizing in layoffs, not surprisingly. Yeah, so they

really were setting their hopes on the Dreamcast. They really thought maybe the Dreamcast system could succeed where the Saturn had failed. They really put a lot of work and design and the Dreamcast and it showed. But the damage had been done already right there. The missteps they made with the Genesis peripherals, the missteps with their c D system had kind of turned a lot of gamers off. They had a bad perception of Sega the company as far as hardware as concerned. Yeah, but we're going to

talk more about that right after this quick break. All right, so now we're going to talk about the Dreamcast system I still own. I think we own one too. It's actually really easy to hook it up because you can just hook it up through a coaxial cable to your machine. In fact, you could even feed cable through a cable system to your game system and then from the game system to the television, because I used to do that.

My my Saga Dreamcast, which I do still own, is not currently connected to my television, but it could be. It should be, Jonathan, it should be. Well. The Dreamcast came out in Japan and ninety nine in the US about a year apart from each other, not like a few months apart, but about a year. And it was a sixth generation console for home by Sega and the last one and uh, gamers who got it saw that the system was pretty boss. Yeah, people still say that

it's not everybody. A lot of people say that it's one of the best consoles that's been created. It the least a toe to toe with the competing consoles on them. It was. It was advanced compared to the competing consoles on the market. It even I would argue it didn't equal the following generation of consoles, but it was pretty darn clothes. Well. It was the first one to have a built in modem for online gaming, it was the first one to do voice recognition for online gaming, and

it had really great graphics and really great sound. It also had that that fish Man game, you know what it was man, which is interesting. If you're not familiar with it, you should or should not, go look up. I can't. I can't even recommend for you to go look at a YouTube rio because it's weird. Yeah, if if you feel the need to not sleep ever again,

go look it up. But then they came out with really great games, absolutely Crazy Taxi and Jet Grind, radio imports of their Arcade games that also we're really great on this console, shem You, and Soul Caliber too, just to name a few. Yeah, Soul Caliber was probably my favorite series. Yeah, and they even won an award for the most successful hardware launch in history, and it sold over five hundred thousand units in the first week, as opposed to the Saturn, which had only sold that many

in a month. Yeah, so incredibly well out of the gate. But unfortunately that was not sustainable. Yeah, because then we got the PlayStation two. Yeah, and the PS two ended up winning over a lot of people right away. PS two is a great machine. I still think the Dreamcast is better than the PS but a lot of people

had already switched over to PlayStation Yeah. There are a lot of people who are already in the Sony ecosystem, and they thought, oh, well that I already loved this game system, I bet this one's going to be it's too I bets twice as good. I'm gonna go with that. So they stopped making the Dreamcast in two thousand one, and support for it ended in two thousand three, and games were produced into two thousand seven, over thirty of them. But unless you get a really ambitious kickstarter, you're not

going to get more games. Interesting. I didn't realize they were being made even that late. I know that I got my Dreamcast after two thousand one, which is when they had stopped making the Dreamcast. But you know, I've only been around for two years. In the US, you had a lot of fans that were making games. You had a lot of crowdsourced gotcha games. Apparently it was pretty easy to make them for the Dreamcast. It's definitely easy to pirate them, not that I would know from

personal experience. I didn't fired them. I just I just got hold of something, and I mean someone I know got hold of a whole. Yeah, I just keep digging that whole Jonathan um. In March of two thousand one, they announced, you know, we're out of console game We're just going to focus on software and third party game publishing. They did some restructures. The first game they released for

another competitor was for Nintendo. I feel like this was probably what broke the spirit of the company right because the Dreamcast, like we said, was truly a revolutionary product. It was a good game console, people liked it, and yet the company, like the actual hardware, ultimately failed in the market. Like it had a great reception and had early buzz, but it wasn't able to keep on with that. And I think that must have been a very hard decision to come to at Sega, to say, listen, we

gave it our best shot and it wasn't enough. Yeah, it even gets a little bit sadder before it gets better. They looked at a bunch of mergers. The president of Sega at that time of Sega Japan passed away shortly after that. He did give seven hundred million dollars to the company UM to try to help bolster it's it's success, it didn't really help. In two thousand three, they announced a merger of Semi Corps, which made Pachinko machines and

things like that. Yeah, and then Namco said no, we want to buy Sega, and then both of those fell through. And then a few months later Sammy Corp. Came back and bought Sega. But in two thousand twelve they had to restructure again, so they cut more jobs, they closed multiple branches, and they announced that they would only be focusing on developing digital contents so free to play in phone apps and things like that. Yeah, far cry from the old arcade and console days. Yeah, and then driving

their existing IPCA Sonic. Sonic still comes out with games and people still like them for the most part, so they can make some money licensing that intellectual property. And since then they've even they've even made a few acquisitions, and like I said, there have been some talks of a comeback recently. Yeah. So so they continue to make games for other platforms, but they haven't shown any sign of getting back into the the home console market. Apart

from there were rumors every few years. Yeah, but I heard about something in twenty but I couldn't substantiate it. Yeah, so we hear this pretty much every few years, like, let's wait till e three and maybe we'll hear another announcement of this beloved game company coming up with a console again. And honestly, there might be a possibility of that happening. You know, we've got the next generation of consoles right around the corner. Sony's getting ready with their

big announcement for the PS five. They've talked a little bit about it already. There's always rumors about what the next Microsoft console is going to be, So maybe we will see another attempt in the future. It is very challenging to get into a market that has been dominated by three powerhouse players. I think their biggest hope would be really banking on those gamers who are now grown

up in middle aged. All that hurt to say, and now have you know, expendable income to relive their fond memories. I'm sorry, I can't hear you my elderly ears. I was putting myself into that category as well. Jonathan, there there are a couple of fun facts. I do want to at least say one of them, which is the Sega Genesis motto, which is Genesis does wet nintend don't. Yeah, now I remember that ad campaign. Yeah, And there's some other things we could talk about. We didn't mention the

infamous game gear. That was a handheld game system that Sega came out with, but it was plagued with problems, not the least of which was if you wanted to play it, you better have a steady supply of batteries on hand because it drained those suckers and it took like six from That was not the most efficient game

system out there. And um, yeah, there's there's a lot more we could say obviously about Sega, but that was the real nut of the problem that they faced was that they probably, rather than go with the Sega Genesis peripherals, should have thrown more attention and support behind and that

might have given the Saturn a real chance of success. Instead, they kind of confused the market and cannibalize their own sales, and then by the time the Dreamcast came around, which was again truly an awesome console, they just didn't have enough goodwill out there and enough enthusiasm too push them hard enough so that when Sony came out with a p S two, they could really compete, which is a shame. But you know, we don't know what the future holds.

Maybe we will see Sega return truly from the brink. I would say right now, they're still beyond it because they're a shadow of what they used to be. But who knows. Maybe once they do the Sonic the Hedgehog redesign for the movie. Yikes, I've seen some good fan art of what the redesign could look like. Yeah, but

that's fan art, I mean maybe. Honestly, I was surprised to see that a company would take that initial reaction so seriously as to go that incredible step, because I mean that is that that's not a small endeavor to redesign, reanimate, re render all of that work, because you figure they must be almost done with the movie by the time they're releasing trailers, at least a good portion of the movie, and then you're essentially deleting the character and reinserting the

character with possibly with the same animations, but it's still a totally different design. Is gonna cause all that rendering to back again well, especially after researching this episode and talking about Sega. I hope that the redesign is successful and that a new generation falls in love with little Blue Speedy Hedgehog. Yeah I do too. I hope you enjoyed that episode of Business on the Brink. That was

an interesting show to work on. Big shout out to my co host Ariel who I mean, you just don't know. She did so much work on that show. She was an incredible researcher and organizer and was a joy to work with. Uh. We also did large Nerdron Collider together, which is currently on hiatus but is planning to come back very soon. She's actually on vacation right now with her family, so wishing her all the best. Wishing you all the best. Hope you are happy and healthy and safe.

I'll be getting there soon enough. It's just a little momping the road and uh yeah, that's it for this episode. If you would like to leave me a message, there are a couple of ways you can do that. You can send me a voice message by going to the I Heart Radio app, navigate to the text stuff page. There's a little microphone icon that you can click on

and then leave up to a thirty second long voice message. Uh. And you can even let me know if you would like us to use the audio in an episode and we will lea use that to help launch an episode, or you know, you can just tell me what your ideas or your quest or anything like that. Or if you don't want to leave a voice message, you can also always leave a message to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff

is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Nine