Today marks 59 years since the gaming company first known as Service Games – later SEGA – opened their doors and began providing gaming entertainment to the world. To mark the event, the official Sega Japan and many of Sega’s arcade location Twitter accounts have been busy celebrating. That has either been marked with chili dogs (Sonic the Hedgehog’s favorite food) or where Sega arcade employees spell out SEGA with their bodies. Here’s the better looking one of those I’ve found:
https://twitter.com/SEGA_niihama/status/1135374466219823105
The company also posted this video to YouTube to celebrate, which includes plenty of love for arcade machines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fTspzsuItA
As we’ve discussed in the past, Sega didn’t start off as a home console gaming company, but an out-of-home entertainment provider, first with vending and jukebox machines, then soon after that, electromechanical arcade games that would provide an alternative to pinball machines for various locations. Some of those games were quite interesting and were the focus I wrote about for Sega’s 55th anniversary.
Sega has also put together a 59th anniversary page in Japanese, where it showcases a number of Sega items, including one (possibly the first?) of their early machines, the Sega 1000 Star jukebox. For their latest arcade title, that would be ATV Slam, and of course they are always working on the next thing. I’d expect to see what it is at IAAPA 2019.
With so many games released over the years, it makes for a broad question to ask: “What’s your favorite Sega game?” So, what is it? And what do you hope to see them do over the next year?
For me it’s the house of the dead that sticks out in my mind the most. They’ve done so many games over the years so it’s so hard. I would like them to do another virtua cop 4, another ghost game (ghost squad series) and also a reboot of primeval hunt as it was so underrated game but imperfect.