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Service Games: The Rise and Fall of SEGA: Enhanced Edition Paperback – December 18, 2013

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 171 ratings

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New Edition! More content, images, and corrected text and facts. Monochrome edition.Starting with its humble beginnings in the 1950's and ending with its swan-song, the Dreamcast, in the early 2000’s, this is the complete history of Sega as a console maker. Before home computers and video game consoles, before the internet and social networking, and before motion controls and smartphones, there was Sega. Destined to fade into obscurity over time, Sega would help revolutionize and change video games, computers and how we interact with them, and the internet as we know it. Riding the cutting edge of technology at every step, only to rise too close to the sun and plummet, Sega would eventually change the face of entertainment, but it’s the story of how it got there that’s all the fun. So take a ride, experience history, and enjoy learning about one of the greatest and most influential companies of all time. Complete with system specifications, feature and marketing descriptions, unusual factoids, almost 300 images, and now enhanced Europe specific details, exclusive interviews, and more make this the definitive history of Sega available. Read and learn about the company that holds a special place in every gamer’s heart.Funded on Kickstarter.
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; First Edition (December 18, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1494288354
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1494288358
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.41 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.09 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 171 ratings

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Sam Pettus
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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
171 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2015
This is a comprehensive history of SEGA from the beginning to where they are at now. The focus is on the console hardware and on the business strategies surrounding their creation. There are useful references to games and I had fun buying games as I read about them. You probably know how the story ends, but until you read this book you don't know the real story. I found the book captivating and finished wishing there were more, and maybe there is.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2014
First of all, this book is very, VERY informative. I can't imagine the painstaking work that had to go into gathering all this information. I think it also give a more educated outlook on what happened behind the scenes at Sega. For example, for years, many fans blamed Sony and the PS2 for killing the Dreamcast and Sega's hardware business. The reality was that Sega killed themselves with the Saturn and simply could not recover from that kind loss to remain competitive. Another myth is that Sega was too stubborn to have DVD playback in the Dreamcast. The reality was that the technology for it was expensive back in the day and they simply couldn't afford it. My personal favorite chapter was the Sega Saturn chapter. It's without a doubt the most tragic chapter in the entire book, but that's also what makes it so epic. That's not to say no other chapter presented that kind of feeling. The end of the Dreamcast chapter almost had me in tears. They tried so hard. They deserved to win and did everything they could do to make that happen, but in the end they lost. I guess it was really sad for me because as someone who gee up with Sega consoles, Sega may have financially revered after the Dreamcast, but the Sega of today was not the Sega of my youth. I think the games speak for that.

There are a few things that will stop me from giving this book a perfect five stars. While some of the information has been updated (I used to read the online version of what was put into this book), some of it wasn't. For example, there's a part of the book that discusses Nintendo and Namco's relationship and how it's strained to this day because of how Nintendo screwed over Namco during the 8-bit era. While this may have been true more than 15 years ago, it is simply not true anymore. For over a decade, Nintendo and Namco have collaborated on a variety of projects, the most recent being the upcoming Smash Bros. game. Also, throughout the 2000's, Namco had brought several games from it's Tales series over to Nintendo hardware and at least two of those games were exclusive to Nintendo hardware for a while. Not to mention that almost 10 years ago, Nintendo and Bandai collaborated into a holdings company, meaning that Namco has been under new leadership, and whatever hate may have been left within the company is now completely irrelevant. So not only does the information seem terribly dated, it also sounds fanboyish, although I do believe that it was an honest oversight and not meant as a jab at Nintendo. Another complaint is the style in how some of the book was written. While I do understand that the source material did come from a fan site and is meant for diehard fans and gamers, some of the writing comes off as fanboyish, but not in a biased sense. It's more like hearing a couple of kids talk about their favorite gaming company rather than a professional book writer talking about their favorite gaming company. While I think the book definitely shouldn't be bland, I just wish there was some sort of balance in how it was written. The third complaint are the images and the formatting of the images. While I'm sure budgeting restrictions prevented the use of color, a lot of the black and white images looks terrible. It's the fault of the people who made the book. It's just that some of those images aren't meant to be in black and white. Also, some of the images are rather pixilated, which seems rather unprofessional in my opinion. The final complaint are about the interviews at the end of the book. It's obvious that the people being interviewed do not speak english as a first language, but don't you think you guys could have done some correcting on that? There are some parts of the interviews that are almost unreadable because of how broken the english is.

While it may sound like the complaints outweigh the compliments, that's far from the truth. This book gets four stars from me because the sheer amount of the information the book contains outweigh a few of the complaints. That being said, if there were ever a future re-release of this book that addressed some of the complaints, I would probably buy it again.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2015
Certainly exhaustive. This text is a great, nostalgic look at what many consider the Golden Age of gaming.

As a proud Sega kid growing up, I was there for the magic of the Genesis and the Game Gear, and even attempted to get our 32x to run with the 1st model Sega. Didn't work! And like many others jumped ship to the PS1 in '97. These are issues discussed in the book. The author is obviously invested in video game history loves Sega.

Highly recommended, fun read.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2015
If you are expecting a well sourced, footnoted history book with quotations and one you can cite with confidence, this is not it. If you want to iimagine a friendly and knowledgeable friend chatting to you up about Sega in the 1990s, going back and forth, offering opinions as fact, sometimes misspeaking or getting information wrong, overly focusing on recent events, being contradictory sometimes in the same breath...then this is the book for you. Its less authoritative history and more like telling a familiar story with liberties.

In a book about 480 pages long, it dismisses about 30 years of Sega history before the Master System in 20 pages. The 8 bit master system gets about another 20 pages. The 16 bit Genesis is discussed separately from the Sega CD, which is discussed separately from the 32x, which cause the reader to bounce back and forth trying to build a timeline of concurrent units. The photos are not in chronological order, with the SNES coming before a Genesis, and the photo of the Genesis with the Power Base Converter is missing the key word "Converter". The author slips into 1st person (his love of Beavis and Butthead), opinions are given as blunt statements without referencing any survey or source ("To the typical American consumer, long inured to a steady stream of high pitched advertising, every video game system was a “Nintendo”), and some facts are blatantly wrong ("–Exidy’s Death Race suffered from a similar public outcry back in the 1980s" - Death Race is a 1976 arcade game ). Some statements are poorly worded ("Turning the SMS’s US fate over to Tonka proved a fatal mistake from which Sega never really recovered" - actually Sega recovered just fine, and if he meant the Master System, you cannot recover market share you never had to begin with, and Mattel, a toy company, had marketed its first video game console just fine). There are glimpses of gold not mined, for instance Kalinske was there at Mattel during the Intellivision years - that's interesting in looking in how he steered Sega of America a few years later, but its not explored. Neither is much about Sega of Japan's inner workings of the execs, or after exploring Sega's set back against Accolade why it was that Accolade had to capitulate to Sega's terms. The author is conflicted on his own opinions within the same paragraph, such as saying a cartridge adapter to the Saturn would have been an expensive and unnecessary oddity for a CD-ROM based console, but in retrospect may have been a good idea - so which is it, the oddity or a good idea, or what about the CD ROM based Sega CD games?

The book does have good information, its just still in Beta. Like having the Table of Contents in the back, its a book you find yourself wanting to interrupt - to expand here, to pin down an opinion there, to clarify this, and tie together that. It doesn't. The harshness of the subheadings, like "Anatomy of a Failure" made me want to use that as the title of my review, but I thought that was too harsh. Maybe a 2nd edition will reorganize, build a list of references, interview more substantial people, oh, and removes comments like "The rest, as they say, is history" .
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Top reviews from other countries

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Louis Jean Novaes Bernabé
4.0 out of 5 stars Muito bom
Reviewed in Brazil on April 2, 2021
Historia da Sega
John Doo
5.0 out of 5 stars A fast paced look at Sega
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2021
Ever since I saw my school mates Sega Mega Drive I just wanted to have one of my own. I loved the console and was puzzled and dismayed when Sega nearly failed. This book is a well researched ,fast paced and fascinating book about how Sega started and nearly stopped complete with interviews from staff including Sega's founder ' David Rosen' and other people who worked at Sega including military personal and game developers across the world. The book includes technical data covering both Sega and Nintendo consoles and it was quite a surprise to learn that Nintendo considered using the same chip set as the Mega Drive in their Super Nintendo . Sega's first attempt to enter home console gaming with their SG1000- 3000 Consoles was unsuccessful due to a combination of factors including Nintendo signing up developers using contracts that banned them from developing for other systems and Sega's lack of experience. The next console ' Master System' was also unsuccessful in North America but when it was released in England, Europe and South America it became a phenomenal success due to the operating system being three times faster than the Nintendo system. I cannot help but get the impression that if Sega had concentrated on these markets in the first place the organisation would have been more successful. Sega's 16 bit console 'Mega Drive' became Sega's biggest success owing to aggressive marketing such as including free games and the creation of Sonic the Hedgehog. Both American and European adverts for Sega's consoles are reproduced throughout the book and details of the organisations TV advertising are well documented ,The North American adverts depicted a character screaming SEGA!. In England the adverts consisted of pirate TV style adverts which depicted a man hijacking a regular television advert to advertise Sega. I vaguely remember these adverts but one which sticks in my memory was for the Sega Game Gear which depicted a man in a sleeveless outfit standing on a disused oil platform in a desert playing Sonic on a Game Gear before jumping on to the back of a Harley Davidson being driven by a red haired woman { This advert is not mentioned in the book}. From memory Nintendo's Television advert depicted a teenage boy playing on a game boy whilst a voice over introduced the console. Sega never appeared to directly advertise their products on television and instead relied on gimmicks. I also learned about other events that shaped the Mega Drives success such as the violent game Mortal Kombat increasing sales of the Mega Drive due to the console being able to depict blood and guts whilst the Nintendo system could not which certainly proved their slogan 'Sega does what Nintendon't '. Unfortunately Sega's success resulted in friction between the American and Japanese parts of the organisation due to differences in doing business .Which resulted in Sega going rather crazy during the early1990's in a bid to keep ahead of Nintendo, Sega produced loads of different systems ranging from the acclaimed 'Pico' to the 32X and often producing hybrid's of the systems such as the Multi Mega which incorporated a Mega Drive , Mega CD and a CD player in one portable unit. Sega of Japans president ' Hayao Nakayama' goes from hero to a utterly reckless villain as his decision to take more control of American and European operations resulted in the 32 bit Saturn which was such a mess that even if Sony had never released the Playstation it still would have failed. Incredibly despite nearly killing Sega he still stayed with the organisation in a ceremonial position which certainly does not make sense to me. The last console 'Dreamcast' had so much potential and deserved to do a lot better than it did especially as it was internet based but Sega was too tarnished to really triumph again which is probably why Sega marketed and advertised the 'Dreamcast' name only. The book is written almost entirely from an American perspective but has a small section at the end covering Sega's European operations. Overall it is a very fascinating book
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ady
4.0 out of 5 stars DIe Geschichte von SEGA schön zusammengefasst.
Reviewed in Germany on August 6, 2015
Ob alles faktisch korrekt ist, kann ich nicht sagen. Das Buch liest sich auf jeden Fall gut und man erfährt, warum das Unternehmen am Abgrund stand und die Hardwaresparte aufgeben musste. Einzig die Zeitsprünge sind manchmal etwas fordernd, weil nicht chronologisch sondern thematisch gegliedert wird. Für Videospielefreunde ein Muss.
Lannoy29
5.0 out of 5 stars Passionnant!
Reviewed in France on August 28, 2014
Une plongée très bien documentée sur une compagnie qui accompagné de nombreuses heures de divertissement pour les trentenaires d'aujourd'hui. Les challenges et les échecs de SEGA sont à méditer : ils invitent à ne jamais se reposer sur ses lauriers
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Nicolas Garcia
5.0 out of 5 stars A must have for any SEGA fan out there!
Reviewed in Spain on June 29, 2014
Sam Pettus does an extraordinary work and he manages to tell us the tale of SEGA, a company with great games, great consoles and that completely failed the console wars against Nintendo and Sony. Service Games is the story of the loser but also probably the best game company of my generation.
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