Master System
Sega's machine was the stronger one, and barely one Japanese buyer in ten took it home. The better hardware lost to the better rules.
In October 1985 Sega put the Mark III on Japanese shelves at fifteen thousand yen. Measured against the Famicom it carried four times the system memory, eight times the video memory, and a faster processor. Barely one buyer in ten chose it.
The reason was not inside the box. Nintendo required that games written for the Famicom not appear on rival consoles, and Sega, busy bringing its own arcade titles into the living room, was slow to build the relationships that would have brought other studios to its side. Nobody standing in a Japanese shop in 1986 was comparing clock rates. They were looking at the shelf of games behind the counter, and the shelf was Nintendo's.
Then the machine left home. In Western Europe it found around 6.8 million buyers by 1993. And in September 1989 a Sao Paulo company called Tectoy began building it in Brazil, a market Nintendo never seriously entered: more than eight million machines, sold across four decades. The console Tectoy sells there today is not the one from 1985. It has no cartridge slot at all, and holds 132 games in its own memory. But the name on it is still Master System, and someone is still carrying one home.
It did not become a better machine when it crossed the ocean. It was the same machine. Only the room had changed.
Master System — at a glance
- Released
- 1985 in Japan as the Mark III; 1986 onward abroad as the Master System
- Display
- More memory, more video memory and a faster clock than the Famicom it lost to at home
- Media
- Cartridge — 44-pin in Japan, 50-pin abroad. They are not the same slot.
- Units sold
- Around 1 million in Japan · roughly 6.8 million in Western Europe by 1993 · more than 8 million in Brazil
- Region
- Japanese and overseas machines take physically different cartridges, and the BIOS checks the header besides
What actually happened
Released in Japan as the Sega Mark III on 20 October 1985 at 15,000 yen, and re-released there in October 1987 under the Master System name at 16,800 yen. Abroad it launched from 1986. Sega redesigned the cartridge slot for the export machine, moving from the 44-pin format used in Japan to a 50-pin one, and the export BIOS checks a header inside the cartridge before it will start. In late 1987 the Japanese hardware was revised under the product code MK-2000 with the Yamaha YM2413 FM sound chip, the 3-D glasses adapter and a rapid-fire module built in; the product was still called the Master System, and none of this was ever sold outside Japan.
The idea behind the machine
Sega built the more capable 8-bit machine and then competed as a hardware company against a company that was competing over software. Nintendo's licensing terms kept third-party games off rival consoles; Sega answered by porting its own arcade catalogue, which filled its shelf with Sega and left it there. The machine was not beaten by a better machine.
Things worth knowing about the Master System
- The Japanese machine could sing and the export machine could not. The Yamaha YM2413 FM sound chip was sold in Japan in 1987 as an add-on, then built into the Japanese hardware. It was never sold anywhere else.
- Between 1987 and 1989 Sega shipped many of its games on a single worldwide ROM. Which means some export cartridges still carry the FM sound code for a chip their consoles never had. The music travelled to London and to Chicago sealed inside the game, and never played a note in the rooms it was sold into. Collectors can coax it out today with a modified board or an emulator. Nobody who bought the game new ever heard it.
- Japanese and export cartridges are physically different: 44 pins against 50. Even with an adapter, the export BIOS checks the cartridge header, and some Japanese games will simply refuse to start.
Where this leads
Thinking of buying one? What to check before you do →