Collection: Mega Drive

The Sega Mega Drive , marketed as Sega Genesis in the United States of America and how Super GameBoy And Super Aladdin Boy in South Korea , it is a console for video games produced by SEGA between 1988 and 1998 . It inaugurated the era of consoles equipped with microprocessors 16-bit , based on the Motorola 68000 , at the time used by computers such as the Amiga

It was distributed in Japan on October 29 , 1988 and in the USA starting from 14 August 1989, while in Europe and in Brazil it was distributed in the last months of 1990 . It was the second system equipped with a CD-ROM reader, thanks to the distribution by the Japanese company of an external device (the Sega Mega CD ) which added not only greater storage capacity but also computing power to the system, allowing faster speeds, more accurate graphics and, of course, CD-quality soundtracks. In Italy it was distributed by Giochi Preziosi.

The Mega Drive was a great success, which Sega never managed to repeat with subsequent consoles. Estimates of the number of units sold vary; for the global total the figure of 29 million is often cited, but the estimate of almost 39 million seems more accurate. Approximately 18.5 million units were sold in North America, 8.4 in Europe and 3.6 in Japan. Although the console managed to achieve great success in North America, Europe and Brazil, in Japan it failed to keep up with two other competing consoles, namely the PC Engine of NEC Corporation and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System from Nintendo.