Mega Drive/Master System Stand: I'm nuts.

Chalk this up as one of the craziest Sega related purchases I have ever made. The game shop I bought it from said they paid £600 for this back when the Mega Drive was the best selling format at the shop (15 years or so ago I'd imagine), and I got it for the starting bid of £50 one morning a week ago on a whim on eBay.

My dad picked it up all the way from Chester yesterday (he does a delivery job driving all over the country, so he picked it up while he was up that way), just in time for the consoles' 20th Anniversary since it's American 'Genesis' (ick) launch. To say it's big would be an understatement, it's 190cm tall and 56cm across, so about the size of our freezer. At first it looked a bit like the Leaning Tower of Pisa until this morning I figured out that you have to twist each shelf around until they lock in place. It's currently sitting in a room that isn't used much because there is no way it's going up those stairs, and there probably isn't anywhere to put up there anyway.

It has a big square weight at the bottom so it doesn't fall over, and Sega logo stickers on every side. It's not really much to look at until you fill it up with games though, right?

I have just over 100 Mega Drive and Master System games in all, and this thing can hold up to 140 (160 if you include the very top, though they'd probably fall off when you turn it up there). But enough talk, more photos! Click to enlarge yadda yadda..

Sega of Americas Holy Grail

I'm sure if you browse gaming blogs you will have already seen this by now (most likely at Kotaku where they made up some rubbish about Sega forgetting all about it, either from mis-reading or an excuse to take a pop at Sega AKA gaming's whipping boy), but I can't NOT post about this archive of Sega's back catalog that they store at the American offices. Apparently it holds just about every game Sega has ever made or published, as well as all their consoles and peripherals. It truly is a beautiful sight to behold, and they have even more games stacked behind the ones shown in the photos!

A whole draw full of what look like Dreamcast GD-Rs. They even have a list for them all.

More after the jump!

Darn, even more GD-Rs, although according to the writer of the Flickr page they could very well be early builds or prototypes. You whats to guess they have some copies of Propeller Arena and maybe some betas in there?



Goddam that's a lot of Saturn games! The rest are PS2, Xbox and Gamecube games, and when looking quite close up it seems they've kept a bunch of games that were not produced by Sega too.



This appears to be where they keep all their PC releases, of which they seem to have a lot of copies of. There appears to be at least six piles of Sonic 3D there alone, and what do you know: I didn't know they ported Virtual On to the PC.



Even more Saturn games and shelfs full of Japanese and PAL Dreamcast games. Someone wipe the drool from my gob please..



There's a Dreamcast award of some sort her that in the full size photos reads "Sega Dreamcast: 1 million units sold, November 25 1999". Also a bunch of master System games, loads of PS2 and even more of those big PC boxes.



A whole slew of Mega CD games here, many of which I've honestly never even heard of (Bouncers? Wild Woody?). The 2nd shelf seems to be a Nintendo stash, and who knows whats in those hundreds of CD spinals at the bottom. One can hope it's original source codes that they could use to port classics to modern systems. If you find Chu Chu Rocket in there can you port it to Wiiware please?



A tall pile of PAL Dreamcast and on quote "some burns". Having a closer look at these burns shows they they have a propeller Arena demo, a whole bunch of E3 anf TGS demos and even some betas and alphas! Right near the bottom of the pile is "Dee Dee Planet Final". FINAL? Holy shit. If you haven't heard of Dee Dee Planet, it was a Death tank style Dreamcast game that never got released. All we ever saw of it was this video.



Piles and piles of peripherals and consoles, all of them never opened from their boxes. Oh how i would love to have a supermarket sweep through this room..



Finally a photo of an entire wall of shelfs. In the bottom corner they have every Pico game, a bunch of Japanese mega CD and Saturn games, GBA games, even more "burns" and much, much more. It's just so much to take in. Incredible.

Tiny Sega keychains of awesome

As you may of noticed, I have managed to stumble upon quite a few bits of Japanese Sega junk in recent months, from Gashapon Sega gal toys to that art book and the little NiGHTS pre-order bonus. A little while ago (the last few posts have mostly been backlog) I also got my hands on this set of Japanese Sega keychains. They were quite cheap and there was two sets all selaed up amongst them, although one of the designs shown on the card (a white Sega Saturn) was missing. Even though they're keychains you could easily take the chain part off and keep them as little figures, which I've done by sitting them along my Dreamcast game shelfs. They're rather neat, I must say. Photos after the jump!

The whole set (except the Saturn) are based on some of Sega's biggest stars from the 80s. Would have been nice if a Alex Kidd or Wonder Boy was thrown in for good measure. They were made in 1997 so maybe they were made to advertise the Sega Ages Saturn releases. While we only got the one disc with three games on it, in Japan they released a whole bunch of Sega Ages discs, much like they do now for the Playstation 2.

The Opa-Opa of the set is fantastic. It looks just like it does in the games. Now if only it had a 500 Ton weight accessory to go with it.

I don't know how they managed to make a cute toy out of the biker from Super Hang-On, but they achieved it somehow by turning him into a kid sized biker with equally tiny bike and ballooned head. They've even managed to get a teeny Sega logo on his helmet.

Much like the Hang-On bike, they've given Mr.Space Harrier guy (does he have a name?) the super deformed treatment as well. However, the poor little bugger has had a Sega copyright cut into the full length of one of his legs. Both this and the hang-On toy do look remarkably like the in-game characters though, especially when seen from the back like they were in said games. Balloon sized head with standing, of course.

Finally, a toy of Pengo, the penguin that must of dipped into some tie dye to become those odd colours. Again a nice rendition of the character, although personally not one that means a great deal to me. The other three made the set well worth it though, as they were cheaper than most of the other Japanese toys I've picked up recently.

Sega History Collection

This collection of consoles arrived in the post today. A member of the racketboy forums by the name of GrittyKitty sold me this whole lot for just $20 (about £10 in my money).

But no, I didn't just get the console bundle bargain of the century, as these are not the real consoles. Rather, they are miniature toys of them, about one 50th of the original size! Did I fool you? Nah, you probably already looked at the other photos and know I mainly post about stuff like toys at this blog. If I did get a stash of real consoles like this, though, you would probably hear about it anyway! More photos after the jump.

These are, much like the 'Sega Gals' I showed you all a while ago, toys that were sold in capsule machines in Japan, so when you bought one you would never know which one you're getting until you open it, and you have to build them up from many, many pieces. They were produced by a company called Yujin and 200 yen each. Because these were pre-owned, I did not have to do any fiddly sticker work as it was already done for me! Here is each system all set up in backwards order of their release.

First off, here is Sega's last console the Dreamcast, showed cased here by my Ulala toy.The little console, no bigger than a 2p coin, has a opening disc drive and all four controller ports, of which you can actually plug the tiny little controller into any of these just like the real thing! The set also comes with two VMUs, which even have their lids that can be taken off so you can plug the VMUs into the controller or into each other. If that isn't an insane attention to detail for something so small, I don't know what is. Each little system also comes with a replica game or two. Lucky for Ulala, in the case of the Dreamcast you get a tiny copy of Space Channel 5; both the box and the disc, which can be placed in the console if you wish!

Next up is the Sega Saturn in it's model 1 grey glory (I liked the white 2nd model more, but you can't have it all), shown off here by Fighting Viper's Honey. This console miniature comes with a controller, and a box and disc of Virtua Fighter 2. Like the others, you can plug in the controller and insert the disc. This one seems to come with the least pieces. A mini 4MB RAM cart would of been nice. It's still neat none the less, and a great likeness to the chunky old box of joy.

Now for the biggest behemoth of the collection when plugged together, the Mega Drive with both of it's add ons, the 32X and Mega CD. The Mega Drive, the first design with it's iconic gold '16-BIT' lovenly recreated, came with a Master System converter (see further below), a controller, and two game carts: Sonic 1 and Alien Solider. The 32X and Mega CD (Under the system design) were bundled together along with a six button controller, some Mega-CD game I have never heard of and a Virtua Fighter 32X cart. Above is all of these little toys when you plug them together. The disc drive of the Mega CD can slide out to slip a disc in, and the Mega Drive has it's flap of plastic at the bottom so it can plug into the Mega CD, again just like you would with the real deal. Good thing you don't have to sort out all the plugs for this miniature!

Here is where Sega started for many of us: the Master System (I started to get lazy with the photos here, so no character toy showing it off). This the first design of the 8-bit system we got, but the last in Japan. It came with two joypads, a Phantasy Star cart, and Teddy Boy on a 'Sega My Card'. Now if only I could plug it in and play a built in Alex Kidd game. =)

Now this system won't be familiar to everyone unless you lived in japan in the 80's or are a major console collector, as this is a Japanese equivalent of the Master System, the Sega Mark III. Released a couple years earlier, it is a smaller cuter design much like the Famicom compared to our NES. This system comes with two Joypads, a Fantasy Zone cart, some Ninja 'My Card' game and the FM sound unit which you attach to the top of the system (The FM Sound was built into the Master System, which maybe explains why that console was bulkier). This was the third design of the SG-1000, Sega's 2nd console in Japan after the SC-3000. I really dig the design of it.

GrittyKitty also threw in a spare Mega Drive set, which I have with it's Master system converter sitting on top here. The master system games can plug into that too! They have really thought of everything with these toys!

The obsessive attention to detail is quite amazing. Just look at all the games that come with each of the systems. To the untrained eye this photo below makes it look like I own an actual cartridge of Alien Solider! Even the Master System card games have fully detailed artwork on them despite being the size of a pin.

To get the best gist of the scale of these things, here are some comparisons with the real things. For example, see how the Saturn controller is the size of the real controllers start button, and the Dreamcast controller is smaller than the real VMU's screen! Crazy.

Next time: I just bought a Sonic 15th Anniversary statue from Ebay today, so when that arrives in a week or so I will be posting some photos for that! =)