I was in India in 1995 and 1999 and purchased mega drive games from a market in Punjab. They had games from the Europe alongside pirated games on the same shelves. I remember picking up Bare Knuckle 3 and Sunset Riders for the equivalent of £1 each.
Agreed. I read somewhere that some people around Europe managed to contact Japanese tourists before they left Japan and without Internet for part of it, then told them which games they wanted, and the Japanese tourists would bring them, which is why imports are so common in European retro game stores. I really wonder how and more! I hope someone will make a documentary or something as I was too young to know about this in the 90s..! Makes me wonder, how did they manage to make possibly Japanese systems work on PAL CRTs, I managed to make a Japanese Wii work, but it's supposedly hard to do?? How about the 🔌? How did that go? A market for specially made cables? Swapping cables? There's travel plugs, but they are slow as all heck, so if you travel anywhere with your switch or something, try to buy the local 🔌 as it works much faster and your system doesn't mind (if it gets hot, I once brought my pal 3DS to Cape Verde, and while they have the exact same 🔌 as the one that came with my system, it became really hot, so it depends on the quality of the electricity or something).
Piracy is just inevitable, drm and region locking never really served a pupose. Especially in poor regions of the world where they didn't even try to adapt.
I get it though. As regional distributors paid for rights and if you did that, then everyone bought from wherever the currency made the game cheapest you'd lose sales. You talk to anyone in the US they can't believe how big a publisher Virgin Interactive was in Europe.
My neighbour growing up was a retired HK policeman who moved back to the uk. His console had broken so he gave all his HK megadrive carts to me as his kids were into their saturn at the time, around 100 or so, all the Japanese shaped cart. The only one I still have is sonic 3 as it was the only one I could actually use with my Megadrive at the time! My parents took all the rest to the tip as they were "unplayable". My first experience of region locking! Still have not forgiven them to this day. I never to this day have played sonic 3 without it being inserted into S&K...
Well in same year Sega mega drive was selling at Rs 3500 this amount of money was very huge back then even middle class salary was only Rs 1000 I guess. I remember my uncle bought terminator 2 NES of Rs 600 in 1998 and 600 was also huge amount of money back in 1998 especially for Video games.
probably the wildest story I've heard from this channel! I've heard the stories of other regions' retro systems like I think Korea had a very interesting take on the NES?! and of course brazil's legendary stories about the SMS of course. But the Megadrive in india is a new one on me! I do love that sweet gold logo, though.
@@lvl90dru1d oh yeah I know they have some stories, like that whole dendy famicom thing? yeah seeing other countries' variants on the retro stuff was always a trip to me!
Sega by Shaw Wallace Whiskey A combination you would never see coming But that was fun to learn, how they marketed the Mega Drive back then. I wonder how long they kept that up with each model. Wait was the Saturn, and Dreamcast marketed the same way? That must have been surreal.
The 90s was indeed the most in your face sega marketing. It continued a little into the Saturn era. More so in America. The UK was a tad more experimental.
@@slopesgameroom I really miss those days sometimes. Sega used to be the one that messed with Nintendo. But it was not meant to last forever. Then again, Sega can still surprise us.
Im from India and im not even aware of this, back in the day we normally got cartridges which were in the shape of the US versions and some in the Japanese regions...in India the NES was in two forms Samurai and Media , whereas sega was just Sega nothing changed??
I'm from South India and was not even aware of the existence of official Nintendo and SEGA presence in the Indian market (?) lmaooo. All I knew when I was young were a ton of FamiCom clones (that were referred to using the umbrella term "Video Game") with the cartridges resembling their Japanese counterparts. I still remember owning lot of "999999 games in 1" cartridges :D
@@naughtiusmaximus789 Good times. but the famicom clones that i knew but SEGA part where it was partly owned Shaw wallace . i mean i remember getting a legitimate SEGA mega drive .
India’s own version of Brazilian region of Sega games. I just love that they called the NES Samurai and the commercials for that one is funny. It’s incredible that countries around the world tried to make their own regions which is besides Europe and Japan.
And then there were all of the Mega Drive/Genesis games released in Russia. The cases are smaller than typical cases. Here are the ones that I have; A small drop in the bucket as to what's out there: Angry Birds in Russia Angry Birds: Star Wars Combat Cars Fix-It Felix Jr. Harry Potter Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Iraq War 2003 Plants vs. Zombies
The gold logo/PAL label on JP shell games were sold all along South Asia. I’ve had games shipped from the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and others. I do love that gold logo!
Sorry OCD moment... I have to point this out... The SCARCITY is LIMITED? Limited Scarcity surely means No Scarcity, right? Availability is Limited, surely, right?
Some great information in this video, it's a SEGA market rarely covered on English RU-vid channels, good work. Should note a lot of PAL cartridges were a world revision and would run perfect at 60Hz if plugged into a NTSC system, same is true of NTSC game which would run at 50Hz on a PAL console. The 32X was a good way to get around the Japanese cartridge shell as it fitted both. Later games were region locked and a number were PAL optimised in one way or another and so won't run correct at 60Hz, normally these were region locked. Of course you can use Game Genies and bypass cartridges to get around it. When you go deep into the subject it gets very complex, did a video on it awhile back if interested look for "50hz PAL Sega Mega Drive games run at 60hz on a NTSC Genesis" it's a bit dated and needs an update, but gives a good overview.
Enjoyed that. Sonic 1 PAL would play at full speed in a 60hz machine so it’s still worth having. Only the post 1992 mega drive PAL games had any kind of PAL 50hz optimisation. The system dictates the hz not the games on those pre 92 titles. Virtua Racing tho is 94 so yeah the PAL one of that is pretty much just a curiosity piece these days. The Asian games from areas like Hong Kong do also come with a manual in Chinese so that’s a good way to tell a specific area.
@@slopesgameroom Anytime. Yeah it’s around then they start region locking titles and applying some effort to PAL titles. If you look at the back of PAL boxes from late 92 onwards they often say “for play only on PAL and SECAM”. Not all these titles are region locked from this date (some are clever and recognise they are playing on a 60hz machine and operate normal.) but that’s the general rule. Streets of Rage 2 is a great oddity. The Genesis game is region locked for Japanese/PAL machines but the Japanese/PAL is locked the other way instead of Japanese being locked for PAL etc.
I used to play Bootleg NES in the early 2000s but never knew SEGA and Nintendo officially released them in India through collaboration, most likely due to the Name change but even then I've never heard about the "SEGA" system.
@@slopesgameroom I always bring up Mother 3 as an example, the only reason the West even got to play it was through ROM downloads, the Big N sat on it too long so people took the Thanos approach and just ported it themselves
I got a PAL modded JP Mega Drive when I was in Thailand and it had a warranty sticker over one of the screws. The RF modulator was actually fixed to the ground plane on the left side of the board with a hole that allowed you to plug/unplug your RF switch externally. They even made a clean cut for a frequency switch which I repurposed into a JP/NA region switch after gutting the rest of the mod. I actually used the gutted RF modulator‘s shielding to mount a triple bypass board with miniDIN since the JP consoles don’t have an RF modulator on the back (PAL/NA users typically replace the RF modulator with a Gen2/MD2 9P miniDIN). All in all, it came out really nice!
1:11 Well more than that, it was only called Sega Genesis here in the US. A pretty stark contrast to the Famicom brand only being used in Japan as Nintendo wanted to appeal to the home computer market in Japan and sidestep the market crash in the US by selling the console as a toy (not sure about the rest of the world though as the crash only happened in the US). There's really no reason I can think of as to why they repeated this with the Super Famicom/NES though and it would be the last time they used either name instead opting for global brand synergy, much as was the case with the Sega Saturn with Sega CD being Mega CD outside of the US and 32X being an absolute wildcard with Super 32X in Japan, Sega Genesis 32X in the US, Mega 32X in Brazil and Mega Drive 32X everywhere else.
With the Sega Genesis name, Mega Drive was trademarked by some disk manufacturing company over here in the US, though AFAIK that disk company ultimately never used the name, to the point that I thought it was nothing more than a rumor.
@@ExtremeWreck Found some on USPTO. If I had to guess, it's the Mega Drive Systems/MegaDrive Systems trademarks filed on October 1st, 1991, registered on September 15, 1992 and cancelled on March 22, 1999, literally a year after the console came out over here.. Literally none of the rest shared any possible market.
@@mattwo7 I would never forget Mexico, the most delicious country on earth in my opinion. North America includes Mexico, although if you listened to that scummy Trump guy then you would be forgiven for believing it didn't. Well, as forgiven as a person could be for taking Trump on his word. Some of the most lovely people I have ever met are Mexicans but they are commonly mistreated in USA. I just hope that as time goes on and kids are smarter than their parents, the prejudice will go away
It’s funny, in 2018 the Tetris Company officially supported a new Tetris game for the Retrobit handheld system the Go Retro portable …. So there’s an official Tetris game exclusively available on a famiclone!
6:14 That sounds like Ernie Anderson. He was monster movie host "Goulardi" and voiced promos for the ABC network for many years. He also did the promos for Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first few seasons.
What was the time line for the Indian variant? Was this around the time the others happened or did they release it way after it was discontinued elsewhere?
Regional control went nowhere as the years go by due to some bootlegers who were talented and amazing at that time in pirating. What they did may be illegal but they were talented and amazing, nonetheless.
you know, I've always been curious about the computer/video game scene was like. Like, are there any consoles or computers that were 100% exclusive, or games too?
@@slopesgameroom the zeebo is neat, but there's no way that there aren't at least region specific games for the consoles in those areas. I've never been able to find out anything about Indian computers before, but seeing as they had fami and sega clones, they definitely would have bootleg games too, especially if the real stuff was too expensive.
Slope, I have a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog which is a cross between your pal version and the Genesis version. It looks like the pal boxart but has Genesis badging logos.
If I'm not wrong, your thumbnail for this video originally had "Indian" as standalone white text. And I think I much preferred that version. It looked cleaner.
Interesting i assumed sega and other gaming companies ignored that region before the 2000s considering how long it took them to release stuff even in richer countries like Australia and my own experience traveling in developing countries in Asia in the 90s and 2000s (i have never been to India) when i visited them at first they had no video games at all i took my game boy and the locals did not even know what it was later on they got a lot of bootleg games. but maybe India was already a lot better off than i thought but i remember hearing a lot more bad news about India and i noticed that when i first used the internet there where almost no Indians online but these days India is the most dominant country on RU-vid so they have improved a lot maybe these games where only played by the richest people in the country and was seen as a luxury item also does anyone know what the launch dates are for these consoles.
Yes and no, the latest games that were played on the most expensive hardware were played by the wealthy, everyone else either stayed in the famiclone era or some other pirated system era
This is definitely neat but aside from the anesthetics of the Japanese Mega Drive cart shell I like our American version better. For example the silver with Sega Genesis logo has a very smooth look that turns somewhat gaudy in gold. I do love the MD in red and green but wouldn't trade it for "High Definition Graphics" for anything. I do prefer the look of the European Mega Drive 2 over the Genesis 2 especially the color scheme. It makes it look less like a cheap toy and more about gaming goodness.
@@slopesgameroom I get it man. I personally hate the way the red box Genesis games look. The 32X cardboard boxes in the US were even worse. Yes, give me my high-tech urine colored yellow box that just screams 32-bit...Sega! One of the coolest looking boxes for me is the blue European Mega Drive plastic cases. They were top shelf looking and always said "Yeah, I'm that cool." The Sega CD cases were close if they weren't so damn big. ;)
I had nearly 350 MD Games until 2017! ( started Collecting in early 2000s) Sold them all! I had couple of Asia versions (one comes to mind is this Young Indiana Jones Title) i allways thougt they were Hong Kong or Singapur Versions! How about a Look at the South Korean Alladin MD versions next!?
Honestly, I think I have exhausted this topic by this point mate, it was fun to make this video but I'm already well underway with something completely different
Sold my retro collection maybe 15 years ago, last time I was in between jobs. Biggest mistake I ever made because that was when prices started to go up and some games I sold off, I couldn't afford to get again 🤕 So was a big fan of the virtual console on wii and wiiU and then the recent game collections and switch online selections nowadays 🤓
As always the only way to really beat piracy is to make your product attractive enough. TecToy is the poster child for absolutely bloody nailing this. Ever more interesting SMS variants with plenty of built in games at prices normal people in Brazil could actually afford. It's not so bad there in that respect now but then you get the point the machine is an institution so much it doesn't even matter. Especially as the internals now really do make TecToy ones official bootlegs as they're mostly emulator boxes.
Because 1 India was part of the uk and the language is still co official despite not being native and when these commercials came out that was more recent nowadays there is less English in India 2 these games where for posh rich kids since video games were not affordable to the average worker in India before the 2000s. 3 India has so many languages if they would put it in Hindi they could only market it to a certain region of the country while English is not the biggest language in India it is more spread out around the country and also back then you did not have as many tv channels as later on so they had to make it for the entire country.
In south Africa for sure and probably in some north African countries like Egypt or Algeria but i assume not in most of the continent unless you count bootlegs.
I think the Genesis was sold in the Gulf officially, or at least I think that's the case. I definitely remember seeing some official looking cover art from those regions for games like Urban Strike & Mutant League Hockey.
@@slopesgameroom :D This reminds me of a football commentator who kept calling Chile "Mexico" during one of their games (not against Mexico, btw), and even he couldn't figure out why he was doing it.
I am lucky enough now to own a hong kong pal/ntsc MD (fully boxed with sonic) and so i play sonic japan these days and i always thought the japanese box art was far better but mine does both carts native no need for any convertor etc. Mine is a variation on the one slopes showed here i got it for £40 just saw the prices i did well 🤣
I think we all know the reason why game prices have gone up so high and that is thanks to heritage auctions and wata games and their scheme to overprice the market for profit. I'm not a collector but clearly those companies are ruining video game collecting
If you have played any of the mini systems, or played any compilation games of old Megadrive games on an XBox or Playstation then you have played emulated games. The main difference is that these are usually tweaked to iron out some of the wrinkles since emulators aren't perfect. It's getting easier to do. If you own a Nintendo Switch with the online subscription then there are NES, SNES, Megadrive and N64 games available to play. They are all emulated
@@slopesgameroom : you’ve not figured this out yet? Someone like you does a video, then the other bigger guys come in a copy you.. before you know if, shouty video game guy who thinks swearing is funny is doing a video, and prices go skyhigh ;P
You're as bad as me buying a Russian Dreamcast game because although it was unofficial and its a Doom mod (Plutonium project) it was still pressed on a disc rather than burned and it had a fascinating semi official factor.
for some reason the subtitles incorrectly say "mexico" every time you say "brazil".....you also show the mexican flag in the video instead of the brazillian one.....and i only know it SHOULD be "brazil", like you say out loud, and not "mexico" like the subs say, because i saw that SSFF video about sega brazil.
So sorry about this. I am going to delete the subs in the morning if they haven't fixed themself by then. It was a mistake that I uploaded an early version of the script in a rush to add subs and now RU-vid's playing silly bollocks not updating them!
I prefer to play the real thing when I can. When I die, they probably end up in trash cause I have no reason to sell them. They will die glorious with me in the battle.
I feel like that people who collect to put things on the shelf, like you, might be the biggest contributor to the recent price increase in many retro games. There are lots of games that have a price that the game's experience cannot justify, in my view, but if people aren't going to play them anyway, that's no big deal...
The reason the price hike is so high is due to retro collecting becoming more popular and people buying for the sole intension to sell at a higher rate
@@slopesgameroom According to Sega Retro video games became popular over there thanks to an unknown distributor importing the Mega Drive 2 model and from 2005 to 2012, Sega games were sub-imported by New Era, which is when the overlap happened because as I'm sure you know, they were also the sub-distributor in the rest of the "Asia/PAL Asia" region.
Bit silly to say that because 50hz isn't actually inferior to 60hz. First of all 50hz doesn't flicker like 60hz does which looks better and is better for your eyes. Most importantly, Sega didn't need to slow the whole system down in order to sync to 50hz but that's how they chose to do it and that's why it wasn't as good as the 60hz machines. The alternative could have been to keep the core system running at the same speed and only sync the video circuit to 50hz, meaning fewer frames to render per second, meaning that a PAL system would have more resources to dedicate to each frame of action. The PAL system would have been the better system to have if they had done that
so now i know how i was playing 8 bit games back then but why it was not a nintendo console, must be fake or clone as i assumed, becasue i noticed that my friend had original nes and cartridges were bigger than of mine, i used to rent games and one time i got that big nes cartridge which didn't fit, although i did had original genesis console back then afterwards
