Genesis SEGA didn’t market the Nomad.

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's icon TamagotchiTamaHero24 TamagotchiTamaHero24]

Going through Pandamonium’s video on SEGA’s FY 1997, going through a leaked document. Very harrowing. But in between the many stabbings towards any chance of Saturn’s success, I noticed something else.

No. It is not your fault that you never heard of the Nomad until YouTube (or for some, hearing about it online thanks to early SEGA fan sites and resources like that). SEGA made almost ZERO advertising for the system. This hyper experimental handheld hybrid was created, in a market where the Turbo Express had already failed mind you, was only made available in one country, got nearly no advertising, and then died.

Here’s the page from the leaked internal document breaking down the Nomad’s marketing budget. It’s pathetic.


Hey, SEGA? If you don’t have the marketing budget to advertise a piece of hardware with your full effort behind it… MAYBE DON’T MAKE IT. The Nomad was an unnecessary distraction to extend the life of the Genesis, as SEGA struggled to get anybody to make and finish Saturn projects. Instead of focusing their attention there, they wasted RND time creating a battery hungry stop gap of a handheld that would then go on to never be ordered by stores and rot in their warehouses.

It’s not your fault you never heard about it at the time. One or two print ads and store catalogs are all that existed to sell units of this piece of technology that SEGA developed.

 

[MegaDrive1987]

To be honest I've always felt that games made for a telly don't transition well to smaller screens. Hence only emulating handheld games if I'm using a handheld machine.

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's icon TamagotchiTamaHero24 TamagotchiTamaHero24]

To be honest I've always felt that games made for a telly don't transition well to smaller screens. Hence only emulating handheld games if I'm using a handheld machine.

I think the system may work for, say, an RPG. Pantasy Star IV comes to mind as a good fit for the system. However, the choice of screen makes for an awful experience with many games with heavy motion.

The big issue with RPG’s though, as you said, is that they were designed for a TV. Text comes across rather nastily on a smaller screen.

 

[Bakuma1997]

They weren't a game of X-men that required you to touch JUST RIGHT the actual reset button to proceed that that system accidentally rendered unwinnable?

 

[Ezri_Muldoon]

I mean, it's hard enough to convince people to buy an "Xbox Ally X" (Handheld Steamdeck competitor designed to play Xbox games) when people already own an Xbox at this very moment.

Now imagine trying to sell some one a last generation handheld Xbox or Playstation as the next gen launches.

The Nomad is great, but releasing it in 1995- the same year as the Saturn, Playstation and within less than 12 months of the 32x's launch?
There was no saving the Nomad. Especially when it was stuck using a mid 90's LCD screen.

The Nomad was always a hobbies item, marketing it would have been a waste.
Especially considering the model 3 launched in 1998.
My parents brought me a Megadrive model 2 for Christmas 2000, brand new from a retailer.
Why buy a handheld console when the actual console is still around?

 

[NotReallyHere]

No. It is not your fault that you never heard of the Nomad until YouTube (or for some, hearing about it online thanks to early SEGA fan sites and resources like that)... It’s not your fault you never heard about it at the time.

Please don't assume

I owned a Game Boy as a kid, and remember pining over a Game Gear and always wanting to try it out whenever a classmate would bring it to school. But the Nomad was on a whole different level. At least, in theory! Little Kid Me didn't think too much about the economics (or environmental impact) of chewing through so many batteries, which I think is the main reason I never got either handheld as a birthday gift...

There was one memorable birthday party at a friend's house where a bunch of us kids stayed up all night eating junk food and playing every game in the house. One kid brought his Nomad, and everyone was just captivated by it. Kept grabbing Genesis games off the shelf and popping them in, amazed that they all worked, just like that.

The catch? The kid didn't have any batteries, as his parents would only let him play it with the AC adapter plugged into the wall! So we all sat on the floor, huddled a good two feet away from the wall socket, taking turns passing the Nomad around. What a time to be alive

 

[Graw]

It would have been interesting if Sega had held off on releasing the nomad for a few years and redesigned it with something more like GBA specs and released it before the GBA. I wonder if they would have had better luck on the handheld market then. A system like that in the time when the GBC was the main handheld could have done pretty well if it released with a solid Sonic title and some good arcade ports not available on other Sega systems. It could have even been something they could have maybe even paired with the Dreamcast similar to the GBA/GameCube link.

 

[RanmyakuIchi's icon RanmyakuIchi RanmyakuIchi]

They weren't a game of X-men that required you to touch JUST RIGHT the actual reset button to proceed that that system accidentally rendered unwinnable?

Yup, X-Men Genesis required the player to reset the console to beat a late-game level, which was unwinnable on the reset button-less Nomad.

Makes sense that the Nomad was barely advertised. Genesis and Game Gear ads were everywhere here as a kid in North America, but I never even knew of the Nomad until I saw it in an AVGN episode.

 

[Alarond]

In 1995? that was massive. As a portable, was one of the most powerful you could get, with a HUGE catalog from day 1. And Genesis was a lot more powerful than the GameBoy Color, or a Neo Geo Pocket Color, released both, various years later. It also had the 6 buttons, not 3! so, fantastic for its 2 "Street Fighter 2" games!
Of course, the screen was as good as it could be, by that consumer technology era, but man... that was good (did you ever see the screens of the very EXPENSIVE laptops by then? full of ghostling effect..., but bro... they were portable PCs!!)

If do not remember bad... you can even connect Nomad to a TV, like PSP did A LOT OF YEARS LATER, and be used it as normal Mega Drive with a TV. It had a FULL, extremely reduced, genesis board inside it!

The problem was, obvious, the batteries. Laster about 3 to 5 hours. But, meh, many people played portable consoles inside their home, so... you just needed an adapter, or some extra batteries for long car trips. Remember: Nomad had a backlit screen, which, yes, directly affected the gaming time if you used batteries. You can or not use it, like in Game Gear. Gameboy? did not.
You also had some official rechargeable battery, extending the gameplay maybe 2 hours.

And Nomad was kind of famous in the videogame media and gaming world in the day. Even in Europe, where never was sold. It was showed in magazines.

Young people need to realize, what people liked about Sega in the 90s was its amazing products they offered. Yeah, now you listened all day along "people lost the confidence in Sega because too many hardware, and bla bla bla" Yeah, ok, good propaganda. But no. In Europe they sold well until the very end (yeah, Playstation win the war against Saturn, but boy, it was a massive piracy problem there, and Sega could not affort the piracy like Sony could, by then. They also had a LOOOOT more of money for promotion EVERYWHERE). Nintendo also suffered a lot in Europe during the PSX years cause that.

The problems with Sega in the 90s were others. I will not lie to you: Sega America was a problematic and wasteful subsidiary almost all the time, not well controlled by the parent japanese company. It was chaotic and just bad managed and doing redundant shit, especially its own game studios, with a history of many incomplete or cancelled projects, with only a bunch of good games for Genesis/MD produced. And then, the VERY BAD commercial management of Saturn in US. Let me not start about Bernie Stolar.

But in Europe? They were just cool until 1997-1998, and Dreamcast was doing a good job in 1999-2000. The most dumb project, by far (and for MANY reasons), was the 32x. Mega-Cd? I never seen it as a failure. Sure, they did many promises and was expensive during the first years... but it had too many good games to buy them all. Sadly, many of its RPG gems stayed in Japan... or in America (noth Lunar).

Nomad never had problems about game catalog, and never need too many promotion, it was just a full portable Genesis... a little more expensive.
For example, Nintendo was ultra conservative in the same era. Nintendo sold you a gameboy in form of a SNES cart, without screen and no buttons, and tell you it was a cart that made SNES compatible to GB. Yeah... of course, because it is a GAMEBOY you have to insert in a SNES (using it as a power adapter) to work. Duh?

Instead, during the same era of the Nomad, Philips (and also Sony) released some few portable CD-i models.
ULTRA expensive, some including screen, some even not. Those products, totally futuristic, were pure and almost useless snobbist tech... nobody ever attacks. The problem with them was: they drained battery VERY fast, and all that advanced hard they had, was just to play in "portable mode" a bunch of very crappy games (CD-I was bad even in basic things, like scrolling)... or just bizarre CD interactive titles. But... why you would ever do that? They could NOT reproduce Video CD (the proto-DVD video format), btw.

A Nomad was a LOT more interesting than that.

(CD-i Portable models: Left Sony, Right Philips)