Sega screwed up big time recently. They caused me to buy four of their competeitor's systems and spend over $800 on non-Sega products. I haven't heard of anyone else getting themselves into this situation, but it may be more common than you think...

You're probably rather curious about this by now. It has everything to do with Mega Man, I assure you, so don't touch that dial! The reasons may be apparent to you already if you've read Discussion #01, "The History of Mega Man & Me."

Rockman Mega was developed entirely in Japan by Capcom for the Mega Drive 16-bit game console. This console is better known as the Sega Genesis in North America. Sega chose to port the game to Europe, and, later, the U.S., but not in the traditional cartridge format.

In early 1994 the "Sega Channel" had just been launched and its producers were looking for ways to promote it. They realized that, to draw a larger audience, the Channel needed exclusive games that could only be played by subscribing. The problem with this was that the long development time needed to produce a game made it impractical to design a new game just for the Sega Channel.

Sega needed a game it could safely place exclusively on the Sega Channel to drum up exitement for the new service without risking profits. That game was Mega Man: The Wily Wars, as Rockman Mega became known in English-speaking countries.

MM:TWW was a very big deal. Its arrival on the Sega Channel was printed in almost every major game magazine (except, of course, Nintendo Power). In GamePro, for example, an entire column was dedicated to it in the News section. Now that's coverage.

I'm still unsure if the scheme worked...but even if it did, its results were of enough magnitude to dilute any of its success.

I wasn't immediately impressed with Mega Man. The game moved too slowly and the use of a lifebar in a platform game seemed ignorant. Toward the end of February I had become bored with Shining Force II and went back to Mega Man. After a great deal of work I defeated Wood Man and aquired his weapon, the Leaf Shield. And then, when I used the Leaf Shield for the first time, the concept of Mega Man hit me, and I was...impressed, to say the least.

You must remember that my attitude at that point was "if it's not Sega, it's not good." My Sega evangelism was notorious at school and Sonic was my religion. The act of converting me to a Nintendo user was meant to be an impossible feat...but it was done by one game, and that game was Mega Man: The Wily Wars.

...but how did this fail Sega? There's Mega Man games on Sega systems, right?

How many can you think of? I can think of three. Mega Man 8 was supposedly better on the Saturn, but Saturn MMX4 was inferior to its PlayStation counterpart...and who in the heck would want to play The Best of Mega Man anyways?! One game! One Mega Man game is worth buying from Sega.

That doesn't compare very well to no less than twenty-one Mega Man games on non-Sega systems. One to twenty-one reduces to...one to twenty-one! In order to own every Mega Man game in existance, you must buy twenty-one games from companies other than Sega.

Assuming that MM:TWW had never been featured on the Sega Channel, I may have never discovered Mega Man. I won't waste time wondering about where I would be now, having never heard of Mega Man, but the concept is interesting. I would definitely be playing more Sega games.

By featuring a never-before-seen-on-Sega hero on the Sega Channel, Sega distracted a potentially diehard customer. I am only now returning to my previous interests. Am I the cause of Sega's recent business troubles? Certainly not...

...but it's foolish decisions like MM:TWW that break a company. Looking back on the histories of ruined companies, I see that mistakes at critical points caused them to lose their greatness. Apple Computer could rule the computer industry today, but poor management and misinformed decisions caused them to lose all but a handful of their fame. IBM has been eaten alive by its clones and Atari, blind to the issues that actually made a difference, has been whittled down to a microscopic speck of its former self.

In conclusion, Sega's reasoning at handing gamers a bridge to the other side of the industry may be the same behind its recent failure at remaining a competetive business.