What Happened to SEGA?

In the early nineties, Sega was everywhere. The Japanese developer and console maker was riding high on the back of games like Sonic the Hedgehog, which arrived in 1991 and became the cool, fast, attitude-soaked answer to Nintendo’s mascot. For a stretch there, Sega didn’t just compete, it set the pace.

So what happened? Recent years have not been kind. Sega has been in steady decline as a force in the market, and sales have dropped sharply. One of its most recent high-profile titles, Aliens: Colonial Marines, sold only 1.31 million copies despite being heavily anticipated and predicted to be a ‘AAA’ release, a number that, for a game with that licence and that much hype behind it, tells its own story.

It’s a long fall from the company that once went toe-to-toe with Nintendo for the soul of the playground. The Sega name still carries enormous nostalgic weight, but a string of underwhelming releases has left it a shadow of the brand that defined an era. The question worth asking isn’t just what went wrong with one game, it’s how a company that was once this synonymous with cool ended up here.