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A history of Sega in Canada
| Iridescent selfie messiness | 09/29/24 |
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Date: September 29th, 2024 8:26 PM Author: Iridescent selfie messiness In the sprawling tapestry of video game history, few narratives are as obscure, occluded, and perplexing as that of Sega's peculiar dominion over the Canadian marketplace. While scholars have traditionally focused their gaze upon the well-trod landscapes of the United States and Japan, where Nintendo’s leviathanic presence rendered it the hegemonic overlord of the 8-bit and 16-bit epochs, Canada—at once adjacent and yet anomalous—emerged as a curiously fertile ground for Sega’s peculiar permutations and commercial experiments. Indeed, as the annals of Canadian gaming history reveal (buried deep within forgotten warehouses in Montreal and the haunted office parks of Mississauga), Sega’s penetration into the Canadian psyche was nothing short of unparalleled, spawning a mythology that endures even unto this day.
The saga begins, as all grand narratives do, with a paradox. Although the Sega Genesis struggled to establish its foothold in the American market until the early 1990s, Canada exhibited an inexplicable predilection for the console from the very outset. The reasons for this affinity are manifold and elusive, but contemporary accounts suggest that Sega’s early marketing strategies—emphasizing the rebellious, almost misophonic distinction between Sega’s sleek, hard-edged aesthetic and Nintendo’s softer, more childlike patina—resonated deeply with Canada’s perennial insecurity over its geopolitical identity vis-à-vis the United States. The Genesis, with its sharp blast processing and edgy image, embodied the quintessence of Canadian defensive cosmopolitanism—asserting itself through an ironic embrace of cultural difference even as it assimilated seamlessly into the domestic space.
By 1992, this obscure alignment had solidified into what can only be described as a veritable mania. Where the NES had once held sway, the Genesis now emerged as the quintessential Canadian gaming platform, outselling its rival by an astonishing ratio of nearly 3:1 in key provinces such as British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. While the New York Times and other bastions of American cultural imperialism blithely ignored this seismic shift in the northern markets, Canadian retailers, from Zellers to Future Shop, found themselves utterly overrun by a wave of Sega-philes whose fervor bordered on the evangelical.
However, it was the advent of the Sega CD—the notorious add-on whose legendary failure in the United States has been the subject of ceaseless derision and posthumous scorn—that cemented Canada’s role as the improbable vanguard of Sega’s fortunes. Where in the American context, the Sega CD’s library of inscrutable full-motion video titles and esoteric anime imports were met with abject indifference, Canada welcomed the device with open arms. It is a little-known yet incontrovertible fact that, of the approximately 1.5 million Sega CDs sold in North America, an astounding 80% were purchased in Canada. No fewer than 1.2 million Canadian households became proud owners of this obtuse contraption—an unprecedented feat that transformed titles like Night Trap and Sewer Shark into household names alongside Wayne Gretzky and Bryan Adams.
Why did the Sega CD achieve this astonishing success in a market otherwise considered marginal? The answer, shrouded in the mists of Canadian cultural idiosyncrasy, lies in the peculiarities of the national taste. Canadians, ever the connoisseurs of high-concept absurdity and postmodern irony, relished the Sega CD’s disorienting mélange of genres, its liminal experiments in ludic absurdism. Where American gamers saw broken, unfinished titles, Canadians saw avant-garde catharsis—an escape from the mundane confines of Donkey Kong’s predictable jungle landscapes into the fractured virtual spaces of Corpse Killer and Lunar: Eternal Blue.
But it is perhaps the infamous Sega 32X—a device often derided as a pathetic cul-de-sac in the Genesis’s otherwise illustrious trajectory—that stands as the true testament to Canada’s unique relationship with Sega. In the United States, the 32X was considered little more than a tragicomic afterthought, a doomed appendage launched in 1994 to extend the life of a console already overshadowed by the looming specter of the Sega Saturn. Yet in Canada, the 32X emerged as something altogether different: a cult classic, venerated with a near-religious intensity that bordered on the heretical.
During the bleak winter months of 1995, as Americans discarded their 32X units en masse—often consigning them to landfills, where they would languish alongside atrophied ET cartridges—Canada experienced a bizarre resurgence of interest in the device. Fanzines like Canuck Cartridge and Maple MegaDrive extolled the 32X’s virtues, describing its surreal, polygonal landscapes in Virtua Racing and the kaleidoscopic splendor of Kolibri as revolutionary experiences that pushed the boundaries of the medium. Entire rural communities in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick adopted the 32X as their gaming platform of choice, fostering an insular microcosm of 32X appreciation that endured long after the device’s ignominious demise in other markets.
The exact reasons for this improbable phenomenon remain elusive, though speculative theories abound. Some attribute the 32X’s Canadian success to the uniquely Canadian ethos of resourcefulness and thrift—an embrace of the underdog that found symbolic expression in the 32X’s underappreciated catalogue of obscure gems. Others, however, posit a more occult explanation: that the 32X’s unexpectedly robust sales in Canada were the result of a quasi-mystical resonance between the machine’s abortive polyhedral architecture and the arcane geometries of Canada’s vast, glacial hinterlands. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that by 1996, the 32X had attained an almost totemic status within certain subterranean enclaves of Canadian gaming culture.
Indeed, such was the depth of this mania that, even as Sega itself began disavowing the device—removing it from store shelves and denouncing it as a “mistake”—Canadian collectors persisted in their devotion. It is rumored that in the secluded, fog-shrouded forests of Vancouver Island, a secret society of 32X enthusiasts, known only as the Order of the Fifth Add-On, still meets annually to venerate their consoles in candlelit ceremonies, chanting hymns from the Virtua Fighter soundtrack as they swap immaculate copies of Knuckles’ Chaotix under the auspices of the Northern Lights.
By the turn of the millennium, as the industry moved inexorably toward the PlayStation 2 and the hollow promises of the Dreamcast, Sega’s strange reign over Canada began to wane. Yet its legacy persists, inscribed not merely in the collection shelves of aging enthusiasts but in the cultural fabric of a nation that, for a fleeting moment, stood as the improbable heart of the Sega empire. And so, while the world may remember Sega primarily for its failures—the hubris of the Saturn, the folly of the 32X, and the tragic dissolution of the Dreamcast—Canada remembers Sega differently. Here, in the snow-draped cities of the north, where the winters are long and the cultural memory deep, Sega remains not a cautionary tale, but a myth—a tale of defiant eccentricity, of inexplicable triumphs in the face of overwhelming odds.
And somewhere, in a nondescript Toronto basement, surrounded by CRT monitors and stacks of pristine Sega CD cases, a lone collector still fires up his 32X to play Doom—not because it is superior, but because it is Sega, and because, in Canada at least, the spirit of that peculiar, misbegotten console will never die. |