Sega SG-1000

15 July 1983 is a date worth knowing: Sega launched the SG-1000 and Nintendo launched the Famicom on the exact same day in Japan. The SG-1000 lost that fight, but not catastrophically — roughly 2 million units sold in Japan and select Asian markets, laying the foundation for the Master System. The SC-3000 variant was a home computer with integrated keyboard on the same hardware base — arguably more interesting for domestic use. The SG-1000's VDP chipset survived nearly unchanged into the Master System and conceptually influenced the Mega Drive. Finding SG-1000 games in boxed CIB condition outside Japan is the equivalent of finding a piece of almost invisible history.