32X

When the MegaDrive/Genesis was nearing the end of its life span, Sega had several different plans of what to do. While Sega Japan was working of the successor, the Saturn, Sega America thought that this 32-bit update to the MegaDrive/Genesis was the future. However, neither the consumers nor the developers were fond of this new add-on - and a very disrupting strategy of launching the new hardware, at a time where no software was available for it, did not really help. The 32X was officially discarded only about a year after its launch, and left a group of angry customers behind. Customers who now had an expensive add-on, which they could not really use for anything. At one time a combined MegaDrive/32x console with the title Neptune was in the works, but due to the failure of the 32X itself, this idea was quickly abandoned. The whole 32X project is considered to be one of the most outrageous mistakes in the console industry.

The 32X works like a big cartridge, that is placed in the game slot of the MedaDrive/Genesis. The games are then put into the 32X, allowing them to use both the hardware from the MegaDrive/Genesis and the 32X. Technically the combined system was quite impressive, compared to its competitors at the time. The whole package was based on two Hitachi RISC processors, capable of delivering 50'000 polygons per second in 32'000 colours. Compared to the 'real' 3d consoles that debuted only a year later, the system did however not match up.

From today's perspective, the main problem with the 32X is the number of games available. There were only a small number of games for the 32X, and even less of them were actually worth playing. Most of the decent titles are better conversions of Segas 3d based arcade games, than what was technically possible on the MegaDrive/Genesis itself. This goes for titles such as Virtua Racing, AfterBurner II and non the least Star Wars Arcade. One of the most interesting exclusives were Knuckles Chaotix.