of Sega can be seen in the quality of the stories and the marketing used for each of the Phantasy Star installments.

Developer History

Sega dates back all the way to 1951 when David Rosen, an American living in Japan, founded it. At the time, the company was a Japanese art exporter (and later an art importer as well) and known as Rosen Enterprises (ZDnet). It was not until nearly fifteen years later when Rosen Enterprises merged with a jukebox company that the company’s name was changed to Sega–short for “Service Games” (Sega.com). Before the release of the Master System (or Mark III in Japan) Sega produced a number of great selling and currently well-known arcade games as well as some very crummy games for the first Atari consoles. Froggerand Zaxxon are two of the earliest arcade hits Sega produced.

In 1985 Sega introduced the Mark III to Japan and the next year the company released the American equivalent, the Sega Master System. After many years of poor performance from the console video game market, Sega hoped to capitalize on the new surge in sales generated by the new Nintendo console, the Famicom in Japan, or Nintendo Entertainment System in America. Unfortunately for Sega, Nintendo maintained a stranglehold on the market. Nintendo’s licensing agreements (which were later deemed illegal) prevented third parties from developing games for systems in addition to Nintendo systems. Consequently, very few games were designed for the Master System outside of Sega’s own development teams. By 1988 Sega had only sold two million Master Systems