History of Sega in Italy

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History of Sega in Italy
Official Sega distributor(s): Melchioni (1984-1985), NBC Italia (1986-1988), Giochi Preziosi (1988-1998), GP Tronic (1998-1999), Halifax (1999-2004), Leader (2004-2006), Halifax (2006-2015), Koch Media (2015-present)

In the 70s Italy was one of the countries where Sega imported its game machines.

Melchioni, known for distributing Atari consoles, began selling the SC-3000. For Autumn 1984 company prepared large advertising campaign, but in September 1984, a fire broke out and burned expensive Philishave shavers distributed by this company, which resulted in the transfer of all money for buying a new shavers and thus small sales of Sega computers.

NBC Italia has dealt with the distribution of the Sega Master System since 1986. Unfortunately, the console was poorly promoted and in 1988 the distributor was changed.

Since 1988, Tecnoplay has begun cooperating in importing arcades from Data East which later changed its name to Sega Pinball. In 1991, Tecnoplay released the first Sega arcades called Virtua Racing.

The new company selling Sega consoles is Giochi Preziosi, previously selling Nintendo products. They started promoting the Master System actively on TV, including the famous goalkeeper Walter Zenga. The advertisement with slogan Team Sega was broadcast during the World Cup in Italy which was supposed to increase sales. Preziosi was a toy company, so they started putting out their own gadgets like a soccer ball to add to the console.

In the next years a lot of famous athletes and actors joined the ads like Jerry Calà, Gianni Bugno, Ian Ziering, Roberto Mancini, Gigi Lentini and mentioned earlier Walter Zenga. Most of the ads had the marketing slogans with word Campioni like Solo Per Veri Campioni or I Videogiochi dei Campioni. There were also others like Non c'e' paragone or Sega TV Pirata.

The Mega Drive went on sale in November 1990, but it was only available at Giochi Preziosi (the so-called Giocheria) stores. Other stores got it in January 1991. Since then, the company has spent huge amounts of money on advertising campaigns, hiring more famous personalities to appear in Sega advertisements. Mega Drive has sold 300,000 units throughout its lifetime in Italy. In 1991, Master System II and Game Gear was released. Until 1993, the Sega handheld was the most popular portable console on the market.

Sega's successes ended in 1994. Sega Pico hasn't gained as much popularity as Game Gear and the Mega CD with Mega Drive 32X were also ignored by consumers. In January 1996, TCI's technology group got the rights to distribute Sega Channel in Italy, but it isn't known that the service was launched there. In 1995, Italian distributor pushed Sega Saturn, but sold less than 10,000 units over its lifetime. In late 1998, Giochi Preziosi founded GP Tronic, which had to deal with the creation of the distribution network for Dreamcast and with PC industry.

Mega Drive clones have also appeared in Italy, such as the Mondial Drive II by Schnider, Super Mega Driver by Watary Italia SRL. Mosciano S.A., Game Drive 2 and Video Gioco 16-bit.

Sega Dreamcast hit the Italian market in 1999 and Halifax (which belongs to Digital Bros) became the distributor. Halifax was distributing Sega much earlier, when sometimes in the 1990s got right from them to sell all software for Master System, Mega Drive, Game Gear and Saturn, so in that time they worked like second distributor for Italian market. Dreamcast Internet was launched by Albacom in July 21, 2000. Digital Bros was Sega's distributor until summer 2004, when Leader took over.Halifax returned as distributor in May 2006 but in 2015, Koch Media took over.