History of Sega in Mongolia
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With Mongolia's democratization in 1990, video games were introduced to the country.
One of the first popular home consoles were the famiclones, especially the Subor called here Khujaa (хужаа) because it was imported from China.[1] Brick Game called Tetris was a popular handheld game.
The first Sega consoles were released in Mongolia in the mid-90s, around 1995/1996. The first and most popular console was Mega Drive 2 called here simply Sega which in the years 1996-2000 was the leader of the Mongolian gaming market. There were many Sega Centers, also called Sega Playgrounds, where people played for hours on the Mega Drive console. The most popular games for the 16-bit Sega in Mongolia were 2D fighting games, the most famous of them was the Mortal Kombat series.[2] High popularity of Mega Drive meant that clones and pirate games were also distributed in the region. A lot of the consoles delivered here were Chinese clones of original 16-bit Sega. Some of the clones can also be found today. [3][4]
Some sources say that Sega released it's consoles in 1998,[5] but this date is probably related with two facts. First one might be Sega Saturn which has been also reported to be sold in Mongolian market but without much success. The second one might be that Mega Drive was so popular that people started to using word Sega as a synonym to video games, and around 1998, PlayStation was delivered to this region which was called sometimes Sega or Sega PlaySatation,[6] just like other console for example Sega Tetris. A lot of people started saying that they played Mario on Sega, or that Sega brought Tetris (Brick Game) to Mongolia, or that they played Sonic on PlayStation.
Nowadays, Mongolian media attribute the Sega console unleashing a wave of popularity for video games, which according to them results in today's addiction to the games of many Mogul players.[7]