Sega of America

From Sega Retro

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Sega of America
Founded: 1986[1]
Headquarters:
California, United States

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Sega of America, Inc. (SoA) is the company responsible for Sega's North American operations.

History

Sega of America, Inc. was established in 1986[1], primarily as a means to front the Sega Master System project after the success of Nintendo's Nintendo Entertainment System. It was originally a subsidiary of Sega Enterprises Inc. (SEI), Sega's US-arm which had existed since 19xx, licensing, distributing and at one point manufacturing its own arcade games for sale across America.

Sega Enterprises Inc. had itself traded as "Sega of America" during the 1970s[2][3], mainly referring to its electro-mechanical and discrete logic arcade products (and the Sega-Vision). This name fell out of use when SEI bought Gremlin Industries - Gremlin would act as Sega's way into the fledgling video game market (with SEI's game production facilities wound down), later trading as Gremlin/Sega and Sega/Gremlin before becoming Sega Electronics in 1982. While Sega Electronics was able to make a name for itself during the early 1980s, even producing games for home consoles, its assets were sold to Bally Midway in 1983, leaving Sega without a video game presence in the US for more than two years.



In 2008, Sega Enterprises Inc. ceased to exist as a company, leading to Sega of America becoming the centre of all Sega's North American operations. Subsidiaries of SEI became subsidiaries of SoA.



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Since the mid-1980s, Sega of America's primary role has been to localize Japanese games for English-speaking regions. It was established relatively early on that an American presence was needed for Sega as the Japanese executives did not understand the American market well enough.

At first, Sega of America allied with Tonka for Master System distribution, though following the launch of the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in North America), it began to play a much more significant role in the industry. Sega of America's efforts greatly influenced the video game industry as we know it today (for example, it created the VRC ratings board, which led to first industry-wide system, the ESRB)

For many years it was believed that America could not produce video games to Japanese standards - SoA's first home-grown game, Monopoly needed to be "saved" from poor quality production and impending delays in 1988, and this trend often continued, with SoA adopting a policy of quantity over quality (attempting to develop and publish significantly more games than rivals Nintendo to give the impression that Sega systems were backed by more developers, and were hence seen as superior). Over time, Sega of America became the dominant force within Sega, largely thanks to luminous executive Tom Kalinske. This was in thanks to marketing strategies of the Genesis in the US, as well as a strong line-up of games that defined Sega's library like Ecco the Dolphin, ToeJam & Earl, Comix Zone, as well as sports games and other games based on western licenses and movies. The marketing influence of the Sonic The Hedgehog series is also of note, although besides Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the game development staff remained Japanese throughout.

In the mid 90's, SoA largely fell of due to Sega Saturn compatibility and development being very hard for developers. During that period, Tom Kalinske generally disagreed with the policies of Sega of Japan, and went on to do edutainment, which was influenced by SoA's own efforts (mostly by Novotrade) on the Sega Pico. Another venture was SegaSoft an off-shoot branch that focused on original PC games, formed around the mid 90's. Around the same period, Sega of Japan launched a PC initiative by porting a variety of games.

During the Dreamcast era, Sega of America came back strong, due to Visual Concepts and the 2K games - as well as strong marketing reminiscent of the Genesis days. Like on Saturn, the bias was more towards localizing Japanese games however. In 2005, Sega of America was hit with a large scale restructuring, with it being designed to appeal more to the Western market, due to it being becoming larger than the Japanese market. This however led to numerous questionable games, with some games being some of the worst in Sega's history. This includes licensed games The Golden Compass, Aliens: Colonial Marines and Iron Man, as well ill fated attempts to reboot SoJ franchises such as with Golden Axe: Beast Rider and Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.

Around 2015, Sega was evaluating on how they should handle the American branch in the future. Effectively, SoA was relocated from San Francisco to Irvine, California, to share the same office with Atlus USA, which Sega had acquired earlier. The main purpose of the new Sega of America and Atlus USA, is to localize the Japanese games of their respective parent company. In addition, a dedicated office for the Sonic franchise in Burbank, California exists as well.

Softography

Unlike in Sega of Japan, all games are created with an external company

Master System

Genesis

Game Gear

Sega CD

Pico

Sega 32X

Sega Saturn

Dreamcast

PlayStation 2

GameBoy Advance

Xbox

GameCube

Nintendo DS

PlayStation Portable

Xbox 360

Wii

PlayStation 3

Nintendo 3DS

Wii U

Xbox One

PlayStation 4

Nintendo Switch

PC

External lLinks

References

Overseas Sega companies, studios and subsidiaries
84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
CSK Sega Sammy Holdings
Sega of America
Sega Technical Institute
Sega Away Team
Sega Europe
Sega France Sega France
Sega Consumer Products S.A Sega Spain
Sega Vertriebsgesellschaft Sega Austria
Sega Interactive
Sega Deutschland Sega Germany
Sega Amusements Taiwan Sega Taiwan
Sega Denmark
Sega Belgium
Sega Netherlands
Sega Multimedia Studio
Sega Midwest Studio
Sega Amusements USA
Deith Leisure Sega Amusements Europe Sega Amusements International
Sega Total Solutions
Sega Prize Europe
Sega Music Group
SegaSoft
Sega Entertainment
Hyundai-Sega Entertainment
Sega Enterprises Israel
No Cliche
Sega of America Dreamcast
Sonic Team USA Sega Studios USA
Visual Concepts
Sega.com
Sega.com Asia
Sega of China
Sega Mobile Sega Networks Inc.
Sega Publishing Korea
The Creative Assembly
Sega (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd
Sega Benelux
Sega Studios San Francisco
Sports Interactive
Sega Studios Australia
Three Rings Design
Relic Entertainment
Atlus USA
Demiurge Studios
Go Game
Sonic Studio
Amplitude Studios
Sonic Team USA