The six-button controller was just sitting there on my mate Dave’s coffee table like it had fallen from another planet. 1993, this was, and I’d honestly never seen anything quite like it – three extra buttons casually lounging above the standard trio, waiting to completely change how we’d tackle Street Fighter II. Dave had somehow managed to convince his mum that his Mega Drive was educational equipment. I mean, fair enough, Ecco the Dolphin did teach us about marine biology, didn’t it?
That chunky black console absolutely transformed everything for me. While my neighbor Tim was desperately saving pocket money for a Super Nintendo, I’d already fallen completely head-over-heels for Sega’s aggressive marketing and that absolutely distinctive sound chip. You know the one I’m talking about – that metallic, slightly harsh FM synthesis that made every single explosion sound like it was tearing through sheet metal. My dad used to moan it sounded like “robots having a proper argument,” but honestly? That’s exactly why I bloody loved it.
The whole “blast processing” thing was complete marketing bollocks, obviously. But try explaining that to ten-year-old me watching Sonic absolutely tear across Green Hill Zone at what felt like the speed of light. The way that blue hedgehog moved… it was like someone had worked out how to bottle pure velocity and inject it straight into Saturday morning telly. I’d wake up ridiculously early just to squeeze in extra time with those first two Sonic games before mum took over the television for her morning programs.
Streets of Rage became my proper obsession though. That opening scene where you’re walking down the street, picking your character – I must’ve watched it a thousand times, but I never, ever skipped it. The music hit completely different on the Mega Drive. Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack didn’t just accompany the action; it WAS the bloody action. Those basslines could make our ancient CRT television rattle, and I swear the neighbors always knew when I was having a gaming session because the entire house would thump along to Stage 1’s beat.
My Mega Drive came bundled with Altered Beast, which was… well, it was something, wasn’t it? “Rise from your grave!” became a proper catchphrase in our house, much to mum’s absolute horror when she first heard that digitized voice booming from the living room. The game itself was pretty rubbish, but that presentation! Those chunky sprites, the dramatic transformations, the sheer bloody audacity of it all. It felt like Sega was saying, “We’re different, and we’re not apologizing to anyone for it.”
Then came the discovery of import games. Proper revelation, that was. Dave’s older brother knew someone who knew someone else, and suddenly we had access to these mysterious Japanese cartridges with completely unreadable text but absolutely incredible gameplay. Gunstar Heroes completely blew our minds – co-op action that made Contra look positively tame, with weapon combinations that actually encouraged experimentation rather than boring memorization. We spent entire afternoons trying to decode what the different power-ups did, creating our own manual through pure trial and error.
The competition with Nintendo kids got pretty bloody intense, didn’t it? During lunch breaks, it was like proper Cold War playground diplomacy. “Mega Drive does what Nintendon’t” wasn’t just some advertising slogan – it was our battle cry, our rallying call. We’d argue about graphics, sound quality, game libraries… looking back, we were probably absolutely insufferable little gits. But God, we believed in our rectangular black box with such fierce, unwavering loyalty.
Mortal Kombat absolutely sealed the deal for me. When it hit the Mega Drive with that blood code (A-B-A-C-A-B-B), it felt like we’d won some sort of proper cultural victory. Nintendo had their sanitized version with “sweat” instead of blood – sweat! – but we had the real deal, didn’t we? Typing in those button combinations felt like accessing forbidden knowledge, like we were part of some secret society of mature gamers. At twelve years old, naturally.
The controller design was absolutely brilliant in its simplicity. Three buttons felt perfect for most games, but when that six-button pad arrived, it opened up completely new possibilities we’d never imagined. Street Fighter II: Champion Edition suddenly made proper sense – decent controls for decent fighting games. My thumbs developed muscle memory for Ryu’s fireball motion, and I could pull off Chun-Li’s lightning legs without even thinking about it.
Phantasy Star IV taught me that JRPGs didn’t have to be Nintendo exclusives. That game’s story hit me harder than any film I’d seen at the time. The hand-drawn cutscenes, the epic scope, the way it concluded the entire bloody series… I still get proper chills thinking about some of those later plot twists. It proved the Mega Drive could do deep, emotional storytelling just as well as flashy action games.
My console developed its own personality over the years, you know? The power LED would sometimes flicker when the system got too warm during summer gaming marathons. Certain cartridges needed to be inserted just right – Sonic 2 was particularly fussy and would sometimes glitch into that infamous “14 sound test” if you didn’t seat it properly. These quirks became part of the ritual, part of what made my Mega Drive uniquely mine.
The add-ons were where Sega’s ambition really showed though. The Mega-CD promised multimedia experiences that would revolutionize gaming forever. Night Trap caused congressional hearings! Sonic CD had proper time travel and the best soundtrack in the entire series. Sure, the load times were absolutely painful and most games were interactive movies rather than proper games, but it felt like we were living in the actual future.
Then the 32X happened. Oh, that beautiful, expensive disaster. Sega’s “poor man’s Saturn” stacked on top of the Mega Drive like some sort of technological Frankenstein’s monster. Virtua Racing Deluxe was genuinely impressive, and Doom ran surprisingly well, but the thing was absolutely doomed from the very start. I convinced my parents to get me one for Christmas 1994, and within six months, Sega had basically abandoned the bloody thing. Still, for those brief moments when everything worked together – Mega Drive, Mega-CD, and 32X all connected properly – it felt like piloting some sort of gaming spaceship.
The library was absolutely incredible though. Rocket Knight Adventures, Contra: Hard Corps, Shinobi III, Thunder Force IV, Castlevania: Bloodlines… games that pushed the hardware in ways that seemed completely impossible. Developers worked out tricks to squeeze more colors on screen, to make the sound chip sing in ways Sega probably never imagined when they designed it. Even today, firing up those classics on original hardware brings back that specific feeling of Saturday afternoons and endless summer holidays.
My Mega Drive still works, you know. Thirty years later, and that old black box boots up without a single complaint. The controller cords are a bit frayed, and some of the cartridge labels have faded quite badly, but everything still plays exactly as I remember it. That’s the real testament to the hardware – built like an absolute tank, designed to last through countless hours of enthusiastic button mashing by kids who didn’t know the meaning of “gentle use.”
Sometimes I think about that moment when Dave first showed me his Mega Drive. How that simple black rectangle would shape so much of my gaming DNA, introduce me to series and developers I still follow today, and create memories that feel as vivid now as they did three decades ago. Blast processing might’ve been complete marketing fluff, but the blast of nostalgia when I fire up Streets of Rage? That’s absolutely, definitely real.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
