Dances with Sega

Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, Sega were in a console war with their fellow Japanese rivals, Nintendo. Keen to show what they could do, they created more and more add-ons for the Mega Drive (or Genesis to our North American friends) like the Mega CD and 32X. Sega were really doing what Nintendon’t, for very good reasons!

As the 90s came closer to the millennium we also saw a new craze from Japan for dancing games, notably Dance Dance Revolution by arcade legends Konami, or Dancing Stage as it was known in Europe. These dance based games really saw a following and even to this day dance games are incredibly popular.

My guest this week is here to talk about both nostalgic experiences, especially as he’s working on a one-quarter sized all-in-one DDR mini-Arcade build using an Intel NUC, a custom input board and more lights than Blackpool Illuminations.

We delve into lots of nerdy details on the famed ‘Sega Tower of Power’, as well as pondering what may have been if Sega hadn’t ended their console hardware with the too-little-too-late DreamCast.

We’re sure this conversation is going to spark some debate, especially as we may have trash talked more than a few rivals, so we’d love to hear from you; send a note over to [email protected], leave a comment on the post, or join the discussion over on our Discord server

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Episode Links

• Naoki’s Retro Corner – YouTube Channel
• Making my own Dance Dance Revolution Cabinet – Naoki’s Retro Corner (YouTube)
• Exploring The Wild World of DDR Controllers – kkclue (YouTube)
• Project OutFox – Rhythm game sim for the Raspberry Pi
• Dance Dance Revolution – Wikipedia
• MiSTerCade – JAMMA for Mister
• The Sega Genesis Mini is getting its own ridiculous mini tower – Polygon
• Mega CD – Wikipedia
• 32X – Wikipedia
• Sega Saturn – Wikipedia

Chapter Times

1. 00:00:00: Adopt A Listener
2. 00:01:05: Introductions
3. 00:06:20: A Brief iMovie Chat
4. 00:09:08: Why Arcade Builds?
5. 00:13:44: Quarter Scale DDR
6. 00:36:33: Modern Dance Games
7. 00:39:32: Project Outfox
8. 00:43:02: Arcade Experience Scale
9. 00:47:11: Saga Mega Drive
10. 00:57:23: Mega CD
11. 01:09:44: 32X
12. 01:14:55: Tower of (Unstable) Power
13. 01:23:35: Saga Saturn
14. 01:38:23: Sega’s Legacy Today
15. 01:46:17: Wrapping Up

Credits

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW