Sega of America

Sega of America, in their hardware-oriented, semi-autonomous 1990's incarnation, were responsible for the Sega Genesis becoming extremely successful and effectively providing the blueprint for Sony to follow with the PlayStation in their crusade to win mindshare from Nintendo.

Unfortunately they spent the remaining 99% of their time and effort trying to screw things up and pissing of their customers, their developers, and Sega Japan in the process. Two defining characteristics were repeatedly misjudging their audience's taste and releasing peripheral devices in knee-jerk reaction to similar Super Nintendo gimmick hardware. Here are some of their worst howlers (in non-chronological order):

• Outright mismanagement of the Dreamcast marketing effort (An extremely strong product sabotaged by strategic ineptitude)
• Rejecting Ancient's offer to make Streets of Rage 4 for the Dreamcast, (Apparently no-one at SoA knew what Streets of Rage, one of their most successful and well-respected 16-bit titles, was.)
• Development of the 32X in flat contradiction to Sega Japan's Sega Saturn project.
• Consistently overpricing hardware.
• Not releasing all of Shining Force 3 on the Saturn in English.
• The Menacer
• Renaming the Sega Mega Drive with the hick-friendly Genesis monicker.
• The Activator
• Setting up a research & development 'institute' that pissed away money and produced no good games
• Eternal Champions (bad, expensive attempt at a SFII/MK beater)
• Art Alive!
• Night Trap
• Desecrating Puyo Puyo by turning it into Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (spit)
• Locking out early Electronic Arts games with a hardware hack

I presume that Sega Japan have curtailed most of their powers in the light of the Dreamcast situation, and that via external distributors and publishers they will no longer foolishly deny the Western world from playing most of their supposedly 'Too Japanese' games. In my opinion Sega of America's single greatest achievement (in game quality terms, rather than commercial success) was probably financing the development and publishing of ToeJam & Earl.