Lost in Japan: The Sega Teradrive

Developer: Sega & IBM

Year: 1991

In my collection: No

Life lesson number one: There are no certainties in life! Except death that is… and movie licenses turning into crappy games. Or was it the other way around? We sure do live in confusing times. But let me try to rephrase that! When two successful companies put their resources together and make a new product, also known as Co-branding these days, there’s just no chance that their joint effort will produce an awesome new product, right?

Wrong! Chances are slim but possible. Chances even are you are using one of those products every day (or you’ve bought it as a present for Mother’s Day at least). I’m talking about you, shiny red Senseo coffeemaker. But I guess I’ll leave the juicy details of the passionate relation between Philips and Douwe Egberts untouched for now.

Let’s head back to the glory days of 1991 when Sega and IBM tried their luck by combining a MegaDrive (pronounced Genesis in some specific parts of the world) and a AT PC in one piece of equipment. Sounds like a match made in heaven! Imagine being able to play all those awesome Sega classics on a PC monitor without having to seize the family T.V. plus having the power of the brand new 80486 processor on the same motherboard, all crammed in one case and interchangeable with the flip of a swith! “No dad, I wasn’t playing games, I was finishing homework”, I would regularly have screamed as a kid.

Time to burst that bubble and get back to reality. While the 80486 was already available at the time, the Sega Teradrive was only equipped with a 80286 processor hitting it’s ninth birthday already. Needless to say the sheer computing power of the Teradrive was widely undersized for the time being. This decision heavily impacted the selling appeal of the Teradrive, with low sales figures as a result. Logically, the system never left Japan because of this.

At release, three different versions hit the shelves. All systems had the same 80286 processor, running at 7,7Mhz on the PC side, combined with that good old Motorola 68000 and Zilog Z80 on the Megadrive side. Prices ranged from ¥148,000 ($1100, €790) to ¥248,000 ($1840, €1400). The low end model only packed 640KB RAM and no HDD, while the top end model was given 2,5MB RAM and a 30MB HDD. The midsized model would have lifted ¥188,000 ($1400, €1020) out of your wallet. This model ran on 1MB RAM and still lacked an HDD. All three systems ran on OS IBM DOS J4.0/V.

Note that the prices stated earlier didn’t include a monitor. That piece of equipment would have cost you $593, let’s say roughly €400, extra. That’s a lot of money for an awesome gaming console plus an outdated computer.

Still, I guess Sega and IBM must have thought the system would have had some potential. Why would they add an expansion port with the same characteristics as the one on a regular Megadrive console? You’re thinking Mega CD right? Well, it’s been said that two prototypes of CD drives have been developed at the time, but sales where going so slow, the drive never lived to see the day.

Side notes:

• A similar but more powerful piece of hardware named the Amstrad Mega PC hit Europe a few years later. It’s different from the Sega Teradrive in many ways.
• Puzzle Construction was a title released for the Teradrive which was mainly a puzzle game with a built in editor that could be used on the PC side of the system, while the game itself used the Megadrive part of the system when you actually played it.
• The last Teradrive auction on ebay (feb 12 2015) was a model 3 (the top end one) and sold for $500