Imagining A New SEGA Console In 2025
It's another dimension, SEGA are still in the hardware business and the next console is about to launch
Introduction
It’s a stifling Summer evening in Tokyo and the 1-2 punch of sticky heat and nerves glues the freshly ironed shirt beneath your business jacket to your back as you take the lift and ascend past the salaryman-staffed offices of SEGA HQ right to the top floor: the geographical and hierarchical summit of this formless, shapeless, timeless corporation.
The door chimes: a reassuring pat on the back as the grey metal slabs yawn open and invite you to enter a sterile waiting room containing a few faux leather armchairs, a vase of paper flowers on a glass coffee table and a secretary wearing a plastic smile of porcelain teeth, you put on your deepest, most important voice and tell her what you’re there to do and she nods knowingly, gesturing for you to sit down with an upturned palm. Moments pass but for you they feel like hours, the briefcase in your left hand contains only paper but it’s the burden of the dream printed on those pages that truly weights the thing, so you place it on the floor beside you and scroll aimlessly up and down on your phone looking for nothing on the screen but inside yourself for courage.
“-Will see you now.” You’re snapped out of your self-soothing trance by the secretary, you didn’t catch the first half of her sentence but the meaning is clear: the time has come; clear your throat, dust off your jacket, pick up the briefcase and march onwards past the desk and into the trials ahead.
Within stands an enormous oak table, at each and every seat sits a suit with money on his mind and scepticism in his heart, you take your position at the head of the table, unclasp the briefcase and lay out the battle plans for SEGA’s great console counteroffensive.
The Premise
Somehow, someway, Sega believes it’s time to re-enter the hardware market; perhaps somebody time travelled back to kill Hitler? Maybe Jacob Crow never discovered the time crystals in Scotland? Maybe Captain Kirk’s girlfriend didn’t get run over? I don’t know what has transpired in this timeline but perhaps it’s better not to ask questions.
But what should a modern Sega console look like?
I’m sure millions of former Sonic militants have asked themselves this question while trying to sleep at night.
Today’s post will be my take on what a fantasy modern Sega console should and shouldn’t do: I’m going to go over how I think Sega could carve out their own niche, pricing, exclusives all of it. Obviously, the chances of this ever happening are between zilch and zero, so don’t take it too seriously and I’m expecting to be clowned on a little bit but I don’t mind, it’s all food for thought.
The Foundation
Once a budget, mobile, child-oriented choice for gaming the modern handheld market is flush with devices of every price, shape and size from ultra-premium offerings like the ROG Ally to super cheap ROM boxes from Ali Express; I’m all about authenticity and big tube-TV’s but even I have to admit a lot of these are incredibly impressive. It’s for these reasons that, similar to the Steam Deck, my vision for a modern Sega would be a handheld that can be cast to the TV via a wired or wireless connection.
Fake console names are always extremely stupid but in the vein of the fake upcoming console videos from 2008 that inspired this post, I’m going to include my own: this device will be called the SEGA Dream Gear. The whole premise of the Dream Gear will be something between the PlayStation Portal and the Nintendo Switch: a handheld with ergonomics that aren’t Nintendo-esque (read as: horrible) that can cast to the TV and take certain content from the cloud but can still be used while out and about; the Dream Gear’s dock would be an additional add-on that exponentially boosts the power of the handheld, similar to a pro-model. The dock would also contain a disc drive so that third party developers have the option to put their huge games on a Blu-Ray, this way, we don’t have to have slimmed down versions of major Triple-A releases or charge people up the ass for larger sizes of our proprietary game card medium.
Sega hardware was always looking out for the little guy and had loads of cross-compatibility. Mega Drive controllers worked with Atari, the power chord for a Master System works with a Mega Drive and vice-versa and the Dreamcast could be hooked up to a PC monitor which back in the CRT days, used the entirely different VGA connector.
In this vein, I’d include both USB-C and USB 3 ports on the console as well as the expected headphone jack and Bluetooth support; additionally, it’d be nice if you could use any gamepad you wanted in addition to an official model and the buttons set into the handheld itself, a bit of a homage to how cross-compatible the Mega Drive controller was.
The Strategy
Let’s be realistic here, even if Sega had survived, they would have/could have never cultivated the fiscal power to compete with the other big three; Xbox essentially has an infinite money printer behind it, PlayStation has Sony, itself a huge company and Nintendo is starting to compete with Disney in its cultural power and multimedia influence, this leaves Sega vastly outmatched, even if they are a hugely respected name and publisher. It’s for these reasons that the base handheld without the dock would be much, much less powerful and probably sourced from existing components: comparable to a less compromised original Switch; I meant what I said about the dock acting as the pro option too, I’m talking, a bump up to a level beyond the Series S at a premium price but unlike the Sega CD, it needs to be clear what this thing does and the price can’t be too insane.
A huge appeal of the Nintendo Switch is its vast catalogue of indie and Double-A titles; I own a gaming PC, a very good one and yet I never buy indie games on Steam just because they feel so at-home on the console. Now, if you’ve been following things behind the scenes lately you’ll be aware that Nintendo have been shooting themselves in the foot in regards to this. A huge swathe of third party developers big and small never received dev kits for the Switch 2, meaning developing games for the console is extraordinarily difficult.
Well… we’ve got Dream Gear dev kits.
I doubt any indie dev is going to agree to permanent platform exclusivity… but for 12 months of exclusivity and a hefty fee? I think that’s a deal that could work. Dream Gear should aim to steal as much of the indie market as possible while Nintendo are establishing the foundations of the Nintendo Switch 2.
Another vulnerability we could exploit is the sheer number of lay-offs coming out of Microsoft. This is all top-tier talent hungry for work and with experience working at a major competitor, well? There are jobs here at our fictional Sega and given Sega’s long history of floundering in the West, this is a market and cultural insight that would be a massive boon too.
The Games
Sega has a vast array of IP’s and developers under its umbrella that the company has long been accused of not putting to good use, so let’s leverage all that and develop a line-up for the first year of Dream Gear.
Firstly, the upcoming Virtua Fighter game would make a great nostalgic launch title for the console: the Sega Saturn launched with VF1 and the fighting game genre is perfect for couch CO-OP. As of now, a direct sequel to Sonic Frontiers is only rumoured but I think it’s safe to say that launching with a brand new 3D Sonic in the same vein would be a safe bet. Also upcoming in the pipeline in our own timeline is a new, open-world Crazy Taxi game, considering that Microsoft recently murdered Forza Motorsport and that Horizon 5 isn’t as good as Horizon 4, I think positioning this new Crazy Taxi as a wackier, more colourful alternative to Horizon could, as they say: do numbers. That’s 3 launch titles so far and presumably a bunch of indies, but I’m thinking a 4th title is in order… and this is a big one.
Medieval 3, bam.
For those unaware, the developers of Total War, which is the most-successful and arguably the most-beloved RTS franchise ever, are owned by Sega. Since 2006, Total War fans have been begging for a sequel to Medieval 2: Total War which is generally seen as the peak of the historical Total War games, if a little dated, so provided Creative Assembly don’t do Creative Assembly things and enough money is put into it, I could see this turning heads as a Sega console and PC exclusive, bonus points for cross-platform play.
The next Virtua Fighter and Crazy Tax, Sonic Frontiers 2, and Medieval 3… I don’t know about you but that’s a launch line-up I could get behind. Crazy Taxi and Frontiers 2 could work with the base-model handheld with the other 2 requiring the disc dock.
Moving past launch and more into fantasy territory now, I think a Dragon Engine remake of Yakuza 3 and any future, new Like A Dragon games would be awesome exclusives and a good chance to fix a lot of that game’s issues, of course, this all presents the opportunity to finally finish the Shenmue series off, it might be difficult to market the game since the unwashed internet masses already think of it as a prototype Yakuza (they’re actually nothing like each other) but that’s an issue for marketing, not for me.
There have been persistent rumours of a Code Veronica remake coming in 2027/2028 as well, given that the original was a Dreamcast exclusive, you can bet we’d snap that up for our fantasy future.
In Reality
This is all just food for thought at the end of the day but I love talking about this impossible nonsense regardless, if there’s one thing we can all agree on though it’s that the industry is a little less colourful and fun without Sega’s consoles.
Have your own crackpot ideas for the return of Sega? Want to clown on me? Go ahead in the comments, this might be the most opium-infused article I’ve ever written.
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There’s a officially licensed Phantasy Star TTRPG coming at the end of the month that I preordered back in December.
Love it. Here's some other possible titles: Space Channel 5 reboot. Chu Chu Rocket with mobile to console gameplay. Nights into Dreams sequel with added VR mode. Pandering Dragon's RPG to compete against Square Enix. Jet Set Radio sequel with thorough multi-player modes, including campaign. Samba De Amiga RPG (why not?)
And, finally, a Sonic game as magnum opus. Hire creative team members from Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and, cough, Nintendo. Go all out. Reboot Sonic. Get rid of all the lore, the Sonic Adventure additions. Make a game that the general population is interested in. Try to actually compete with Mario in the platform space. Take inspiration from Enter the Spider-verse for art style, but not as a complete copy. Again, inspiration. Try to conjure up the wonder of the opening Green Hill Zone level from the first game, but not by doing Green Hill Zone. Stop trying to just copy a Nintendo formula (Galaxy, BotW, etc.) Anyway, great post!