How popular is the Genesis these days?

[IrishNinja]

wow, i totally do not agree with Sega-CD and especially Saturn "lacking quality", there's a lotta greats & classics to be found, especially on Saturn. we can talk all day about the wrong moves they made marketing things, but there's way too many broad/wrong statements here.

I think a lot of people forget this fact. The Genesis, while a solid system with a great library, was so successful because it was released during the life span of the NES. The graphics bump was enough to put it on the map in terms of sales. The SNES, which came a few years latter would be a technically more impressive machine, and Sega would never again lead in console dominance.

The Genesis's success is almost entirely tied to its timing of release.

this is entirely factually incorrect; SNES was out a mere 2 years into the Genesis' cycle (1991) and '92/93 Sega enjoyed a larger marketshare, thanks the popularity of Sonic, sports titles & a host of hardcore entries too (arcade, beat-em-ups, fighters, SHMUPs etc). Sega starting falling off hard around '94 because while Genesis was getting long in the tooth, they were splitting their house too much supporting Game Gear, Sega-CD, 32x and Saturn development (and release in Japan). ports on SNES in later years tended to look/sound better but that's not a given for every title either; you have to define exactly what you mean by "technically more impressive" because the SNES' CPU held it back but not in a way that many who played the most common games noticed (JRPGs, platformers etc). Kalinske, then head of SOA tried telling SOJ that the 16-bit gen had a few more years in it, but when the rushed Saturn bombed over here, SOJ pulled the plug on all the other systems to focus on that one, and SNES basically had the market to itself & proceeded to eat many newcomers' lunch with stuff like DKC, mario RPG etc into the mid-90's.

the SNES was a great system with a fantastic library, but there's no need to revise history for it here.

This just isn't accurate at all. You don't sell tens of millions of consoles based solely on a graphics bump and timing. The Genesis also had an outstanding library of games with many arcade ports and sports titles early on which is why a lot of us bought one at the time. The NES also didn't sell particularly well in Europe and frankly, the Megadrive outsold the SNES there despite its technical edge. At the end of the day, the SNES ended up with a more impressive overall library IMHO, but the Genesis has a pretty outstanding library as well.

also this.

I hope we don't have a flame war on here, What's better SNES or the Genesis

I like both system, Sonic on the Genesis and Mario on the SNES

Blame all the damn Nintendo Fanboy's on the Internet

me too, but agreed; when retrospectives are done i tend to think the history is painted rather one-sided.

In the late 80's and early 90's the graphics improvement over the NES was everything. Back then that was essentially the number one selling point; how close the graphics were to "arcade quality". So many of the games were terrible or had about 60 minutes of play value attached (ahem, Altered Beast), but looked so cool, and the fact that one could finish the game in about 20 minutes with about zero reason to play through again didn't matter.

ugh, this is also severely under painting the breadth of titles/genres the Genesis saw. even arcade style stuff like Strider, Streets of Rage, or run-n-gun like Rolling Thunder 2 fit your criteria on length, but make up for it with challenge as they're meant to be replayed/mastered, no idea why that's a negative here but if you want to pretend they were all like a rushed launch title...okay, i guess?