Quote Originally Posted by Az View Post
Honest question: did anything contemporary at the time claim that the SMS was more powerful?

I never saw any press or advertising from Sega/Tonka that said it did. Sure, carts were labeled as "the mega cartridge" or "two-mega cartridge" but those were just buzzwords with no meaning to people. Might as well say "low calorie" or "high energy". I never really heard even the press mention megabit size until Strider came along.

Although I didn't read PC mags, console mags like GamePro and EGM never touted the SMS as more powerful than the NES. Screenshots might have looked a bit more colorful but even that wasn't capitalized on as a system selling point. As far as I can recall, nobody really knew or cared about exact system specs until the next generation of systems came out and suddenly thrust a whole new terminology and hardware accentuation on customers.
Well you're asking a marketing question, because that's all something like that is. The whole "power" angle was something that SEGA began to push big time with the Genesis. Does it really mean anything? Probably not. What those commercials showed was what they were pushing at the time for SMS, which was partly licenses, but also the features of the console. I loved those old CGI-style SegaScope 3D ads, for instance. But as I said, going all the way back to George Plimpton, the advertisements were usually simply look and compare. Being "more powerful" did not start up big time until Genesis, and then ever system was claiming their specs were better, which really meant zip if the games stunk.