Sega has done some pretty shady things in the past. Aside from the declining lack of
quality that fans and critics alike have noticed when it comes to Sonic games, Sega has pulled
some pretty questionable stunts over the years that hasn't done much to help their image.
So today, we're counting down the top 10 Secrets Sega Doesn't Want You to Know. But
before we begin, I'm joined by a special guest today-
10 Their employees are bored Our first number is a topic we've discussed
on many a Sonic themed list before on our channel. An ex-Sega employee by the name of
Ben Andac published a scathing blog post under the username jpeg. Ben discussed the failings
of NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, along with a laughable new Sonic game in the works concerning
Sonic's transformation into a werewolf – he was talking about Sonic Unleashed. The post
came out prior to the game's release. The accuracy of these made people believe what
he was writing about was authentic, including a statement he made about the way Sega employee's
morale for the company was low. Aside from calling out Sonic Team for having no passion,
he noted that they are "bored, weary, closed-minded and out of touch with any sense of what makes
games good anymore." He also stated that making Sonic games was one of the reasons
Yuji Naka resigned in 2006.
9 Sega Saturn Moving on to less shady point and lazier one,
let's talk about the 1995 release of the Sega Saturn console. At the 1995 E3, Sega
made an unexpected announcement – that they were releasing the Sega Saturn that day – four
months early. The whole gimmick was that as they made the announcement, retailers would
already have the consoles ready to put out onto store shelves. Except, most of them didn't.
Toys R Us got it, but pretty much everyone else didn't, which made a lot of different
retailers decide to not carry the Saturn whatsoever. Not only did this lose them business, but
turns out they ALSO didn't inform a lot of the third party companies who were developing
games for the Saturn, so the number of games available for the console was pretty lacking.
To add insult to injury, Sony held a press conference immediately after, announcing they
were dropping the Playstation's price by a hundred dollars less than the Saturn.
8 Menu Lies From consoles to comforts, up next we have
a slightly different kind of shady Sega behavior with the Sega-owned restaurants. Turns out
Sega owns a handful of restaurants in Japan – 19 to be exact – and in 2013, they got
in trouble for misleading customers with their menus. One restaurant in particular claimed
on their menus that their food was made with organic vegetables, premium diced stake and
meals were prepared with locally grown grub. But, none of that was true, yet the prices
of the meals were just as expensive.
7 Marlbolo Controversy You know what's probably not a good idea?
Advertising cigarettes in games geared towards kids. Yeah, there's a reason why there's
laws against that these days. But, back in the day, Sega had no problem slipping in advertising
for Marlbolo cigarettes - advertising that was badly disguised, that is. In their arcade
game Grand Monaco GP, a racing game, they slipped in ads that read Marlbobo, with similar
fonts and colours as the cigarette's regular marketing assets. The worst part about it?
The ads weren't even authorized by Marlbolo's parent company Philip Morris. According to
David Rosen, the now ex-head of Sega of America, the whole mishap was due to an "innocent
attempt to mimic real-life." So they weren't making any money off of it, and they ended
up being sued by Philip Morris for copyright infringement.
6 Stealing Ideas Apparently Sega doesn't have the best track
record with major brands in general. Back in 2002 they ripped off a Nike advertisement
- Frozen Moment - and recreated the commercial to advertise their Dreamcast game NBA 2K2.
While copying an idea and repurposing it is often common in the advertising world, this
ad was pretty much a shot for shot remake, and led to Nike suing Sega. Sega settled,
canned the ad and paid $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Club as part of their agreement with
the athletic giant.
5 Stolen Fan Art There's no shortage of Sonic fan art on
the inter webs; we've talked A LOT about it on our other lists on this channel. This
is something that Sega is more than aware of, to the point where they actually stole
one artist's piece - a portrait of Sonia, by DeviantArt user Lightning-Duchess. Sega
took the piece and put it in the casino track Roulette Road of Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing
on the queen of diamonds playing card. But they didn't get the artist's permission
to use it. Because it was fan art, there wasn't any legal way for Lightning-Duchess, whose
real name is Riana Dorsey, to get retribution. But she did get an apology, and a half assed
reason for why they used her piece. Apparently one of Sumo Digital' artist mistook her
piece for an official drawing and put it in the game. When Sega had told Sumo to remove
it, Sumo forgot to do it for the Wii and PC versions of the game.
4 Copyright SEGA doesn't play by the rules - this may
have been part of their whole projected personality back during the age of console wars when Nintendo
was pushing out family friendly vibes, but it's just blown up in their face. Especially
since they literally live up to that persona when it comes to copyright rules. There was
a scandal over the Genesis game Revenge of Shinobi that was littered with copyright infringement.
It featured drastically similar rip offs of Batman, the Terminate, Godzilla, Spider-Man,
and even Rambo. The game director described it as a game that "felt like a Hollywood
action film", but apparently that meant stealing properties from major Hollywood - and
pop culture - successes whose rights weren't owned by Sega. Eventually, the game had to
be altered five different times to change up the characters whose likeness they had
stolen, and to avoid getting sued.
3 Key Master The Sega Key Master was an arcade vending
machine that let you unlock physical prizes by putting a key in the machine in "just"
the right spot. Sometimes, prize machines like these seem promising. But, back in 2013,
the Key Master was proven to be a fraud when C. Stewart Brown of Manhattan sued Sega after
they won at Key Master twice and didn't get any prizes. If you take a look at the
user manual, you'll discover a few sketchy facts – there's settings that can make
the controls more inaccurate, and a 'payout rate' limit that designates how often Key
Master can dish out prizes, with the default setting one prize every 700 attempts.
2 Spying Sonic People care a whole lot about their privacy
these days. And companies care a whole lot about your valuable data. Turns out that Sega
is no exception. Earlier this year, Pradeo, a mobile security company, discovered that
some applications in the Google Play store that were published by SEGA were leaking user's
geolocation and device data. They stated that it wasn't entirely clear who was receiving
the data, or who the data information was going to, with the info being sent to 'uncertified'
servers. So which apps were being used for this? Sonic Dash, Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom
and Sonic the Hedgehog Classic. Meaning up to 600 million users may be affected. In addition
to this, they also noticed a bunch of security holes in the apps, which definitely doesn't
help the situation.
1 'Actual Gameplay' At the 2012 E3, Sega revealed gameplay of
Aliens: Colonial Marines. It quickly became one of the most highly anticipated games of
the year. Rightfully so – the trailer was phenomenal, and the gameplay was stunning.
But, when the game came out, players were incredibly disappointed. The actual game looked
nothing like the trailer. Or rather, the quality of the game was significantly less than what
was previewed at E3. It was ugly, riddled with bugs, and none of the detailed textures
or dynamic lighting that were promised. News would later come out that there were issues
between Sega and developers Gearbox, with Sega stepping in to finish it off, and a lawsuit
was launched for false advertising that cost Sega 1.25 million dollars.
There we have it friends!
Which of these Sega not-so-secret secrets shocked you the most? Are there a few Sega
scandals we didn't mention that you think we should know about? Give us a shout in those
comments and fill us in. If you dug this video, hit that like button, subscribe if you haven't
already, and don't forget to check out some of the other gaming videos on our channel
before you go. Thanks for watching! Catch you all in the next one.
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