Sega Genesis Games

Sega put the Mega Drive on sale in Japan on 29 October 1988. It arrived in North America a year later under the name Genesis, and in Europe in 1990. The design was blunt and effective: a Motorola 68000 running at 7.6 MHz did the heavy lifting, while a Zilog Z80 handled sound and doubled as a compatibility layer for Master System cartridges. Graphics came from a video display processor with a 512-colour master palette and roughly 64 colours on screen, and the sound was a Yamaha YM2612 FM synthesiser backed by a simple PSG. That FM chip is why Mega Drive music has its distinctive metallic, bass-heavy growl — nothing else from the era sounds like it.

Speed, attitude and arcade ports

Sega leaned hard on the 68000's speed, and the software followed. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic & Knuckles were built around momentum and scrolling that the hardware could sustain. The console also became the home of the side-scrolling brawler, with Streets of Rage 2 and Golden Axe II, and of some of the best 16-bit shooters ever written: Thunder Force IV, Gunstar Heroes and Contra: Hard Corps. Treasure and Konami squeezed remarkable things out of it — see Rocket Knight Adventures and Castlevania: Bloodlines. It had depth too: Phantasy Star IV and Landstalker carried the RPG side, and Herzog Zwei is widely credited as a direct ancestor of the real-time strategy genre. Sega's own mascots beyond Sonic — Ristar, Vectorman, Ecco: The Tides of Time — are still worth your time.

Playing Mega Drive games in your browser

This is one of our best-supported consoles: 374 of the 562 Mega Drive titles in the catalogue start straight in the browser. The emulator runs inside the page, so there is no download, no installer and no emulator to configure — you click play and the game boots. Keyboard controls are mapped by default, and a USB or Bluetooth gamepad is detected automatically, which is worth doing for the fighting and racing games.