Mentioning card media, most of the time, will bring up discussion of the PC Engine (Turbo Grafix) as it is certainly the platform that folks most commonly associate with the format and with good reason. But there is another, not nearly as successful, card that came before. It was the Sega Card also known as the Sega My Card. Far fewer releases called it home and it was on the market for a lot less time than the HuCard, for good reason. But despite that it had some unique features and arguably holds an important place in game development at that time.

Finding its release on to the market in 1985 (and ending only two years later in 1987), the Sega Card was created mostly as a way for the business to save money. The production of the cards required fewer materials for the media itself as well as fewer materials and a lower cost for distribution. The problem was found with the technical trade off however. The maximum storage capacity on the Sega Card significantly smaller when compared with top cartridges at the time. Looking at the technical specs the cards ranged from 4kb of ram at the lower end to 32 at the higher whereas the cartridge ranges were far higher at 16 to 512. I suppose it didn’t help that there were reports of children trying to eat them as well.

Something that was particularly neat about the Sega Card was found with the Sega My Card EP, EP standing for EPROM or erasable programmable read-only memory, in the Japanese market. These cards had an intial sales point of 5,000 yen (about 35 dollars) however they could be erased and a new title written on the card for 1,800 (about 12.50). Specialty rewriting machines were installed at various retail spots and the idea allowed for gamers to rewrite the titles onto a card for a lower cost than the standard release cost of a game. Despite the unique feature and strong potential, this also was not all that successful. In total there were 14 titles that were part of the My Card program, two of them were initial installs. When purchased, a card would come with either Star Jacker or Gulkave and the buyer could go from there. The other titles in the program were;

• Borderline
• Safari Hunter
• Sega Flipper
• Pacar
• Safari Race
• Sinbad Mystery (There is going to be a huge focus on this one! Oh boy did it give ET a run for its money)
• Penguin Land
• Dragon Wang
• Teddy Boy Blues
• Great Baseball
• Great Soccer
• Astro Flash (TransBot outside of the Japanese Market)

After the SG-1000 the only others to have the proper card slot, when it came to core consoles, were the Mark III and the base Master System. Unlike in the United States, most of the cards released in the European market found themselves re-released in cartridge format once the card was completely phased out

For a look at a couple of titles that found the Sega Card home, check out part two!

There will be an entry to give complete focus to the SG-1000/Mark III/Master System as well as they deserve a lot of love, those systems allowed for the creation of a very strong foundation for SEGA into the console market, the SG-1000 especially. So coming up there will be time to dicuss the hardware itself as well.