Last night, the 2023 Game Awards took place where Baldur’s Gate 3 was, predictably, the winner of the night with six awards including the coveted Game of the Year award. Not to mention – as is tradition – we witnessed numerous trailers with updates to previously-announced games such as Hellblade II, and brand-new game reveals including Marvel’s Blade from Arkane Studios and Hello Games’s first new game in almost a decade, Light No Fire. However, there was one trailer that caught many a gamer’s attention, not just due to the publisher involved but also because of how many games were announced in the span of about 30 seconds.
There were hints about Japanese gaming publisher Sega announcing something at the Game Awards, and internet discussions were abound as to what gaming franchise could see a revival from their treasure trove of IPs. It turns out, it was not a revival of a gaming franchise – it was a revival of five gaming franchises.
The announcement of five games, all of which are reboots of Sega’s storied gaming franchises that have not seen a new instalment be released on consoles or PCs in at least a decade or two (with the exception of Streets of Rage where the 4th instalment was released in 2020 though not by Sega), were revealed in Sega’s Power Surge trailer (embedded above) that was first broadcast at the Game Awards. The five games are brand new instalments for Crazy Taxi, Golden Axe, Jet Set Radio, Shinobi and Streets of Rage, with the video ending by saying “Now in Development” with no release window (presumably, still early).
The history and trajectory of Sega as a gaming company is an interesting one. During the 1980s and early-1990s, their gaming consoles like the Sega Master System and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, coupled with their now-revered gaming franchises that made their debut on those systems, such as Out Run, Sonic the Hedgehog and Virtua Fighter, made Sega a household name in the gaming industry alongside their competitor, Nintendo. However, a series of business and strategic miscalculations starting with the Sega Saturn in the mid-1990s left Sega having to play catch-up with the likes of Nintendo and the new kid on the block, Sony, with their hugely-successful PlayStation. Sega did attempt to make a comeback with the Sega Dreamcast in 1999: a gaming console with features such as built-in modem for online gaming and the Visual Memory Unit (or VMU, for short) as the new innovation for memory cards that made it ahead of its time, even it retrospective. Combined with a great launch line-up – including Sonic Adventure, Shenmue and SoulCalibur, to name a few – Sega felt like they were back on track. Despite this, the impending release of the Sony’s next-generation console was always a lingering threat to Sega’s hardware business due to the sheer number of units that the PlayStation 1 had sold throughout its life – more than 100 million, in fact. This, combined with other third-party publishers preferring to partner with Sony rather than Sega, meant that the Dreamcast was already on life-support. Finally, in early 2001, Sega pulled out of the hardware business altogether, and transitioned to become a 3rd-party gaming publisher for other gaming consoles going forward.
Since becoming a 3rd-party publisher, games that initially launched on the Dreamcast made their way to Sega’s competitors’ systems in the years that followed, such as Crazy Taxi and Sonic Adventure 2. Microsoft and Sega had forged a partnership during the original Xbox’s life cycle that had sequels to Sega’s franchises launch exclusively on Microsoft’s console, such as Jet Set Radio Future, Outrun 2 and Shenmue II (though Shenmue II did eventually get a re-release on PlayStation 4 in 2018). For the next two decades, Sega would experiment with its gaming library by establishing gaming franchises that would be developed in-house at Sega with distinctly Japanese sensibilities – Yakuza/Like a Dragon, Valkyria Chronicles and Bayonetta, as examples – along with other games developed in partnership with Western-based gaming studios like Condemned (by Monolith Studios, based in the U.S.) and Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (by Sumo Digital, based in the U.K.). Though Sega games developed in the west – plus games that featured its mascot, Sonic – would expectedly sell more units in North America and Europe, the Japanese-developed gaming franchises would slowly start to build a cult-following over the years. Combined with its acquisition of Japanese video game company Atlus, creators of the critically-acclaimed gaming franchise Persona, Sega’s most anticipated games worldwide nowadays are those games based in Japan.
Similar to how audiences are receptive to foreign-based films found on streaming services such as Netflix, gamers are drawn to Japanese-based video games that prides on its authentic Japanese roots and does not pander to its outsider audience. And it’s not just Sega that is reaping the benefits of its newly-found popular niche; other Japanese gaming publishers with similar offerings such as Namco and Capcom have also been rewarded for staying true to it’s original Japanese philosophy with its games, to great success.
This is why gamers are excited about the return of those Sega gaming franchises that were teased in the Power Surge trailer. Though it has been a while since those franchises last had a game on a console or PC, Sega has slowly built brand loyalty with its gaming audience with the new franchises that it has been cultivating over the last few console generations, and the return to its legacy franchises does not feel like a nostalgia play, though there is some of that as well, to be sure. Five returning Sega franchises at once can feel like Sega has a lot to live up to, but as long as each one of those announced games turns out at least good and pays homage to the original source material, Sega could celebrate its success as one of the premier gaming giants of the industry, just as it did decades ago.
