In the sports world there is a thing known as the Sports Illustrated cover jinx. The jinx basically says that when an athlete gets their picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated, they go out and break there leg, or mess up real bad. In the videogaming world there is thing known as the Sega system and add-on jinx. The jinx basically says that every system or add-on that Sega releases will be a failure of some kind. Lets look at the history of Sega and see what that means for it's future.

Sega's first home system was the Sega Master System. It had some memorable releases, and some even say it's a more powerful system than it's competitor, the NES, but the SMS was an all around financial failure. Then came Sega's 16 bitter, the Genesis. The Genesis had great financial success in the US and Europe, but was considered a third rate system in Japan, where the SNES and it's role playing games ruled the land. Sega released various add-on's for the Genesis. The Sega-CD offered US gamers plenty of RPG's and other quality games, but financially it was a moderate flop; as it did not achieve the market penetration that Sega had hoped for. In Japan the Sega CD was a complete flop, gamers there had their share of RPG's from the SNES and there was no incentive to buy a Sega CD. Along came Sega of America's infamous 32X, the add-on hyped up to take your Genesis and turn it in to a next generation system. It also failed miserably, as it lacked support from Japan and never had a blockbuster game. Now we arrive at Saturn, which while offering everyone some great games, it seems to be slipping in Japan, and never truly picked up in the US. In comes the Netlink.

The Netlink is the modem add-on for the Saturn. In the US it's has a baud of 28.8 and in Japan 14.4. In Japan it is having moderate success on the level of the Sega CD . In the US it has been a complete flop. The Netlink has been advertised in the US, as the machine that turns your Saturn into a web browser, surf the web, send email, and more! Sounds like an AOL commercial to me. At this point the Netlink has two competitors in the USA, the PC and WebTV. While the PC ,or Mac if you prefer, are in a different price range, one has to ask themselves how much of the market that wants to be on the internet, already is. Netlink's other competitors is WebTV. The actual practical aspects of which web browser is better I will not go in to here, but the I will go in to something I can see every day. It seems like every two minutes a commercial for WebTV comes on. Sure the commercials are annoying, but at least they are there. Commercials for Netlink are few and far between, in fact I don't think I have seen one since the Christmas rush of last fucking year!.

Just for a minute imagine that there is no such thing as internet, and you say "well then what's the use of Netlink now?" Games. If it's one thing everyone likes it's multi-player games, but SOA has not delivered them to us soon enough, or in a proper manner. It took nearly a year for the first Netlink games to be released, and even then the few games released fell far short of Sega's 8-10 game figure by Christmas 96. Worse yet, all Netlink games are direct dial-up, meaning you have to leave the internet and place a normal phone call to play with an opponent. This is fine for local players, but what about long distance play? If only Sega had included tcp/ip play, but that would of actually required effort, effort Sega wasn't and isn't willing to give.