Nintendo has managed to find an incredible amount of success with its “Classics Mini” line, which consists of micro consoles that recreate systems like NES and SNES, and play some of their best games via some pretty great emulation. The NES Classic Mini and SNES Classic Mini have both done abundantly well—which means that it makes sense for other companies that made classic systems to look into doing something like that, too.
Atari and Sega, the two other prominent classic console manufacturers, have been licensing out their systems to other companies for a while now, with Atari Flashbacks and Genesis Flashback (both of which have had mixed results). It makes sense that the insane success of Nintendo’s in house solution has caught their eye.
Sega’s COO Kenji Matsubara revealed in an interiew with Yahoo that Sega plans to sell their own Classics-style systems going forward. But before you get too excited, he isn’t talking about Sega doing their own thing in-house like Nintendo. Rather, he is talking about Sega literally importing the Genesis Flashback by AT&T Games (which, by the way, has shoddy and horrific quality, ill fitting of the console’s venerable legacy) to Japan and selling them there.
It’s a start, I guess. We can only hope that one day, Sega will actually bother putting out actual clones of their own systems that honour the legacy of those systems like they deserve.
