Sega is one of the industry's most famous companies, and it turns 65 this week.
The company was founded on June 3rd, 1960, by Martin Bromley and Richard Stewart in Hawaii under the name Nihon Goraku Bussan and would be rebranded as Sega Enterprises, Ltd five years later (Sega's history technically goes back further than that; Bromley was one of the co-founders of Service Games in 1940, which was established to sell coin-operated amusement machines to US military bases).
Sega would primarily focus on electromechanical amusement machines but would become one of the early forces in the world of "video" games when the arcade boom kicked off in the late '70s and early '80s.
A string of early coin-op hits—including Heavyweight Champ, Head-On, Monaco GP and Zaxxon—would establish the company's reputation, but the arrival of titles like Space Harrier, OutRun, Hang-On, After Burner and Golden Axe would make Sega one of the biggest names in the arcade sector by the close of the 1980s.
This was the same decade that Sega entered the home hardware market, with the SG-1000 arriving in 1983. This would eventually be replaced by the Mark III (known as the Master System in the West) before Sega launched what would ultimately be its most successful console, the Mega Drive / Genesis, in 1988. This was followed by the Saturn (1994) and Dreamcast (1998) before Sega exited the hardware arena and became a third-party publisher.
The company is now part of Sega Sammy Holdings and continues to be recognised as one of the industry's most important players; series such as Yakuza, Streets of Rage, Football Manager, Super Monkey Ball, Virtua Fighter, Total War and—of course—Sonic the Hedgehog are critically acclaimed and commercially successful, and the firm has begun turning some of these franchises into movies; the Sonic series, for example, has grossed over $1 billion at the global box office.
Here's to another 65 years of Sega—we honestly can't imagine the world with it.