Sega and Nintendo are allies now, and have even worked together on key releases in recent memory. This would have been absolutely unthinkable back in the early '90s, when these two Japanese firms fought for supremacy of living rooms all over the globe.
One of the most fiercely contested territories was North America, thanks to Sega's Genesis stealing a march on Nintendo, gobbling up market share previously owned by the NES. While Nintendo would pull things back with the SNES, it was a sobering contest for a company that had the entire console market to itself during the late '80s.
Fast forward to 2025, and Sega has reignited the rivalry with a throwback to one of its most iconic commercials, one which claimed that Genesis' "Blast Processing" (a phrase coined by former SoA staffer Scott Bayless) gave it the advantage over the SNES.
Speaking to this writer on behalf of Retro Gamer magazine many years ago, Bayless apologised for creating that "ghastly phrase":
Sadly I have to take responsibility for that ghastly phrase. Marty Franz [Sega technical director] discovered that you could do this nifty trick with the display system by hooking the scan line interrupt and firing off a DMA at just the right time. The result was that you could effectively jam data onto the graphics chip while the scan line was being drawn – which meant you could drive the DAC's with 8 bits per pixel. Assuming you could get the timing just right you could draw 256 color static images. There were all kinds of subtleties to the timing and the trick didn't work reliably on all iterations of the hardware but you could do it and it was cool as heck.
So during the runup to the western launch of Sega-CD the PR guys interviewed me about what made the platform interesting from a technical standpoint and somewhere in there I mentioned the fact that you could just "blast data into the DAC's" Well they loved the word 'blast' and the next thing I knew Blast Processing was born. Oy.
This time around, however, the company is pushing Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, which is coming to all major consoles – including Switch and Switch 2.
As you can see, the advertisement takes aim at Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World, even going as far as to claim that its open world gameplay is boring.