In North America and Japan, the Sega Master System is little more than a footnote. Those two significant markets were dominated by the NES / Famicom, with Nintendo effectively locking out competition via some rather nefarious business practices – and its own library of genre-defining first-party releases, of course.

Over in the United Kingdom, however, it was a very different story. Home computers like the ZX Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, and Commodore Amiga were the main way to play games for most of the 1980s, and Nintendo didn't put much effort into distributing the NES in the region. Instead, it seemed quite happy to allow Sega – via its distribution partner, Virgin – to steal a march.

As a result, the Sega Master System was a commercial success in this part of the world, selling around 1,350,000 units (according to data supplied by business intelligence firm Screen Digest from 1995). That might not sound like much today, but remember the video game market was much smaller back then than it is today.

Assuming that total is accurate (it doesn't seem like Sega itself has ever officially stated how many Master Systems it sold in the UK), that places the 8-bit console above the likes of the GameCube (1,150,000, according to the ELSPA), NES (1,150,000, EDGE magazine), Game Boy Color (1,100,000, Nintendo), SNES (1,050,000, Screen Digest), Dreamcast (600,000, Screen Digest), Wii U (560,000, Chris Dring), PS Vita (500,000, Screen Digest) and Saturn (214,460, EDGE) – in terms of UK sales, at least.

Some of those figures are almost certainly slightly off, but you get the picture – the Master System was a powerhouse in the UK. That fact has come as quite a shock to some people. Even I have to admit that I expected systems like the SNES and Game Boy Colour to have effortlessly eclipsed what the Master System managed on UK soil – but that doesn't seem to have been the case.

"The Japanese market was something like 85 per cent Nintendo, 15 per cent Sega," former Sega Europe CEO Nick Alexander told me a few years ago. "In North America, the story was largely the same as Japan, with the NES enjoying almost complete control of the 8-bit market. But in Europe things were totally different; from the get-go, we were the market leader. We were helped enormously by Nintendo changing their distribution arrangements in the UK pretty much every year because they hadn't got it right and kept trying to do something else."

Former Nintendo UK Marketing Director Mike Hayes told me that, when he joined in 1989, "Nintendo was on the floor. The NES was selling around 10,000 units through retailer Boots a year, while the Master System was doing pretty well. Nintendo was boring — that’s kind of what the research showed. Nintendo was dominant throughout every other market in the world — with the possible exception maybe of Australia. Certainly in the United States, Germany, Italy, and so on, Nintendo were strong — but in the UK, we were getting trounced. The market share was always two-thirds Sega, one-third Nintendo."

The console would later enjoy amazing commercial success in Brazil, as well.