Indeed, over subsequent decades Sega became a true pioneer in arcade gaming, releasing the first ever stereoscopic 3D game (SubRoc 3D), the first arcade game on Laserdic (Astron Belt), the first game with isometric graphics (Zaxxon), and the first game to feature a live nude man trapped inside (The Clothe-less Screamer).
These days, Sega's arcade division is still distributing games, but they tend to be of the ticket-dispensing variety (you know the sort: they churn out tickets which you can then hand over to a disinterested/irritable arcade employee in return for a malformed rubber pencil topper).
Here are ten very obscure arcade machines from across Sega's history.
As the red pulse reached your "end", you could hit a button to fire off a green pulse to send it back towards your opponent. The key to success was timing your response to the beat of the game's music. Get it spot on, and your green light would careen back at high speed. Depending on taste, players could choose the soundtrack from a choice of five wildly different genres: house, drum n' bass, techno/trance, hip-hop/rap, or "Digital rock".
Now study the above images... Note how the feller in the leopard-print hat appears to be having a stroke and/or involuntary naughty pelvic spasm, and everyone's too engrossed in the game to notice.
That's how good it was.
"Please, Swami, I must know if I will receive pleasant surprise in the near future!"
"Your chances are favourable."
<SMALL KITTEN DROPS FROM CEILING INTO YOUR LAP>
"Wow!"
"My ceiling - it's ruined!"
It's pretty astonishing when you consider that, at the time, the sinking of the Titanic was properly horrific... and you have to wonder how many years must pass before they start making ticket-dispensing arcade machines based upon 9/11, featuring a pair of revolving plastic Twin Towers.
"Roll your coins into the buildings to knock them down and win a prize!"
<ELECTRONIC RASP> "AL QAEDA!"
Reportedly, the chickens were repurposed from an earlier Sega ticket machine - Udderly Tickets - which required players to "milk" a life-size model of a cow. The hens were originally placed on a bale of hay at shin height, making them the ideal target for a good kicking, and thus were regularly vandalised.
Just for the record, if you attempted to recreate this game in real-life, you'd probably anger a farmer, and responding to his furious gesticulations with egg-based puns - as seen on the above flyer - would be likely to make matters worse.
"Why... why do you come here and smash my hens' eggs so?"
"The yolk's on you!"
"That's it - I'm getting my shotgun!"
"That seems like a bit of an egg-streme reaction."
"What is wrong with you?!?! This is my livelihood."
"My brain is scrambled."
"FFS."
"Eggeggeggeggeggeggeggeggeggeggegggggggg-gggnnn-fffnnnnnn!"
"Look at me, mum! I'm flying a whirly-bird!"
"It's a helicopter."
"It's a whirly-bird! Wheeeeee!"
<SLAP>
Inevitably, in a bid to justify its scatalogical "bent" Sega attempted to disguise the fart reference by giving the game a sort of rodent theme.
Here are some other farting euphemisms Sega may wish to base a game around:
Open The Mortuary Drawer
Visit The Old Folk's Home
Burn The Wig Made of Human Hair
Give The Dog A Colonoscopy
Meet The Frenchman (poss. racist/delete?)
Which is, of course, not entirely inaccurate.
Honestly, who used these machines? More to the point... did anybody actually believe them? I mean, we all want to be sexy, but I'm not sure how much faith I put in the subjective opinion of a machine that has only just met me.
Of course, the irony of this is that Sega itself later became a proverbial punch-bag, due to its absurd-mid-to-late 90s business practices.
<DROPS MIC, GRUNTS, POOS IN HIS PANTS>