zgamer007: Sega is maybe the oldest company in gaming. Their roots go back to the days where games were mechanical instead of electronic and when Atari made Pong in 1972, Sega was right there on their heels being one of the 3 biggest game manufacturers at the time along with Taito later on in the 70's.

One thing that I don't see mentioned here is how Sega is responsible for 2 of Nintendo's most popular franchises...Mario Kart & Star Fox. Super Mario Kart came out in 1992 & became an immensely popular kart racer but it followed the formula that came 4 years prior to it in 1988, namely Sega's Power Drift, which was the first ever kart racer. Nintendo may have built on top of what Power Drift was in the arcades by adding weapons like turtle shells along with characters from multiple franchises (like Donkey Kong), but the fact is the hardware of Power Drift was vastly more powerful than any other 16-bit racing game, being 3 times more powerful than the Genesis along with custom state of the art video hardware that allowed for scaling & rotation of very fast moving sprites with no slowdown. The deluxe cabinet would also tilt as players would make turns to correspond to the rotation effects on the screen. Given how much more powerful Power Drift was compared to the Genesis, any port would have been vastly inferior, but had Sega ported it anyway, most people today wouldn't think of Mario Kart being synonymous with the kart racing genre. Star Fox came out in 1993 & like Mario Kart it followed a formula made 5 years earlier by Sega in 1988, namely the arcade game Galaxy Force II. Just play the game and you'll easily see where so much of the mechanics of games like Star Fox for the SNES & Star Wars Rogue Squadron for the N64 come from. Galaxy Force II to the best of my knowledge was the first chase view starship shooter game made & took the Afterburner style of gameplay into space & added all sorts of different enemies. Unlike Star Fox it doesn't have polygons, but I consider that a good thing because rather than having ugly blocky ships, Galaxy Force II had clear high resolution graphics for the 16-bit era. It was the first to use the same extremely powerful hardware that Power Drift later used in the same year (that I described above) which is 3x more powerful than the Genesis and is also more powerful than the SNES hardware even coupled with the Super FX chip. There is no slowdown whatsoever in the arcade version. There was a Genesis port made in 1991, but obviously it's vastly inferior to the arcade version. Star Fox built on the formula Sega created by adding bosses which were lacking in Galaxy Force II along with many more powerups. Similarly to the case with Power Drift, the arcade cabinet of Galaxy Force II offered an experience that couldn't be felt anywhere else with the cabinet tilting into turns made by the ship to correspond the turns made on the screen. Galaxy Force II also had a co-pilot whose voice you heard when you had to make turns in closed in space. Some of the enemies were amazing like huge lava worms reminiscent to the ones that appeared later on in the side scrolling Gradius III that would spiral in the air and move in a snake like fashion. It was amazing how this was all done without any slowdown in a chase view (3rd person) starship shooter.

Also if you back up 2 years before the the release of Power Drift to November 1986, Sega released Outrun which was without a doubt the game that took the Pole Position style of gameplay in the 8-bit era to a much more detailed game with larger sprites and human characters in the car. It also featured an amazing soundtrack. Even though Konami also released WEC LeMans in the arcades in November 1986, Outrun is easily the one that's more well known due to the detail it had along with it's soundtrack. The dual 68000 processors it used were also clocked higher than those of WEC LeMans. Games like Rad Racer, Roadblasters (added a combat element), Final Lap & its sequels, Top Speed/Full Throttle, Chase HQ & its sequels, Hot Chase, Power Drift, Super Mario Kart & so many others all followed suit. Outrun was a gigantic success that made driving games so much more popular than they were before. Sega got its competitors like Taito & Konami to step their game up with the quality they put in Outrun.

A quick note I wanted to point out is that Sega's first game featuring go karts was the 1984 maze game Spatter/Sanrin Sanchan: Tricycle San where the main enemies rode on go karts & chased the girl on the tricycle the player controlled.

One note other note I wanted to say is that NEC did release the Turbo CD prior to Sega releasing the Sega CD, but the Sega CD was definitely more successful & more well known.