Why were the Sega Card games unpopuar?

[tap]

Everywhere I read about them says that Sega stopped releasing games on cards because they were unpopular. Why didn't people like them?

I actually think they're pretty cool, so I always to get a game's card release over the cart whenever I can.

[Maxim]

The format limited them to 32KB. Mega Cartridges were a big deal in Sega's marketing, and the game size wars couldn't easily play out on cards.

[lorf]

Wasn't the price of RAM dropping at the time as well, making stuff like carts cheaper?

[flatapex]

It didn't help I suppose that cards were old technology carried over from the sg-1000.

[Maxim]

ROM prices were still pretty high, Phantasy Star cost extra due to its size (although the extra size also implies extra development work). The card interface could have been SG-1000 compatible and also expose an extra address line for SMS mode to make it the same as a cart in terms of capacity, or they could have paged inside the 32KB they had. The bigger question is, why have two slots at all in the export SMS 1?

[bkk]

They originally had plans for a 128KB card, so they probably still thought it would be a viable format whilst the Export SMS was in development. The first 12 games were all card games, and the first cartridge game (Fantasy Zone) didn't actually get released until after the export SMS was first shown at the 1986 Summer CES. The Export SMS was also developed extremely quickly;

With news of Nintendo's success in the New York launch of the NES for Christmas, 1985, Sega of Japan made a quick decision in March, 1986 to adapt its Mark III system for the U.S. market and re-open a U.S. Consumer Division of the company. Steve described the wild race to get the Sega Master System ready for a first showing at CES in June, 1986 - perhaps one of the fastest product launches on record - and a September, 1986 introduction to the U.S. market. Steve was the Product Manager of the new division, and he recounted the story of the day before CES, when there was no product to put in the Sega booth because it was being air-shipped from Japan. He and a few others from Sega waited nervously at Chicago's O'Hare Airport for several hours after the expected arrival time of the plane. Worse yet, no one seemed to know where the plane was. It turned out that it had been too foggy for the plane to land, so it went on to New York. Many tense hours later, the samples of the new Sega Master System finally made it to Chicago and the CES booth with very little time to spare before the opening of the show.

The first 256KB game (Space Harrier) released at the end of 1986, and the last 32KB game (Woody Pop)* released in March 1987. It probably wasn't as practical to increase the size of cards as fast as cartridges. Still, they continued to market them for some time, with the last overseas release being the US version of Spy. Vs. Spy in October 1988, with the European announcement of them being phased out and being replaced by cartridges coming in the first issue of S - The Sega Mag (October 1989). The SMS II was shown at the 1990 Summer CES, so the phasing out of the cards was probably planned in advance of that.



*Edit: Actually the last 32KB game was probably the European card release of Bank Panic, reviewed in the December 1987 issue of "Power Play", and with "Now there are no limits®" on the cover which dates it to the second half of 1987. I forgot that never got released in Japan or the US.

[jessie]

Great info bkk!