The day Sega stopped making video game hardware was a sad one, but it’s worth remembering that, like former rivals Nintendo, video game hardware wasn’t the only thing Sega had ever made.
Sega’s history is likewise littered with other stuff, from slot machines to photobooths, but one of the coolest has got to be the SegaVision (not to be confused with the Sega Vision, a tiny Japan-only media player).
A series of enormous TV sets released in the late 70s, they were, as you might imagine, pretty insane given the time period. They were huge, clocking in at 50″. They had remote controls. They also used rear-projection, making them some of the first units in the world to do so.
You will also note that they were packed into giant wood-panelled cases. Yes.
The above commercial features baseball star Steve Garvey, who steals more of the show than the TV does, because his hair was magnificent.
Sega’s stay in the TV business was a short one, as by the time the 80s rolled around the company was almost entirely focused on its video game business. Sega would, however, make a late comeback in the year 2000 with its weird-arse Dreamcast TV.
[via The Retroist]
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