SEGA Nomad prototype REVEALED years later: Why was the 'Project Venus' handheld console forgotten?


SEGA is celebrating their 60th anniversary at the moment, and with it, they're doing lots of things to show off bits of their history.

That means we saw some strange mash-up games released a little while ago on Steam, and it's going to lead to a lot of other random gems for sure.

Well, SEGA showed off a new video that has revealed a lot about the history of their games consoles.

It's in this video that the world got its first glimpse at a SEGA handheld. A handheld called the SEGA Nomad.

What is the SEGA Nomad?

If you want to watch the video yourself then you can do so below, it's filled with interesting bits of information about SEGA's history. If you specifically want to watch the bit about the SEGA Nomad, or Venus, as it was codenamed, then you can do so by going to 11:12 in the video:

It's all in Japanese, but you can watch it with subtitles if you don't speak the language.

The Nomad was a portable Mega Drive. It was, according to the video, released in North America and took the Genesis' cartridges. The cool thing about the video is that it also shows off a prototype of the handheld that's never been seen before.

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Why was the SEGA Nomad forgotten?

Ultimately, the Nomad was only ever released in North America, and was even region locked.

According to the internet, it fell to the side once SEGA started focussing on the Saturn, and as a result, it ended up fading out of history.

It's a real shame because a handheld like this nowadays would do absurdly well, just look at the Nintendo Switch and you can see that console gaming on the go is pretty huge.

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