The Box Was Decided Before the Board Existed

The Box Was Decided Before the Board Existed

A Mega Drive feels lighter than it looks. The black shell, the ridges across the lid, the gold 16-BIT badge sitting on the front like the badge on a car — all of it promises something heavier than what arrives on my bench. Open it and you see why. There is a great deal of air in there. The board does not fill the space it lives in.

Masami Ishikawa, who designed that board, explained it in a 2018 interview: the size of the case had been decided beforehand, and he had to lay out the board so it would somehow fit inside. The shape came first. Mitsushige Shiraiwa's team had drawn it from audio components and cars rather than from other game machines, in a year when consoles were still being drawn for children. The electronics were fitted into a decision that was already made.

Normally that is the wrong order, and you can feel it in your hands. But the shape kept its promise. Sega's own AV cable carried mono sound, because the television in an ordinary living room in 1988 was mono. The machine itself could play in stereo. So the hardware staff cut a second exit into the front panel — a headphone jack, with its own volume slider beside it, since headphones have no volume knob of their own. To hear what the machine could actually do, you plugged into the front of it, the way you would with a stereo. The second model dropped both. By then televisions had caught up.

The cartridges from those years almost never fail. Thirty-eight years on, they still read. I like that the box was drawn before anyone knew what would go inside it, and that the machine grew up to deserve the drawing.