Video: Take A Look Inside Sega Of America's Testing Facility, Circa 1995

"God forbid we don't do a proper job of test and release a product that has a whole lot of bugs in it" and people start talking about it etc.

This is where Sega went wrong. Bug-ridden products are the norm in the internet age.

It's an incredible snapshot of the 90s, from the Seinfeld box in the background and the soundtrack to the smoking. I love these training videos, like the Nintendo Support one dealing with customer returns and the infamous Wendy's 'Grill Skills' rap.

When the guy was using two lightguns with Virtua Cop, you could see on the screen that only player 1 had credits. That annoyed me even more than the rolling about shooting without anything plugged in.

I had the full monstrosity in the top image but mine looked arguably sillier as I had the original Megadrive straddled to the Mega CD 2. There was an extra part to the base you had to attach so it wouldn't hang off the edge. Add the 32x on top and the Micro Machines or Sonic and Knuckles carts and you've got the most ridiculous looking contraption of all time. That said,I loved that ugly beast.

Just look at the thing haha
Still say the Megadrive 1/Mega CD 2 combo was uglier though and an absolute nightmare to fit in a backpack.

@OorWullie oh yeah, My brother and I had the Sega Sandwhich as well. We played the crap out of Sewer Sharks and actually beat it.

YEAh this DONT happen any more for the most part SO Many games released in a broken state Bugs, Shoddy Framerates Glitches it LITERALLY is the NORM now along with post patch updates to amend games that shouldn't of been released in that state in the first place.

@Mr_Zurkon Nice one. I don't think I ever played Sewer Sharks.My most played games on the CD were Silpheed,loved that game and a demo cd I got free on a Sega magazine. It had a few demos on it but thr best one was Sensible Soccer, it was the full game but you were restricted to 90 seconds matches. I couldn't believe my luck. I got so much playtime out of that demo haha.

@OorWullie you didn't miss much, the game was pretty much garbage. Lol.

@Mr_Zurkon Ah I remember Sewer Sharks now. How can I forget. Still not sure I ever actually played it though as Night Trap put me off.Road Avengers was great though,that was the pack in title with the Sega CD.It was a good game to impress your mates with.

I ended up watching the whole thing. It's interesting to see how testing those games worked. It was nostalgic too. Sega was cool in a very 90's way back then.

They used to take bug fixing before release much more seriously. The marketing department's influence on development schedules must've grown a lot in the following ten years, considering the same company allowed Sonic 2006 to be released with tons of bugs.

And to think I was wasting my time in graduate school during this era.

Nice little trip down memory lane.

Especially enjoyed the wannabe A-Team van in the parking lot at the beginning (around 00:35).

"we can't release this!" i miss those days.

Chill slice of mid-'90s Southern Cali. Of course Sega, being the "cool kids" game company, would highlight the smoke break. Nice to see Kalinske was very supportive of his dogs' labour. Funny how stomping on the Pico "makes no sound."

Gotta make sure that Blast Processing doesn't destroy the Universe.

Ugh, the post-grunge era. Too soon.

Sewer Sharks. That game was so poopy that it belongs in a sewer.

I'll never forget the first time I booted up night trap! Blew my doors off. And then The driving sequences in batman returns really blew my mind even further!!! What a great game!! Miss you SEGA!!!!

@EllenJMiller Smoking is 90's?

I got a heavy Clerks vibe from this video and considering it came out one year after Clerks, methinks the director may have been a Kevin Smith fan.

Wow, what a trip back down memory lane! I worked at Sega 90 - 91 in that very same office building. What a great time! The industry was so young, exciting, pioneering... even innocent. It's sad that we will never see that era again. Nintendo is really the only company holding on to those roots and it's even slipping away from them too.

Those testers were no joke. I worked on the phones in customer support. But it was well known in the office the hours of blood, sweat and tears that those testers put in. Yes, as people have mentioned here... there was no such thing as "patching". You either got it right and shipped a clean game or you shipped a disaster. It's amazing that there weren't more games shipped with catastrophic bugs back then. Just a testament to those testers and, most importantly, the executives back then who valued quality over timelines. Truly an era long gone.

BTW, @Gauchorino, Redwood City is Bay Area. NorCal. About as different a vibe from SoCal as you can get. But yeah. Really cool 90s vibe to this video

@AcesHigh My mistake, thanks for the correction! But yeah, Nintendo seems as the only games company still remotely worth such a distinction for quality and effort to innovate, despite their increasingly less creative approaches and often poor (but apparent) sense of conformity to what the rest of the industry is doing. It's unnecessarily a little disheartening, then, to still read disparaging comments about the company from some modern "hardcore" Sega fans. Do they not realize that both Nintendo and Sega had strived against each other for the sake of making the better game, rather than one company placing a much more peripheral importance on games development than the other? The kind of competition that existed between Sega and Nintendo is of a rather different variety than what has ever existed between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

Those testers might have even been paid a living wage. Now developers get the gamers to test for free and pay full price.