Released in the United States in September of 1986, nearly one year after the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega decided to enlist Tonka's toy-marketing muscle in order to swipe a piece of the pie than Nintendo had baked. Unfortunately for Sega, Tonka knew very little of marketing video games in a still somewhat chilly market, never mind one effectively under lockdown by Nintendo. The commercials enlisted the voice talents of Ernie Anderson to promote the powers and the library of the Master System, but never had quite the airtime that Nintendo game and system commercials commanded.

One issue with the handling of the games was the package design, being mostly zero-effort clip art that wouldn't be out of place on a circular for a rummage sale or school festival. Without the world wide web, or even the massive array of video game magazines we have today, much of people's impressions about games came from the box art. This may seem silly, but many stores didn't allow kids to handle the boxes to view any possible screenshots of the games on the rear of the package. One can only experience so much buyer's remorse before they give up on a game system, or even a game company entirely.

Not only does the Sega Master System sport the expected cartridge slot, but also a front-mounted card slot for Sega Card games. These cards hold up to 256 kilobits of data, so they won't be the most jaw-dropping of games, but fun is fun. Be careful not to misplace the cases for these cards, as they're rather unique in design, similar to the jewel case inserts for TurboGrafX 16 HuCards.

There also exists passthrough adapters to allow you to play older Sega cartridges from the Japanese system, the SG-1000. These games are similar to Colecovision games, in terms of sound and graphical fidelity, so you can expect some decent arcade action. The Sega MyCards for the SG-1000 may not work with an American Master System, but you aren't really missing much there.

Though there were several fumbles in the handling of the Master System, I still recall being utterly amazed by its port of Double Dragon, and playing in cooperative mode with a friend from school. No matter how ugly the box art was at the start, or how brutal the development cycles were for the system, fun is in the mind of the beholder, and time spent enjoying something isn't time wasted at all.