Sega Retro

segaoa.com, Circa 1995: The Origins of Sega’s Online Presence

The year is 1995, and the Internet is pretty barren in terms of Sega-related content. Before there was rat.org, before there were Sega webrings, before there were people who had no idea what the Gopher protocol was online, there were only two real places to be a Sega fan: alt.sega.genesis and rec.games.video.sega. Enter, naturally, segaoa.com—the original official website of Sega of America. By the first time archive.org got around to crawling the site, it was already gone, replaced by a domain purchase parking page.

Thankfully, the site is still preserved in one place: the May 1995 issue of Sega Visions magazine. Although the two-page spread is basically an advertorial for Compuserve (you may be as surprised as I was to find out that the service is still around to this day), it does capture screenshots and give a writeup of what the site featured, including “online conferences” with Roger Hector, Tom Kalinske, and Joe Miller (then-senior VP of product development), video clips and graphics, and cheesy graffiti–a feature sorely missing from sega.com today. 🙁

Check these scans out to see segaoa.com (or, on Compuserve, GO SEGA) for yourself:

Sega of America, I know you probably have a copy of this site sitting somewhere on a disk (or several floppy disks, or even a ZIP disk.) Give us a copy of the site and I’d be happy to host it–heck, I’ll even try to buy back segaoa.com. 😉

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5 Comments

  • Reply

    It’d be pretty awesome if Sega still has this somewhere… and if they do hopefully they’ll send you a message saying you can buy it from them or something Scarred Sun. I would love to visit the site if it ever does come back online. ^_^

  • Reply

    Too late, someone already bought it.

  • Reply

    Ah, I remember Sega Visions. I used to read that magazine all the time when I was a kid.

  • Reply

    It would have been really neat to see this website back in the day. I never even heard of the internet or world wide web until late 1996. Seems funny today how the article describes how the web essentially works and how to navigate it. There’s a Sega ad featuring the “new” segaoa.com website in an issue or two of the Sonic the Hedgehog comic as well.

  • Reply

    i think it would be cool to see the website in its hayday unfortunatly i was born a couple years before the site existed

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