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. 😉