Yet more coverage of the April 1992 issue, with only a paragraph and a half to go.
Oooh, here’s a juicy bit!
[…] word from the Sega chief is that a new piece of Sega hardware, officially code-named the Giga-Drive, will hit soon! The machine will indeed support at least a 32-Bit configuration mocking the System 32 boards from Sega’s coin-ops! In addition to buff new games, the Giga-Drive will also remain completely downwardly compatible, so your Genesis library won’t be obsolete overnight (learn Nintendo learn Nintendo learn Nintendo learn Nintendo)…
This could only be the Sega 32X, the ill-fated add-on for the Sega Genesis that was released shortly before Christmas of 1994. Of particular interest, though, is that Quartermann appears to have pulled the codename from thin air; I can’t find anything else that references the project as “Giga-Drive” – the actual codename for the Sega 32X was “Project Mars,” and the only time I’ve ever seen Sega used the name “GigaDrive” would be the highly impressive engine behind M2’s Sega 3D Classics, which does not really involve 32-bit processing so much as essentially inventing a whole new “expanded MegaDrive” with which to handle 3D effects. It’s a cool read, but it’s not relevant to this rumor. Everything else about this chunk of rumor is pretty much true, even the bit about backward compatibility.
Happy, happy – Joy, joy…While digging on the Giga-Drive, yours truly has also scored with some kick news on the yet another piece of Sega hardware! This machine, still in development and untitled, will be CD specific but won’t hit the stores until sometime in 1994! Can’t wait…
Ah, the Sega Saturn, Sega’s only true contender to the 32-bit throne, and the unfortunate victim of Sega’s left hand not knowing what its right hand was doing. The Sega 32X was, presumably, only ever supposed to be a stopgap, a way to keep the Genesis relevant while the Saturn was in development. However, Sega wound up releasing both consoles on almost the same week in Japan (Christmas of 1994), and the American Saturn came a mere six months after the 32X (halfway through 1995), leading to Sega effectively cannibalizing its own marketplace. Of course, the Saturn wound up lasting quite a bit longer than the 32X did, especially in Japan where it had much more market support and install base.
And now here is that half of a paragraph:
Nintendo is working on the development of the Color GameBoy, but no development systems have so far been awarded! The Q-Mann says December at the earliest…
Oh, come on, man, you were doing so well.
For the interests of history, everybody really wanted a color Game Boy (just about as much as they apparently wanted to play NES games on a Super NES), but Nintendo did not wind up obliging those people until June of 1994, with the Super Game Boy, which “colorized” monochrome Game Boy games by running them through an SNES, and had a few games that adopted full color palettes when run via the SGB. The real Game Boy Color wouldn’t reach the video game marketplace until late 1998, six and a half years later!
Grinding the Rumor Mill 