Sega

Sega didn't start in Japan, and it didn't start as a game company. It started in 1940 in Honolulu, Hawaii, as Standard Games, a company that built coin-operated amusement machines for U.S. military bases. After the war it relocated to Tokyo and renamed itself Service Games, importing jukeboxes and slot machines to entertain American servicemen stationed there. Shorten Service Games and you get SEGA. That's the whole naming story, hiding in plain sight for decades.

Sega spent the 60s and 70s as an arcade hardware company, building coin-op cabinets and electro-mechanical games before video games existed in any recognizable form. Consoles came later, and always second: the Master System behind the NES, the Genesis fighting Nintendo directly and actually winning real ground in North America for a stretch, then the Saturn and Dreamcast losing that fight to Sony and Microsoft.

The Dreamcast is the part of the story people romanticize hardest. It launched features other consoles wouldn't touch for years, a built-in modem for online play chief among them, and still lost the generation. Sega left console hardware entirely after it, and became a third-party developer instead, the company that used to compete with PlayStation now making games for it.

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