The Japanese Mega Drive (top) and the North American Genesis Model 2. Neither machine has a game on the 32-entry list. Photo: Evan-Amos, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Here is a small test you can run on any “greatest games of all time” list. Count the entries that predate 1995. Then count the ones from a Sega console.
I ran it on a 32-game list built for public voting. Five entries predate 1995: Tetris, Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter II, Doom and Super Metroid. Sega games on the list: none. Not Sonic 2, not Streets of Rage 2, not Phantasy Star. The machine that took Nintendo to a decade-long fight (Mega Drive in Japan from October 1988, Genesis in North America from August 1989) contributed nothing to the canon as that list has it.
The companion console list does the same thing in miniature. Thirteen machines, and the Dreamcast is on it while the Genesis is not. Sega’s last console made the cut; Sega’s most successful one did not.
This is what open voting does to old software
Recency bias in these lists is not a mystery. People vote for what they have played, and what they have played is what is currently installable in under a minute. Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 are one click away on a machine everybody owns. Skies of Arcadia requires you to want it.
There is a second effect that hits Sega specifically. The company’s catalogue is spread across five incompatible platforms in eleven years: Master System, Mega Drive, Saturn, Game Gear, Dreamcast. The affection is real, but it never concentrates on one title the way Nintendo’s does on Ocarina of Time. The vote splits, and a split vote reads as absence.
Head-to-head voting handles that better than a ranked list does, because it never asks anyone to compare across the whole field at once. It shows two games and takes a winner. Somebody who has played Streets of Rage 2 against Shenmue, Jet Set Radio against Daytona USA, Sonic CD against Golden Axe can answer that in a second, and never has to weigh any of them against Minecraft.
The difference shows up immediately. In the general list, Sega is absent. In the Sega-only list, fifteen games compete on their own terms, Shenmue among them — a landmark that reached the Dreamcast on 29 December 1999, about as commercially doomed as a landmark can be.
Sonic himself is the exception that got out. He stopped being a Genesis character, which is the whole explanation. He has since been a 3D adventure, a kart racer, a pinball table and Jim Carrey’s co-star, which is why sixteen different rankings can hold him at once and put him in a different place in each. Sega gave him a 35th-birthday livestream in June 2026 and spent it announcing a pinball machine and museum-grade reissues of his first two cartridges.
The reissues are the tell. Thirty-five years on, the cartridges are the product.
