30 Years Ago the Genesis Hit the Road with the Sega Nomad

By Marc Normandin | October 1, 2025 | 1:44pm

Video Games Features Sega

30 Years Ago the Genesis Hit the Road with the Sega Nomad

In the mid-1990s, Sega went to significant lengths to extend the life of their 16-bit Sega Genesis any way that they could. There was the Sega CD add-on, which allowed for enhanced Red Book audio, and offered loads of space for visuals, scripts or other extras that couldn’t fit on the smaller storage size of a cartridge. There was the 32X, a 32-bit add-on which in North America was meant to serve as either a bridge to or replacement for Sega of Japan’s plans with the Sega Saturn, but that, with a library of 40 games and just 800,000 units sold, ended up being neither of those things.

Far less discussed than those pieces that let you turn your Genesis into a little multi-part tower was the Sega Nomad. While Sega’s 8-bit portable competitor to Nintendo’s Game Boy, the Game Gear, could play Master System games with an adapter, the Nomad natively played Genesis carts. In fact, that was its entire purpose: it didn’t have its own library of Nomad exclusives, but was meant to be a portable Genesis. The other name the handheld is known by is the “Genesis Nomad,” even.

It was a North American-exclusive handheld, based on a Japanese Sega product known as the Mega Jet. The Mega Jet was a portable Genesis—well, Mega Drive, since this is Japan—named such as it was hooked up to a screen during Japan Airline flights, but could also be used in a car that happened to have a TV screen and cigarette lighter to plug into. Sega of America took that concept and added a screen, removed the need for plugging it into a power source by adding batteries, but kept the ability to plug the system into a TV so you could play games on a larger screen if you had one available.

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Pretty amazing, right? A few things happened that kept it from catching on. It was released in October of 1995, well into the existence of the Genesis—that was great news as far as an existing library goes, as it was hundreds and hundreds of games at this point. However, it was also five months after the launch of the Saturn in North America and a month after Sony’s Playstation arrived there: the former was a focal point for Sega internationally, while the latter was also consuming Sega’s attention in a very different way.

In addition, it hit the market for $179—for comparison’s sake, the Game Boy launched in 1989 at $90 and the Game Gear in 1991 at $150. It never fully took off, though. Over the course of four years, just one million Nomads were sold. The price probably played a little bit of a role in that, but there also weren’t new games being released just for it, as Sega as a whole was slowing down releases for the Genesis much more quickly than Nintendo did with the SNES.

The price came from the expensive technology inside of it: the 3.25-inch, backlit LCD screen was meant to overshadow Nintendo’s monochrome and aging Game Boy, just like going with a full color display on the Game Gear was supposed to, only this time for 16-bit games that you already owned. So there was an upfront cost, but, again like with the Game Gear, a secondary one as well: you needed a lot of batteries to make the Nomad work. So many batteries. You could get around three to four hours of battery life for your Nomad from six AA batteries from the higher-end estimates out there, and fewer than three from the lower ones—this thing could be portable, but plugging it into the wall through an AC adapter was the best way to keep it going. That limited—though did not entirely get rid of—its portable nature. But the fact the Game Boy could run for over 10 hours on just four AA batteries was a major advantage before you even get into how it cost half as much as the Nomad.

Sega and Nintendo were basically opposites in the handheld space. Sega had the same mentality that they did everywhere else, which is to say that power and speed could solve just about anything—that’s not to say that their games were all flash and no substance, by any means, but as far as hardware goes, they really wanted to be able to have flash, too. Nintendo, on the other hand, designed the Game Boy using Gunpei Yokoi’s philosophy of “lateral thinking with withered technology,” which is to say an emphasis on cheaper, mature technologies. The Game Boy—which was designed by Yokoi as well as Satoru Okada—was behind, technologically speaking, in comparison to the Game Gear or the Atari Lynx, but it cost a whole lot less to make and for customers to buy: again, the Game Boy was $90 and came with Tetris in North America, while the Game Gear cost $150 and lacked a pack-in title. Tetris and fewer times having to beg your parents for batteries? A choice made easy.

When the Nomad arrived, however, Game Boy sales had been flagging. It had already been using old hardware when it had launched six years prior, and it wasn’t any newer in ‘95. The CEO of Sega of America, Tom Kalinske, had big dreams for replacing the Game Gear with something much more powerful and more expensive, but that could pull people away from the Game Boy at this moment when its grip on the market had loosened. Via IGN:

Few people know about it, but there was also another system being worked on at the time. Sega had taken a sizable chunk out of the Game Boy’s market share, and with the green-screened handheld experiencing a lull (long before Pokémon arrived to save it), Sega had a golden opportunity to strike with a new handheld of their own. According to Kalinske, the system would have packed 16-bit graphics, a very high quality, higher resolution screen, and a touch-screen interface—years before the Nintendo DS, or even the Tiger Game.com. Unfortunately, the spec was a dream at best. The system would have been prohibitively expensive—$289 by Kalinske’s recollection. Sega chose to shelve the idea, leaving the Nomad—a handheld version of the Genesis—as the Game Gear’s only successor.

The Nomad was something of a compromise, then, a way for Sega to put something new into the market, but without it costing nearly what a Playstation would sell for. One issue with this should be obvious after reading that quoted paragraph: Pokémon Red and Blue did not exist when Sega came up with this plan, but their release in 1996 completely revitalized the Game Boy and helped drive it and its successor, the Game Boy Color, to over 118 million in handheld sales. For a sense of scale: the Game Gear sold 11 million units, and was easily the second-most-successful portable of the era, coming in well ahead of the WonderSwan(s), Neo Geo Pocket(s), Lynx, TurboExpress, and anything else from the ‘90s or early ‘00s.

The second problem beyond Nintendo having yet another killer app to bring the Game Boy back to life and Sega not having one for the Nomad was the handheld itself: the screen—which, again, consumed batteries like wild—had noticeable ghosting that made its faster-paced action games look far worse when played on the handheld than when played through a TV. The Genesis, if you might recall, thrived on its faster-paced action games. The Nomad just couldn’t win, which is a shame, because conceptually the whole idea rules. A portable Sega Genesis! What a brilliant thought.

The mid ‘90s were the era of “conceptually the whole idea rules,” though. Ambition often outstripped the technology and the appetite of a potential audience. This wasn’t just a Sega problem, by any means: the Virtual Boy was released two months before the Nomad, at the same price point, and it did so poorly that Nintendo spent three decades trying to forget that any of that ever existed (until they recently announced that those games were coming to Nintendo Switch Online). Both Sega and Nintendo pushed ahead on their 16-bit systems with attempts to figure out the future of game distribution: Nintendo with the satellite-based Satellaview in Japan, and Sega with the Sega Channel, which provided game downloads through Time Warner and coaxial cable—at one point, the Sega Channel was the only way to get games like Treasure’s Alien Soldier in North America. And the Sega Channel was actually the successor to the Mega Drive’s Mega Net service, where the original version of Fatal Labyrinth debuted as a download well before it was ever a physical release.

There was also Sega’s push to make online gaming happen well before the era where homes were truly equipped to take advantage of it. The Dreamcast wasn’t Sega’s first foray into online multiplayer, as the Saturn had an add-on accessory known as Net Link—a 28.8 kbit/s modem that fit into the console slot and let you play online way back in 1996. Sega loved to push new tech and new hardware, and while the results were rarely positive outside of arcades, it’s difficult not to admire their persistence and dedication to making the future happen sooner.

And, to be fair to both Sega and Nintendo here (but especially Sega), they simply saw the vision of the future too early. They pushed ahead before the technology or the desire was there for widespread distribution of digital games, but it’s certainly the norm now—it just took another decade-plus, and for the likes of Steam and the digital marketplaces of the Xbox 360, Wii, and Playstation 3 to make it happen. That the Nomad connected to a TV was significant: NEC’s TurboExpress, released in 1990, was an even more expensive version of the “it’s a portable console!” idea meant to challenge the Game Boy, and it struggled with its own hardware issues and price point, but it also didn’t connect to a TV like the Nomad did. But the Nintendo Switch connects to a television despite being a handheld, as does the Steam Deck—they are both hybrid systems, after all. And while they might chew through battery power, too, at least it’s rechargeable instead of stacks of AAs. How many dollars in AAs would you spend getting through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild if the Switch still took those like the Nomad did? More than you paid for the game in the first place, that’s for sure.

The Nomad—and the Virtual Boy, and the Sega Channel, and Net Link, and a slew of other mid ‘90s attempts at forcing the industry into the future at high speeds—were just far too ahead of the curve. They all had some issues, sure, but the primary problem for the bunch was that the ambition and the idea were there before the technology or the desire for it existed, which impacted both the execution of the idea as well as its price point. The desire problem could have been solved if only the tech issue didn’t exist, as evidenced by the success of all of the various platforms and consoles that were successors to the ideas of these products—download speeds were much faster by the time of Steam, internet connections became more reliable the further into the ‘00s we got as dial-up was replaced by broadband and special modems no longer needed to be purchased just to play games online, the process of creating beautiful 3D screens and effects had vastly improved by the time of the 3DS compared to the Virtual Boy, and rechargeable batteries, too, were much better, and more compact, and required less from the user to recharge.

So, if you want a Sega Nomad in the present, don’t go shopping on ebay. Go for its spiritual successors and honor its legacy that way. Find a retro console that costs less in the present even before accounting for inflation than the Nomad ever did—one that is guaranteed to have a better screen and significantly better battery life—and play some Genesis games on that. Or, if you want something with more bells and whistles, there’s always the Switch 2. It does play a whole bunch of Genesis games, after all, connects to your television, and Sega probably supports it more than they ever really did the Nomad, to boot.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin