In Japan, the Mega Drive fared poorly against its two main competitors, Nintendo's Super Famicom and NEC's PC Engine (aka TurboGrafx-⁠16), but it achieved considerable success in North America, Brazil, and Europe.

Sega created two network services to support the Genesis: Sega Meganet and Sega Channel. It was released in several different versions, some created by third parties. Several add-ons were released, including a Power Base Converter to play Master System games. It plays a library of more than 900 games created by Sega and a wide array of third-party publishers delivered on ROM-based cartridges. The Sega Genesis, known as the Mega Driveĭesigned by an R&D team supervised by Hideki Sato and Masami Ishikawa, the Genesis was adapted from Sega's System 16 arcade board, centered on a Motorola 68000 processor as the CPU, a Zilog Z80 as a sound controller, and a video system supporting hardware sprites, tiles, and scrolling.