Sega Visions magazine
Retro gaming, history, and search in the age of AI.
It’s a brave new world. AI is terraforming vast tracts of the internet before our eyes.
The retro gaming community isn’t immune to this… What I want to know is how the digital transformation we’re witnessing impacts the collective knowledge that’s been housed across retro gaming blogs, websites, forums, and videos since web 2.0 became a thing.
In short - who gets to decide what you see when you type a search query into a web browser. Sega Visions magazine is going to serve as our canary down the coal mine.
Searching for Sega
This all started by accident.
See, I was on a work call about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and I happened to have SEMrush open in the background. Now, if you don’t know, SEMrush is a digital tool that helps you identify what people are searching for online, and the ‘keywords’ they use to look for it. This can help you tailor your content, so that it matches what people are looking for and blah, blah, blah…
Anyway, as the call continued, I was plugging in random words to see the results. Eventually, I typed ‘Sega magazines’. And that’s when I noticed something interesting.
The term ‘Sega Visions magazine’ was getting a decent amount of search traffic. But there wasn’t a whole lot of info about the magazine available online. In other words - good traffic volume, low keyword difficulty. From an SEO perspective it had ‘potential’.
Coincidentally, I had recently interviewed Al Nilsen - Sega’s main marketing guy throughout the 16bit era - and the person responsible for launching Sega Visions magazine.
On their own, neither of these two things were particularly groundbreaking. But it got me thinking. Would an interview quote, a bit of light SEO work, and an assist from generative AI enable me to propel a content piece to the top of Google’s search rankings?
Nintendo Power vs Sega Visions magazine
A good article needs a hook. A central theme that ties everything together.
My hook was that history is written by the victors. So the nostalgia attached to Sega Visions magazine vs Nintendo Power is directly proportional to their parent company’s fortunes during the late 80s / early 90s. If you’re reading this you already know how that story goes.
Nintendo’s NES controlled about 90% of the US home console market in the late 80s. During this time there wasn’t much in the way of video game magazines. All that would come later. So Nintendo Power was launched in 1988 as a promotional vehicle for Nintendo. The debut issue was mailed to all Nintendo fanclub members in the US, with over 3 million copies distributed free of charge.
Meanwhile, Sega was running a (very) distant second in the US video game market. So when the company launched Sega Visions in 1990 as a free publication to promote its newly released Genesis home console, its reach was limited. Which in turn affected its cultural relevance and place in history.
Anyway, that was the basic set-up for the article. Plus I had the quote from my interview with Al Nilsen to back it up. You can read his take below.
“Sega Visions was important in the early days of the Genesis. We had a big mailing list that we got from Tonka who had distributed the Master System. We used it to help get Master System owners to switch to Genesis. They were already Sega fans, and initially would be our best customers. We would work with the company who published the magazine for us, on what games we wanted to feature. They also came up with different story ideas. Sega Visions did a good job in both converting Sega Master System owners, and promoting games to Genesis owners. While it was a good sales vehicle, it was expensive, and after a few years we discontinued the magazine because we thought those dollars could be better spent in other marketing activities.”
I figured that was a solid framework for an article about Sega Visions magazine which I could then pad out with a few quotes and tidbits from the other articles and interviews that were already online.
Like this interview with former Sega Visions contributor (and industry legend Bill Kunkel) from Sega-16.com. At one point Bill was contracted to write for the magazine. A gig that he’s not entirely proud of.
“Sega Visions was never anything more to me than a really well-paying gig where we were pretty much told what to cover, how to cover it and had no input into the visual presentation,” explains Bill. “Nintendo’s great trick was in creating a magazine that didn’t constantly remind you that it was a tool for Nintendo. [Whereas] Sega Vision was a publication clearly created by the manufacturer to sell its software [and that] just didn’t fool anybody.”
Ghost in the shell
Before we go any further - a quick disclaimer.
I believe generative AI can be helpful when it comes to structuring ideas, article outlines, etc. But its practical application beyond that tends to be limited.
That’s because writing isn’t just regurgitating facts. It requires critical thinking - the ability to link ideas and concepts. The ability to come up with ‘an angle’. Like whatever the hell this article is.
So when I asked ChatGPT to write a piece about the cultural impact of Sega Visions its scope was predictably limited. The several variations it produced were technically ‘fine’, but nothing that I couldn’t have gleaned from reading the Wikipedia entry. Here’s a sample:
“In the console wars of the late 20th century, much attention has been lavished on the titanic battle between Nintendo and Sega. While Nintendo often takes center stage in retrospective narratives—bolstered by its cultural ubiquity and enduring franchises—Sega carved out its own legacy as the rebellious, edgy underdog. Yet one of its key efforts to build a loyal fanbase and shape its narrative often goes overlooked: Sega Visions magazine.”
It continued on like that for several paragraphs in that passive, dead and ghoulish tone…
But as far as genuinely useful info about the magazine, I had to look further afield, referring to some of the original videos and articles already out there.
Here’s some useful tidbits:
Sega Visions made its debut in 1990. It was originally outsourced to a third party publisher better known for producing in-flight magazines. In later years it was published by Infotainment World - the same company that published GamePro.
The magazine was free to anyone who subscribed (or filled in a Sega warranty card). Technically, 4 issues were produced per year, although the distribution schedule tended to be pretty haphazard.
The magazine went through a number of initiations during its 25 issue run from 1990 to 1995. Early issues are basically glorified catalogues, but it went on to look and feel like a proper, commercial magazine in later years.
Oh yeah, there was a comic strip, Niles Nemo in Slumberland, which was written by Bill Kunkel, not something he’s especially proud of.
Sega and SEO
At this point we have a basic (albeit weird) article about Sega Visions magazine. But that’s only half the equation.
It’s time to kick this up a notch and look at SEO. As mentioned above, there’s not much about Sega Visions online (compared to other publications). But there’s still a bunch of solid info, insights and interviews out there.
Would any of that matter? Can this piece outrank the competition with a little SEO tweaking, a couple of quotes, and some background work from a hallucinating AI ghost?
At this point I’m going to resist the urge to go on a rant about how Google search and SEO have dumbed down the creative aspects of writing. Which is why article headlines and sub-headers these days are entirely literal and boring and why this article is called ‘Sega Visions Magazine’ rather than something more fun.
And, look, without getting into the mechanics, I’ve done my best to make this all as SEO friendly as possible. Except for maybe the layers of irony that I’ve heaped on top of each other in creating all this. Does Google understand irony? Does it penalise it? Does the algorithm understand what I’m trying to do?
Writing this took AGES
Let’s wrap this up
A professional sommelier can identify the difference between a $30 bottle of wine and a $300 bottle of wine. Which is great. But for the average person on the street the difference is negligible. It doesn’t justify the hefty price hike.
Question is - does that same principle apply to online searches for retro gaming info? Are people looking for in-depth original content? Or just a quick answer to a random question?
If Google’s recent introduction of AI generated answers to queries is any indication, we know how they’re hedging their bets.
At a corporate level, we’re seeing the same thing. Accountants running corporations are interested in numbers, not creative expression. So while this article has been a fun distraction, it’s a joke that isn’t particularly funny. Because in the time it’s taken me to conceptualise, write, edit, and clean all this up, generative AI could have published a series of poorly written books about any retro gaming topic you can imagine…
So with that said, let’s check back in a month and see how the search rankings for this piece about Sega Visions are doing compared to the competition.
….
Follow-us on Twitter via @American80s
PS. Sorry Al.
PPS. Forgotten Worlds issue #6 is on the way and contains the full interview with Al Nilsen.
