In the late 1980s Electronic Arts locked a single programmer in a windowless room nicknamed Chernobyl to reverse-engineer Sega's new console, then used the result to force a licensing deal on the eve of the 1990 Consumer Electronics Show. That story opens this episode on the Sega Genesis, and how a struggling arcade company used aggressive marketing, legal loopholes, and a very fast blue hedgehog to break Nintendo's grip on the home console market.

We cover Hayao Nakayama's pivot after the arcade downturn, adapting the System 16 arcade board and its Motorola 68000 processor into a home machine, the deep chip discount Sega bet the company on, and Tom Kalinske's four-point plan that swapped Altered Beast for Sonic the Hedgehog in the box. Then the culture war: the Genesis does what Nintendon't campaign, the truth behind blast processing, the  ...