Sega (1994)
The 32-bit addition to the Sega Genesis was released in North America thirty years ago today.
The main thing that I remember from its release was all of the sex jokes that they made in their advertisements. I'm not sure if they thought this would make teenage boys want to run out and buy one, but I was 14 years old at the time and the only affect it had on me was a chuckle and an eye roll. They cost $159 when they were first released. That's roughly the equivalent of $335 today, and the game library didn't come close to justify spending that kind of money.
The 32X was doomed to fail. The next generation Sega Saturn console had already been announced by the time this thing hit store shelves, and it was competing directly with both the Saturn and Playstation at retail by September the following year. No one that I knew wanted a 32X because it was understood that it was going to be obsolete in less than a year. Only 40 games came out for it before Sega pulled the plug, and most of them were no better than their Genesis counterparts which did not require an extra piece of hardware to run.
I picked one up two years after it was released, but only because it was being sold at a fraction of its original price. I was a cashier at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Hazleton when I was 16 years old. They made you take a full hour for lunch in those days, so I used to kill time by going to the electronics department to play the Playstation demo unit that they had set up. One day, I noticed that they had a pile of Sega 32X consoles on clearance for $30, so I figured what the hell and grabbed one. The only game that I ever had for it was the Star Wars Arcade cartridge that came with the machine. A new game back then usually cost between $30 and $50 bucks and Star Wars Arcade was a lot of fun, so it was worth it at the clearance price.
