The missing planet: this was Venus, the portable Mega Drive prototype

The Nomad prototype

25 years have passed since SEGA Nomad was launched in the North American market, but that has not stopped us today from discovering a new curiosity about its development, and that is that the company has shown for the first time what was the first prototype model that most it would later bring the final product to life. Your name? Obviously that of a planet: Venus.

This we have been able to verify in a video uploaded to the company’s official YouTube channel, since with the idea of ​​commemorating the 60th anniversary of the company, they have wanted to review all the home consoles that they launched for 20 years. In the video, Hiroyuki Miyazaki explains the origin of the name of the SEGA prototypes, which began with the creation of Mercury, which we know today as Game-Gear.

The missing planet

After Mercury, came Mars (Mars), which was the name that would refer to the 32-bit accessory of Mega Drive, and later, a name appeared that came to stay, since the final product would be called just like the prototype: Saturn . But in this system of planets there were still some to appear. It was the case of Venus, the prototype of SEGA Nomad, the 16-bit laptop based on the Mega Drive that had never been shown publicly … until today.

As you can see in the images, the design seems even better than the final model, at least more symmetrical, and with more muted colors, closer to Saturn (the Asian model) than to the Mega Drive itself, although that seemed to be corrected with the final model. This model has an asymmetrical shape that sought a kind of left grip with which to comfortably handle the control crosshead, something that did not have much effect.

20 years of releases

With Venus, SEGA finally puts the finishing touch on this generation of prototype consoles named after planets in the solar system, a curious list that was recently updated with the launch of the Mega Drive Mini, which was called Moon, which It would have been great if the original Mega Drive had been Earth (which sadly didn’t happen).

Meanwhile, there was also a cancellation, and it was that of Jupiter, a project that never saw the light and that was based on the classic cartridges, but that SEGA was forced to cancel due to the incredible demand and growth that the CD had- ROM. For this reason, the next project was born, which was none other than Saturn.