How It All Started — My First Contact with Video Games

This blog maybe got its start from a passion for games that began with a kid at a cousin's house, controller in hand, watching a blue hedgehog cross the screen faster than anything he'd ever seen. This is the story of how a Christmas wish went "wrong" — and how that wrong turn ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me in gaming.

A Sunday at My Cousin's House

It was around 1993 or 1994, and I had never touched a console before that day. My cousin had a Sega Master System — one of several Tec Toy models that came with Sonic the Hedgehog already burned into the internal memory — and I remember standing in his living room, completely locked in. I had never seen anything move like that on a screen.

The stage that stuck with me forever was Bridge Zone. I can't fully explain why, but that level — the bridge, the music, the pacing of it — got under my skin in a way nothing else did, and every time I hear it, it still gets to me today. It's the same track I walked down the aisle to at my own wedding, years later. If you'd told me that the soundtrack to a Master System stage would play at my wedding one day, I wouldn't have believed you. But that's exactly what happened.

I went home that day with one clear mission: I needed a Master System with the Sonic game.

The Christmas Wish List

Later that same year, when Christmas rolled around, I asked my father for a Sonic game as a present. It felt like a simple ask — I'd just seen with my own eyes exactly what I wanted, at my cousin's house.

The Surprise Under the Tree

When Christmas arrived, the whole family was gathered at my grandmother's house, the way only a Brazilian family Christmas gathers everyone — grandparents, cousins, everybody crammed into the same room. And I had one very specific thing in my head: a Master System.

That's not what I got. At the time I didn't understand any of it — I just knew that box wasn't the one I was expecting. I got a Sega Genesis instead (the specific model sold here by Tec Toy at the time was the Mega Drive 2, a redesigned, cheaper version of the console), with a cartridge of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in the box.

The Tec Toy Mega Drive II box, with the "Agora com Sonic 2" ("Now with Sonic 2") sticker. This one's from my collection today, but it's the same bundle I found under the tree.

My first reaction was disappointment — I hadn't gotten what I wanted so much, after asking my parents for it, and I had absolutely no idea, at the time, that this console was actually newer, more powerful, and had better games and graphics than the Master System I'd wanted so badly. To me, at six or seven years old, it was just the wrong game, the wrong console, wrapped the wrong way.

Sonic 2, Debug Mode, and Video Game Magazines

Games were expensive in Brazil — and even more expensive back then — so I played Sonic 2 until there was nothing left to discover. I knew every stage by heart. I knew every secret. I bought the video game magazines of the era hunting for tricks and codes, and that's how I learned about Debug Mode: the code that let you turn into a ring, drop scenery objects around by hand, and jump straight to every Chaos Emerald without having to beat the game the normal way. To me, that was pure magic. More than that, this debug mode made it so much easier to play as Super Sonic — discovering that Sonic could turn into a faster, more powerful yellow version of himself felt incredible for the time.

More Than Just a Console

The Genesis carries good memories for me, and it's not only about the games. It's because it reminds me of that Christmas, of my grandparents, of my cousins, of a time when our biggest concern was figuring out what the next game was going to be, the next big thing, the next soda or candy that came with a sticker to collect. It was a good era, and that definitely adds a little extra seasoning to the nostalgia we feel today looking back at our childhood.

Among the Genesis games, Sonic 2 is by far the one that marked my childhood the most. But I also played a ton of Golden Axe, and later came Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and, later still, International Superstar Soccer. It was the era when people would gather around, sit on the couch, and spend an entire afternoon there without even noticing the weekend go by. And there was an unwritten rule: whoever lost handed over the controller. Whoever didn't lose had to set a time limit to pass it along — or else they just wouldn't let anyone else play.

Sega vs. Nintendo, and Why Brazil Was Different

If you grew up outside Brazil in the late 80s and early 90s, you probably remember the console wars as Sega vs. Nintendo — Sonic vs. Mario, attitude vs. Nintendo's family-friendly charm. It was a real, fierce rivalry in the US, Europe, and Japan.

But in Brazil, that war looked completely different, because of one company: Tec Toy.

Tec Toy held the license to manufacture and distribute Sega consoles locally, and they didn't just import boxes — they localized aggressively, built local manufacturing, priced things for the Brazilian market, and even redesigned the hardware itself to cut costs. The built-in-memory Master System my cousin had, and the Mega Drive 2 I got that Christmas, are two exact examples of that strategy — products that didn't exist anywhere else in the world the way they existed here. Because of Tec Toy's dominance, Sega wasn't the scrappy underdog here like it was elsewhere — it was often the default choice. Nintendo had a presence too, mostly through unlicensed clones and gray-market imports (the infamous Brazilian "Nintendinho" clone consoles), but Sega, backed by Tec Toy's local muscle, felt like the establishment.

That's a huge part of why the name Mega Drive matters here instead of "Genesis" — Tec Toy branded and marketed it as the Mega Drive in Brazil, same as most of the world, and that's the name burned into the memory of an entire generation of Brazilian gamers. If you ask someone my age here what console defined their childhood, "Mega Drive" is one of the most common answers you'll get — often followed by a story not unlike mine.

Where It All Leads

So that's the origin story: a kid who asked for a Master System for Christmas, got a Genesis instead, and had no idea what he'd actually been handed. The Sonic built into my cousin's Master System got me in the door. Sonic 2 under the Christmas tree is what made me a Sega kid for life.

This blog exists because of that Christmas, decades ago. In future posts I want to dig deeper into the retro world — news on these consoles, reviews of old games, stories about the rental shops and game stores of our childhood. If you also grew up with a Genesis, a Master System, or anything like it, I want to hear what your story was.

Below are a few photos of my Mega Drive 2 today — not the same unit I got that Christmas (I lost track of that one over the years), but one I managed to find later, from the same era, that's now part of my collection, Sonic 2 cartridge and all.

The back of the box: Sonic, Streets of Rage, Castle of Illusion and more, plus an ad for the adapter that let you play Master System games.

Inside the box: the console still in its plastic, the three-button control pad, the AV cable and the power supply.

The Sonic 2 cartridge and all the paperwork: the game and console manuals, Tec Toy's "Você acaba de entrar para o fascinante mundo do video game" ("You've just entered the fascinating world of video games") leaflet, the warranty card, and a FIFA 97 manual.

A Sonic & Knuckles cartridge, used-store price sticker still on it.