July, 1983.
Tokyo, Setagaya District. Inside a detached villa.
On the second floor, a boy's body jolted violently before falling off the bed with a thud. The brief sting of pain woke him completely.
He blinked, dazed, scanning his surroundings.
This… wasn't his room.
Still confused, he approached the full-length mirror in the corner.
In the reflection stood a teenage boy with slightly long hair, ending in a small mullet dyed gold at the tips. For conservative Japan, that look was bold—too bold.
He stared at himself and muttered a question that sounded almost philosophical.
"Who… am I?"
In philosophy, that question could have countless meanings. But for him, it was literal.
Who was he?
He remembered being Lin Che, a man from Zhou Country who ran a secondhand electronics shop in Hai City, dealing in old relics from past decades—early Sony Walkmans, record players, vinyl discs, and of course, game consoles.
From the first arcade machine ever made to consoles from the '80s and '90s, his shop had everything.
Replacement parts for these machines hadn't existed for years. To revive them, you had to know how to repair them yourself.
And Lin Che did. He could solder circuits by hand, write basic code in Pascal or BASIC, even use old punch-card systems.
Until one day, during a thunderstorm, a power surge hit one of his unprotected machines. He was right beside it when it happened.
And that was the end of his life.
Now, he had another set of memories—belonging to Kobayashi Tetsu, a Japanese-American teenager.
His father, Kobayashi Kentaro, was a hardware engineer who once worked for IBM in the U.S. Recently, Sega Japan had offered him a lucrative contract and stock options to return to Japan, tasking him with leading the company's new home console development division—a temporary department with uncertain prospects.
Because Sega still wasn't sure if home consoles were worth pursuing, the department wasn't permanent. Kentaro was only an acting director.
Tetsu had followed his father back to Japan.
Having grown up in America, he stood out—flamboyant attitude, loud style, clumsy Japanese. He looked stunning, maybe even better-looking than Takuya Kimura, but far too different from the average Japanese teen.
He was currently on a break from school, not yet enrolled anywhere.
Looking at the face in the mirror, flashes of knowledge ran through his mind. He seemed to know the course of world events for the next forty years.
After a long silence, Tetsu sighed.
Whether he was Lin Che or Kobayashi Tetsu didn't matter anymore.
What mattered was—
He now possessed memories of the next four decades.
He thought about Sega.
Sega—the titan of the 1980s, a company worshipped by gamers worldwide. Back then, it was a giant with annual revenues exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars.
Everything seemed perfect.
The apartment he was standing in was in Setagaya, provided by Sega as part of his father's executive perks. After all, they had headhunted him from America—he was valuable.
Tetsu smiled faintly—then froze.
Because he remembered what would happen next.
After the 1990s, Sega began to fall apart.
They struggled against Nintendo and the emerging Sony. In the U.S., Sega of America became too powerful and caused internal rifts. After Atari's fall, Microsoft entered the battlefield.
The console wars became a nightmare. One misstep after another. Betrayals from partners like Bandai.
By the 2000s, Sega's last hope—the Dreamcast—was crushed by Sony's hype-driven marketing and Nintendo's enduring IPs.
Sega had no choice but to abandon hardware, surviving only through a few fading game franchises.
Tetsu frowned.
As Lin Che, he had loved Sega deeply. Sega's games—like Sonic the Hedgehog—were timeless classics.
He couldn't stand what had happened to them—the corporate greed, the false advertising, the loss of creativity, the Western obsession with political correctness that infected gaming.
If he could… he wanted to change it.
But as Kobayashi Tetsu—his father was now tied directly to Sega's fate.
They couldn't simply walk away.
At Sega Headquarters.
1983, Tokyo.
A conference room buzzed with tension. On the whiteboard—sales reports.
Just weeks ago, Sega had proudly launched its first home console, the SG-1000 (Sega Game Box 1000).
They had been so confident.
The console was designed to be similar to Sega's arcade hardware, making it easy to port arcade titles for home play. With Sega's strong arcade following, executives believed it would dominate Japan's living rooms.
But the SG-1000 had flopped.
Because on that very same day—Nintendo released the Famicom (Family Computer).
The future legend—the Red & White console.
SG-1000 had been meant to compete head-on. Instead, it was crushed.
In Japan, only twenty thousand units sold. Overseas numbers weren't in yet—but expectations were grim.
While the Famicom had Donkey Kong, Sega's launch lineup was lackluster.
At the head of the table, Sato Hideki, head of Sega's hardware division, slammed the desk.
"Idiots!" he shouted. "Useless fools!"
"How can a paper-card company like Nintendo beat us?"
"If we can't sell a hundred thousand units, we've failed the president—and might as well commit seppuku!"
Then he issued his "highest directive":
Make new games.
Port the most popular arcade titles.
Improve the hardware.
Cut prices.
Expand distribution.
But most importantly—
Games. Games. Games!
Without good games, the console was dead on arrival.
"Learn from Nintendo!" he barked. "If they can do it, so can we!"
At his side, Kobayashi Kentaro exhaled softly.
Selling the console first and only then worrying about games?
Too late.