As Director of Marketing at both Capcom and Sega of America, John Gillin had a front row seat for the height of the 16-bit era. He helped launch Street Fighter II on SNES and oversaw several Sega lines, including Sega Sports, and he was present during the turbulent transition to the Saturn.

Sega of America struggled long and hard to make the Genesis a success, and it took a national team to topple Nintendo’s monopoly. As Sega’s National Director of Sales, Alan Cohn was an important part of this plan, and he was responsible for ensuring retailers like Kay-Bee Toys and Toys R Us were well-stocked with Sega goodness. We recently chatted with him, and he shared his experiences of working at Sega during its most successful period.

For more than a decade, Joe Miller has been seen almost exclusively as the virtual father of the 32X. What most people don’t know is that his role at Sega as Senior Vice President of Product Development was mostly software-driven, and though he saw the launch of almost a half-dozen platforms, he oversaw over a hundred in-house games and was involved with everything from the Sega Channel to the Multimedia Studio.

Through the turbulent early ’90s Sega of America underwent a massive transformation that resulted in market dominance. Employees of the company during this time took part in a roller-coaster of a business that rose and crashed almost too fast to comprehend. One person with a front row seat to these events was Scot Bayless, a former Technical Director and producer for SOA.