The Surprising History of Sega's Acquisition by an Oil Company

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Sega was first acquired by Gulf and Western, a big oil company, in 1969.
Gulf and Western also owned Paramount Pictures at the time.
Sega was merged into Paramount but their operations and boards remained separate.
Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, two of Paramount's top executives, were put on the internal Sega board within Gulf and Western.

Sega and the Genesis was THE underdog story of the early 90’s. In a single console generation, Sega went from ~zero to 50% US market share and dethroned Nintendo’s seemingly invincible global monopoly. But — somehow — it all then died. Two console generations later Sega was out of the hardware game entirely, and the company was sold off for pieces to a pachinko manufacturer. How on earth did this happen??

Today we’re launching Acquired Shorts in order to tell this story and others like it: side tales from the “Acquired Cinematic Universe” that are too brief for a full episode, but too good to leave in the vault. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the format (and this episode). Please send us your feedback in Slack, email or Twitter!

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