In the late 1980s Electronic Arts locked a single programmer in a windowless room nicknamed Chernobyl to reverse-engineer Sega’s new console, then used the result to force a licensing deal on the eve of the 1990 Consumer Electronics Show. That story opens this episode on the Sega Genesis, and how a struggling arcade company used aggressive marketing, legal loopholes, and a very fast blue hedgehog to break Nintendo’s grip on the home console market.

We cover Hayao Nakayama’s pivot after the arcade downturn, adapting the System 16 arcade board and its Motorola 68000 processor into a home machine, the deep chip discount Sega bet the company on, and Tom Kalinske’s four-point plan that swapped Altered Beast for Sonic the Hedgehog in the box. Then the culture war: the Genesis does what Nintendon’t campaign, the truth behind blast processing, the Accolade fair-use ruling, the 1993 congressional hearings over Night Trap and Mortal Kombat, the Sega CD and 32X add-ons that fragmented the install base, the 1995 decision to abandon the Genesis for the Saturn, and the Sega Channel, a cable download service two decades ahead of its time.

• How a clean-room process let EA build unlicensed Genesis cartridges and win the yellow-tab manufacturing deal
• Why bundling Sonic followed the razor-and-blades model and pushed Sega to 65 percent of the US 16-bit market
• How a PR term for direct memory access became blast processing, and what the Genesis actually did faster than the SNES
• Why the ABACABB blood code and an MA-13 rating made Mortal Kombat on Genesis outsell the censored SNES version
• How cutting off Genesis supply while 16-bit still held 64 percent of the market handed the 1995 holidays to Nintendo