Blast Processing
Not to be outdone, Sega had its own graphical innovation to unleash upon the world. Mode 7 may sound cool, but nothing is more radical/gnarly/tubular/mondo/cowabunga than blast processing, baby. Incidentally, cowabunga isn’t an adjective, but it totally worked.
What did it mean? Was the Sega Genesis actually blasting graphics out of the console? Was it a veritable blast against their bitter rivals Nintendo? Or was it inspired by repeated listening of the Stevie Wonder classic ‘Master Blaster’? As it turns out, none of these are true. It was merely a coding trick that they happened upon that made the hardware push sprites at impressive speeds.
Despite this rather minor discovery, Sega were quick to smother it with as much marketing jargon as they could. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was touted as being the fastest game of all time, with the titular speedster occasionally moving so quickly, he was literally running off of the screen itself. As good as Sonic was at spinning, he had nothing on Sega’s marketing executives when they coined a largely nonsense phrase to make their console appear bigger, better and meaner.