r/MasterSystem • u/Max_Doe11 • 18d ago
My childhood memories of the Master System: what games do you remember playing at your friends' houses?
I never actually owned a console as a kid. No Nintendo, no SEGA, nothing. I had a MSX.
But where I grew up, SEGA was hot stuff. A lot of kids had either a Master System, a Master System II, or later a Mega Drive.
When I was in elementary school, I had two classmates who were both big SEGA fans. One had a Master System, the other had a Master System II. So whenever I went to their houses in the afternoon, we would spend hours playing their games.
The friend with the Master System II had one game that completely fascinated me: Alex Kidd in Miracle World. As I've mentioned in some of my previous posts, whenever I went to his house I basically wanted to play Alex Kidd and nothing else.
The other friend had owned his Master System for longer and had a much bigger collection. One of the games we played a lot was Ghost House. I have a very specific memory from that game: we were exploring the mansion, looking for the weapons and ways to kill the vampires, and one day my friends told me to "jump onto a spider web" because apparently I could use it like a vine... Of course, they were lying. I jumped onto it and my character got stuck for a while. It was a trap, and they had been waiting for me to fall for it! It's funny because I later discovered that Ghost House has a much older history than I realized. I had somehow remembered it as being connected to the SG-1000, but apparently that's not quite correct — it's actually a Master System game loosely based on Sega's arcade game Monster Bash. Still, considering how closely related the early Sega hardware generations were, I can see why my childhood memory made that connection.
Another game we absolutely loved was Rescue Mission. It was basically a rail/light-gun shooter where soldiers were moving along railway tracks on those little hand-powered railway carts, and we had to use the Light Phaser to shoot the enemies before they could kill them. At the time, this felt incredibly cool. Having an actual gun-shaped controller and shooting enemies on the TV was basically the definition of futuristic gaming to us.
Because the one with the Master System 1 had become obsessed with Alex Kidd after seeing the game on our friend's console, he eventually got Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars, the arcade-derived Alex Kidd game. We played that one a lot too. At the time I thought it was amazing (probably because it was Alex Kidd, and that's all I needed to be impressed). Looking back at it as an adult, though... I have to admit that it really isn't that great. I think Alex Kidd in Miracle World is a much better game.
But then we discovered Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, and THAT was the game for us. It was basically our must-play game whenever we got together. What's funny is that I only discovered much later that Shinobi World wasn't originally even supposed to be an Alex Kidd game. It started life as Shinobi Kid, essentially a parody version of Sega's Shinobi, before Alex Kidd was put into the game. So apparently even one of my biggest childhood memories was actually based on another Sega game.
Then there was Ninja Gaiden... I remember being completely amazed by the ability to grab onto tree branches and climb them up to stand on them. Today that sounds like an incredibly small gameplay mechanic, but when you're a kid playing an 8-bit console, something like that can feel revolutionary.
Basically in the 80's, kid where all into ninja's stuff, guess why? ;)
It's strange how different these games feel when you revisit them as an adult. Some of them are much better than I remembered, some are much worse, and some are still magical simply because of the memories attached to them.
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u/jcariello 18d ago
Rescue Mission was tremendous.
I owned a Master System, and there was a small group of us non-nintendo kids when I was in elementary school.
I remember playing Double Dragon (cause 2 of us could play at the same time!), Walter Payton Football, Reggie Jackson baseball, Space Harrier, and My Hero. Although we didn't get too far in that one, never liked those knife guys.
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u/klau8s 18d ago
I had a MSII with a built-in Alex Kidd in Miracle World, and Sonic the Hedgehog cartridge. Literally the only games I ever played on MSII - and those two games live rent free in my head all those decades.
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u/Max_Doe11 17d ago
The friend with MSII bought also Sonic and at the time I believed the 8-bit version was the "real one" and wanted to play only that other than Alex Kidd.
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u/klau8s 17d ago
Well, I also always thought that the 8bit Sonic was the first one and very real one. Only later in life I got the knowledge that it was a port only, and quite a downgrade. Loved it and love it anyway, though. By the way, at the time, I wasn't really allowed to spend a lot of time gaming, and I remember finishing Alex Kidd much later than Sonic.
And maybe a fun fact, despite being able to finish Alex Kidd without losing any lives, there was only one time I was able to finish the boat level without falling into the water :D
By the way, did you try to play Alex Kidd in MW DX?
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u/solar1ze 17d ago
My friend didn’t have one, but at my house World Soccer, Spy vs. Spy and Golden Axe got played the most. Also California Games, Safari Hunt and Hang On!
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u/Max_Doe11 17d ago
I played SPy vs Spy with the one who had the Master System 1. I believe using a Sega Card.
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u/FriendlyAd4234 18d ago
Used to play Ace of Aces, world grand prix and Double Dragon at my cousins house. Transbot, super tennis, pro wrestling, great football, secret command and Bubble Bobble when they visited my house. My best mate had an sms too and I remember playing Teddy Boy. Then he got a megadrive and I remember playing toejam and earl and decap attack a lot. Awesome days!
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u/Immediate_Big_147 18d ago
Not at a friends but my earliest gaming memory was watching my brother play Phantasy Star. I remember just being mesmerized by the graphics and colors. Still one of my favorite rpgs
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u/waldox1976 17d ago
I was lucky enough to have 2 friends who also had a Mastersystem, and between us we had some great games; also some not-so-great games, but still.
- Shinobi
- Choplifter
- Phantasy Star
- Alex Kidd (Miracle World, Enchanted Castle and High Tech World)
- Ghostbusters
- The pack-ins of course: Hang On, Safari Hunt, Astro Warrior
- I had several card games: My Hero, F14 Fighting Falcon and Transbot.
- And yes, I'm not kidding, I went to Toys R Us myself and picked ALF, because I loved the show.
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u/Background-Ad8341 17d ago
Used to own several MSX's (is that even a word?). Sold them to buy a console, the Master System II. Loved the system, had a couple of games...but missed the possibility to program stuff.
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u/Max_Doe11 17d ago
You had more than a single one MSX? The other was a MSX2?
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u/Background-Ad8341 17d ago
Over time owned 2 MSX 1 models, and later the Philips MSX2 NMS-8245. Sold that, and many years later got my hands on a NMS-8280. Manged to collect some of the "office supplies" to go with that (mouse, printer, seperate tapedeck). But this is pretty offtopic I think 😋
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u/TooManyBulborbs 17d ago
Master System, one of the only official console cases where you could be gifted one with no cartridge games at all and you’d still have a game to play because Sega was cool like that.
My SMS 2 has Alex Kidd in Burger World which is good for me because original carts of Miracle World are too expensive for me.
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u/SpaceAviator1999 17d ago
Before I owned a game console of any kind, my friend had a Sega Master System, which he was very proud of. I only remember playing three games on it:
- Safari Hunt
- Ghostbusters
- that snail game (that you could play without a cartridge)
The game Ghostbusters looked pretty good for the time. (Years later, I would try the NES version, and was surprised how bad the NES version looked in comparison.)
The snail game was rather simple, but I liked the fact that there was a secret game hidden on the game console itself. However, I didn't understand why it required a special combination of buttons to be pressed to reveal it. I mean, it's so cool that there's a secret game on the console... Why obscure its existence? (Maybe the button combination was mentioned in the manual itself?)
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u/Max_Doe11 17d ago
The friend with the first versione was totally into ghostbusters at the time and he had the game and we played it a lot too. I played the downgraded version on my MSX.
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u/FogodeSantelmo 17d ago
Alex Kidd was somehow the phenomenon for the early Master System times here, seems that everyone that had the console also had the cart in addition to the Safari Hunt/Hang-On/Snail Maze (Labirinto!) memory trifecta. And them came the MSII with AKMW built in and it became even bigger of a classic here. So, of course we played a lot of early classics (Double Dragon, Gangster Town, Vigilante...) but we didn't went to the more afortunated friends to play "Master System", we went to play "Alex Kidd". Kind of similar what happened a year or so later with SNES and Street Fighter II.
A particular nice memory: I had just read a magazine (that had Super Mario World for the brand-new Super Famicom on the cover) and also had a nice article about a game that was called Phantasy Star. Couple of weeks later, went to a friend's house to play Alex Kidd (heh) and a friend of his had just lend him the cart. It was love at first sight: for the game, for the electronic RPG genre, for tabletop RPG that I would discover because of it...
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u/Tropical_Clam_92 17d ago
My best friend and neighbour: Alex Kidd in Miracle world in 1986. Ghostbusters! Great Wrestling! Wonder Boy. My other friend who lives next door had Great Soccer and Out Run. Those two friends, we were playing those games in 1986-1987. My other friend from school whose house I’d go to after school we played Wonder Boy in Monster Land; R-Type, Y’s and Phantasy Star. That was later, maybe in 1988. So many deep memories and feels associated to these games.
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u/Max_Doe11 17d ago
Wonder Boy was always one of my favorite series but at that time we had no chance to play it on Master System, only in arcades!
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u/Jonaskin83 17d ago
Several of my mates had them, I had an Atari ST computer. Some of my earliest memories of it are my one friend that had an SMS1 (most people had SMS2) and playing Aztec Adventure and Global Defense. And later on, Dynamite Dux. I remember sitting in his room looking through the Sega Games Catalog. The first time I ever played Sonic was in that room, after being excited as hell seeing it advertised in comics, and to this day SMS Sonic 1 is one of my favourites in the series.
I remember the day another friend got his SMS2. It was in a bundle that came with a light phaser, Rescue Mission and Wonder Boy. We played the shit out of all those games, I could never get past the frog in the water on Alex Kidd.
When I was in high school, we’d mostly moved on to Megadrives, but one day me and a friend were walking around his neighbourhood and we found a cart for SMS Choplifter just lying in the gutter. He still had his Master System so we took it back to his place, set it up, threw in the cartridge and it worked!
Such an awesome console, I’ve got a few of my own now with a pretty big collection of game, and still love it even though I find the music for most games pretty shrill and grating these days.
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u/Max_Doe11 17d ago
The one with the Master System first version had Aztec ADventure but he didn't liked it and get pissed off every time I asked to play it since I saw it a lot on TV advertising and insistd to play it.
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u/instigator707 17d ago
Alex the kidd miracle world, Wonder boy, Mickey mouse castle of illusion, Sonic the hedgehog, Wonder boy in monster land, The ninja, Penguin Land, Ghost house, Fantasy Zone,
We spent the first 8months of our sega master system life obsessed with miracle world until we completed it.
Played heaps more but they were the ones that we obsessed over. Seeing heaps of others from everyone here that hits the mark as well.
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u/No-Professional-9618 16d ago
Awesome! I owned a Sega Master System in elementary school.
I always played Choplifer, Ghost House, Hang On, Rambo: First Blood Part 2, After Burner, and Outrun. I also played Alex Kidd in Miracle Word.
I never really owned Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars.
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u/Max_Doe11 16d ago
Finally found another ghost houde player!
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u/No-Professional-9618 16d ago
Awesome! I kind of surprised that Sega never released a Ghost House 2 sequel.
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u/Max_Doe11 16d ago
It would have been their castlevania
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u/No-Professional-9618 16d ago
Yes, I agree. It would have been kind of cool if there would have been Alex Kidd and Ghost Houst cross over type of game.
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u/No-Professional-9618 16d ago
I forgot to mention someone created a homebrew GhostHouse game for the PC a while back.
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u/Liquid4058 16d ago
My cousin had a master system and one of my earliest memories was playing Hang On, Safari Hunt, Rocky, Rambo 2, My Hero and Black Belt. I eventually would inherit the master system because he got an NES, and I still remember the day I “beat” My Hero. I jumped all excited ran to the kitchen and told my dad, and he was like “That’s great! Now eat your sandwich before it gets cold.” I still play Rambo and Black Belt to this day, very fun and I’m not sure why but I remember mostly playing those games with the sports trackball controller.
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u/rebot4 18d ago
The game I used to play at a friend's house was Rastan.
My favorite game, however, was my introduction to RPG's and that was Phantasy Star.