Happy Birthday, Sega:
In the 1980s, 8-bit microprocessors reigned in most video game consoles—partly due to their low cost and partly due to familiarity. 16-bit CPUs had been around since the 1970s, but they remained prohibitively expensive for low-cost consumer products until the late 1980s, when they steadily decreased in price. This new breed of processors gave companies a great chance to one-up the competition through improvement and innovation. Sega did exactly that when it designed a new console, the Mega Drive, based on its powerful 16-bit arcade hardware.
With the release of the Mega Drive, Sega inaugurated a new technological era in the game console arms race. (It should be noted that NEC claimed its TurboGrafx-16 console was a 16-bit system, but in truth, it possessed an 8-bit CPU.) At the heart of this new console lay a Motorola 68000 CPU—the same processor that powered the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST personal computers. Running at 7.67MHz, the Mega Drive processor blew the Super NES's 3.58MHz CPU out of the water in terms of raw speed and processing power.
Had the Genesis not come along, Nintendo would have been perfectly happy to continue squeezing every ounce (and dollar) out of its aging 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) hardware as long as it possibly could. But after the Genesis shipped, there was no looking back; technology had moved on, and the market moved with it.