Today, the battle of the gaming consoles is mainly a three-way fight between Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. But back in the 1980s, there was another huge player: Japanese games brand Sega. Having made its name in arcade games, it launched the Sega Mega Drive in 1988 (known as the Genesis in the US), which would ultimately launch Sonic the Hedgehog, one of the most loved video game characters of all time. "The Sega Master System epitomised 80s video game culture, bringing R-Type, California Games and Double Dragon to home gamers worldwide," recalls James Kirkham, former designer and founder of Iconic. And the logo was suitably forward-thinking and sci-fi futuristic, neatly emulating the lines of code used to program the cutting-edge console. "This emotive 80s classic used a typeface by Japanese designer Teruoki Yagi, who also designed the logo for CNN," explains Kirkham. "The accompanying tightly-spaced, bookish serif fonts were commonly used in the 1980s for technology brands, most famously Apple."
