Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Sega Genesis.

I never had one growing up, but one of my buddies down the street did, and holy shit, Sonic the Hedgehog blew me away. The more detailed graphics, the improved sound…it was fantastic stuff to my preadolescent self. Plus, to my young, impressionable (read: stupid) mind, the Genesis was more amazing than the NES for a while because it had three action buttons on the controller, not two. (And we all know that more is better!)

The Super NES came along shortly thereafter, and I spent my junior and high school years playing games on both systems (depending on which friend I was visiting), but really didn’t have an absolutely loyalty to either. The fanboy wars back then were nowhere near as bad as they are now. In retrospect, a lot of people have crapped on the Genesis because it didn’t have the epic RPGs, color palette, or sound capabilities that its competitor did. That shit really pisses me off. Those kinds of arguments just boil down to technical capability over gameplay, and that’s a bunch of fucking nonsense. Gameplay always comes first, and Genesis games had it in spades.

It’s a shame that the Genesis was Sega’s last “big” console. The company’s marketing failures later on with the 32X and Saturn (the latter was extremely underrated) ended up preemptively dooming to failure what was one of the greatest game consoles of all time: the Dreamcast. (I’ll get to that in a few weeks, don’t worry.) Thankfully, the Genesis’ library holds up even to this day, and with games rereleasing on services like the Wii’s Virtual Console, gamers who weren’t around during the Genesis’ heyday can finally experience just how badass the system’s titles were. If you’ve still got a Genesis lying around, plug it in this weekend, fire up some blast processing goodness, and reminisce about just how kickass games were back in Sega’s prime.