After finding a Sega Genesis 2 and six glorious sci-fi games for $20, Chris chronicles his quest to find a Sega Genesis audio video cable. Click, bold adventurers, to experience the tale, the saga, the legend, and the myth of Bag-O’-Sega™!

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My favorite store in the whole universe is The Earth Collectible Toy Mall. It’s a damned unwieldy name for what has got to be the most addictive shopping experience I have ever known. The name is also thoroughly misleading, because:

1. Much of the stuff they sell there is not really all that collectible,
2. Not all of the things they sell there are even toys, and
3. Its not a mall. As a matter of fact, it’s smaller than a lot of shops in malls.

The only accurate part of the name lies in the fact that they ARE located here on Earth, however, a successful Knowledge (arcana) roll has just revealed to me that most of their stock comes not from our world, but from the Quasi-Elemental Plane Of Wicked Awesome Kick-Ass Shit. Its possible that the namer of this store meant to imply that they sell collectible items from the Earth, which would make the name 33.33% less inaccurate, but if I go down that road this article is going to be a lot longer than it needs to be. Lets just call the place “The Earth.” Besides, I’m not here to talk about that, I’m here to talk about this:

Bag-O’-Sega™!! Oh, hell yeah!

Bag-O’-Sega™ is double exposed. I was convinced I was using a new roll of film, but some of the pictures are even triple exposed, which means that my stupid ass has done this more than once with the same roll of film. Honestly, sometimes I have no idea how I’ve managed to survive for 30 years. I now have a picture of me, buckled up in my car, with a cat I’ve never seen before, on the balcony of my friends’ apartment in downtown Chicago, while the ghost of somebody’s crotch is haunting my ear. Check it out on the ‘About Chris‘ page. I’m going to use the pics anyway, partly because this is a photo documentary of the Legend Of Bag-O’-Sega™, partly because they remind me of that Foreigner song “Double Vision,” and partly because I have no intention at all of going back and taking pictures of all this crap again. Some of the pictures look kinda cool this way, and having double exposed pics on the site makes me feel all artsy and pretentious. So now that we’ve established that I’m much more avant-garde than you, here’s a pic of Bag-O’-Sega™ with some chick I don’t think I know, who somehow got into my camera.

Friday morning I made my usual payday run to The Earth before I went to the office to watch my soul die for another 8½ hours. As soon as I walked in, my presence tripped the store’s Chris detector, unlocking all the TransFormers cases, which immediately sounded their patented hypersonic Chris-call sirens. My eyes, having spotted THREE rare Optimus Primes from Japan, all shiny and mint-in-the-damn-boxes, immediately dislocated themselves from their sockets and drug me by the optic nerves to the display case wherein His High Holiness of Cybertron wore the crown of Iacon upon a troubled brow. Oh, god damn, fuckin’ Jesus God YES!!! After seeing that they were all way more than I had told myself I was going to spend and then buying one anyway, I went to give the rest of the store the once over.

This is double exposed James. Don’t let his nice guy looks fool you; James is a take-no-shit thug pimp from the streets. Since I’m the one paying when I go to The Earth, you may think that James is pimping the toys out to me. Wrong; James pimps me out to the toys, and makes me pay for it. This is how our conversation went Friday morning.

Me: Hey, what’s going on, James? Got any TransFormers cards?
James: I know you did not just call me James, bitch! [smack]
Me: Oh, god, I’m sorry!
James: What’s my name, bitch?! [smack]
Me: Sweet Silk Daddy Chocolate!
James: I said what’s my fuckin’ name?! [smack, smack]
Me: [weeping] Sweet Silk Daddy Chocolate!! Oh, god, please…
James: You call me Daddy, bitch, I ain’t got all fuckin’ day.
Me: Yes, Daddy.
James: You see that Optimus Prime on that shelf over there? Mothafucka ain’t gonna buy itself. You got my money?
Me: Yes, Daddy.
James: That’s my girl. Who do you love?
Me: I love Daddy.
James: And who loves you, even though you make him slap you around, and he doesn’t want to?
Me: Daddy loves me.
James: That’s right he does. Now take off them pants, bitch.

My first clue that something unusual was going on was that, when I brought Optimus to the counter, James tells me that he’s going to make some space for me to “make a pile.” James then casually cleared a nine foot section of counter space, made a quick call to his stock broker, and sat there watching me, like an orca watches a wounded baby seal struggling to get back up on the ice floe. Motherfucker. He knows there’s something in the store I’m not going to be able to leave without. He’s so damn sure, he’s clearing real estate for me to collect it all. And he could probably tell me exactly what it is, and where it is, and what size U-Haul I’d have to rent to take it all home. But he won’t. He’s going to make me work for it. This is part of our love/hate relationship; I hate him for treating me like this, but I love him because he takes care of me, and he doesn’t beat on me unless I deserve it, and he protects me from the other music, toy, and comic store pimps. He’s better to me than I deserve. I think. Really.

As my travels take me past the video game cabinet, I spotted Bag-O’-Sega™ just sitting there. Looking at me. For $20. A Sega Genesis 2, with a controller, power supply, and six games, all bundled up neatly in a giant ziplock bag. Do you see? Do you see now why I love this place so much? Where the hell else could you find something so perfect? It was a complete Sega system. In a bag. A Bag-O’-Sega™. For that is what I dub thee, and hence ye shall be known, now and forever. I could see the little sticker on the bag that told me there was no audio/video cable, and, in my foolishness, I thought that the Sega Genesis was one of those systems that used RCA jacks. If it did, this article would be just like my penis; nice enough to look at, but just way shorter than you would have expected from me. Fortunately for you, dear readers, daddy’s packin’ an anaconda tonight.

I never had a Sega, and never really wanted one. If you’ve read the encyclopedic saga I wrote about “The Batman” video game, you know that I was an NES man. Still am, and proudly. But if you’ve read that article, you also know that I’m completely enchanted by the new hand held video games you just plug in and play from the controller. That article featured the models from Jakks Pacific which, for the most part, are recreations of the arcade versions of video games. There are now quite a few which recreate old console games, like those for the Sega Genesis. Having played a great deal of my roommate’s Sega when I was supposed to be going to college, I’m all about getting my hands on a Sonic The Hedgehog game. I used to see these things all over the place for about $25, and now that I actually want one, its nowhere to be found.

How is this sci-fi, you ask? As cool as all this is, how does it qualify for the site? No sci-fi, no fantasy, no deal; that’s the rule. Bag-O’-Sega™ delivers; it comes with six games, ALL of which are sci-fi/fantasy in some manner or another. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 was right there in front, along with Street Fighter II, both of which contain strong elements of sci-fi and magic. Bag-O’-Sega™ even comes with Jurassic Park, an officially licensed game based on a science fiction franchise! Aladdin was there as well, which qualifies on the magic front, but I’ve chosen to ignore it because we all have our flaws, Bag-O’-Sega™ included. I could keep looking for Sonic for $25, or I could buy the whole damn Genesis with six games, including Sonic 2, for just $20, AND I could make myself feel like less of a loser by trying to convince myself that I’m doing all of this for the show, and that this is an investment. I didn’t even bother looking to see what the other games were. $20? Sold American!

I immediately cried out for James. James holds the most sacred of all objects in The Earth: the mystical Keys of Opening (+8 to all lock picking rolls and customer seduction attempts), which grant access to the gifts of the magi they keep inside the display cases. Upon getting it out of the case, and feeling the beautiful Bag-O’-Sega™ in my hands, Optimus Prime and I forgot all about whatever it was that James had wanted us to buy. We immediately decided that I should purchase it, and we would play it together all weekend long. It would be like a buddy movie, except with less road trips and sexy girls, and more eating corn dogs in bed at home alone with a plastic truck and trying to figure out what fucking purpose that little fox that runs around behind Sonic can possibly serve other than to make me not feel so bad about fur coats and English hunting parties. Seriously, what the fuck is up with that thing?

All day Friday I sit at work and think about Bag-O’-Sega™. I think about it the way little kids think about Christmas, or the way Matthew Perry thinks about his dealer. I just cannot WAIT to play this thing… but I can’t. Because when I get home to plug it in, I discover that the fucking thing does NOT have RCA audio/video jacks as I had assumed. It has one of those special little multi-prong thingies, and unless I’m going to do some creative splicing, I’m going to have to find one. FUCK!

Bright and early Saturday morning, I woke up and looked sadly at Bag-O’-Sega™ laying lifeless on the floor next to my bed. I could tell it was in pain. I plugged it in to make sure it worked, and it lit up for me in an irresistible little red LED puppy dog way which said to me “Life sure would be really swell if you would hook me up to your TV and play with me, big guy.” Well, who could resist that? No one could; I just told you it was irresistible. Pay some fucking attention, asshole.

Now I was on a mission. A mission for Sega. Here’s the mission statement I wrote up:

I WILL play Bag-O’-Sega™ before the weekend is over, or, so help me god, I will bitch and whine about it endlessly.

I needed a cable, and I was heading back to the source. When I got to The Earth, a strange and wondrous thing greeted my eyes. Bag-O’-Sega™ had a son, Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ It was a Genesis 3 with no games, but it had an AV cable, and would play all the games I got with Bag-O’-Sega™. And it was much more compact. It was, for lack of a better word, cute. And for $16, it was looking pretty good. Even if it didn’t work, I could still use that AV cable. No… I would resist. Bag-O’-Sega™ is waiting at home, and I must find cables for it. I will not buy Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™

Not ever. Never ever. Really.

Tearing myself away, I sought out James who informed me that they had no cables, and, after pimping me out for another $25 in action figures, he sent me to a place called Game Swap, where I not only found Sonic The Hedgehog in his first game, sans fox, but I ended up buying the ultimate sci-fi crossover video game, RoboCop vs. The Terminator. I’m not going to talk much about it here, because it deserves its own article, but I had only seen this dumped onto a homemade NES cartridge online just last year, and I thought it was a homebrewed game. I had no idea it was a legit product! And now I could own it and play it! Thank you, Bag-O’-Sega™. Oh, god, I love you so much!

What they didn’t have at Game Swap was cables for Bag-O’-Sega™. They didn’t have them at Game Stop, either. Or at Game Crazy. Or Game-o-Rama. Or Game Weasel. Or Bob’s Country Bunker ‘n Games. Or It Game Upon A Midnight Clear. Nobody has these things. Every place I went, even Radio Shack, told me the exact same thing: “We had ‘em, maybe four months ago, but we don’t have ‘em in right now.” Fuck you, that’s a lie, and we both damn well know it. These self-proclaimed übergamer electronics junkies just can’t admit that there’s a piece of gaming tech that they don’t have, and don’t know how to get a hold of. I don’t want to hear your inventory history report, I just want the damn cable. I even brought Bag-O’-Sega™ into one store with me, just to see if there was anything compatible, and the guy just looked at it longingly and then skulked away, jealous and embarrassed when he couldn’t help me. Fucking liars. Don’t tell me you sold out of those cables just recently; this game system is going on 15 years old. Acknowledge your lies, and repent to Bag-O’-Sega™ before it destroys you! You sit behind that counter and claim to be Lord Of The Games, but when confronted with the truth and the light of the system that dethroned Nintendo, just as Nintendo dethroned Atari before it, you are humbled and small. You don’t have cables for this system because you don’t have a Sega Genesis or any related equipment anywhere in the damn store, and you haven’t for years! You are not the god of Sha Ka Ree, or any other god! You can lie to me if you want, losers, but you can’t lie to Bag-O’-Sega™. Bag-O’-Sega™ knows your sins.

I drove around all day. I’ve never before burned ¾ of a tank of gas in a day when I was not on a road trip, but Saturday the Scifimobile drank deep. I didn’t care. I would fucking HAVE those cables. I was on a mission from God. I would not stop until my Bag-O’-Sega™ jihad rained blood and fire from the skies down upon the heads of the unbelievers. And I would not, no matter what, face the fact that there was only one place I could get the cable I needed that day, and break down and go back to The Earth to buy Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ No matter what. Never ever.

Really.

When I got home with Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ I was pretty happy. James let me test it before leaving the store with it, and it didn’t work. I asked him how much he wanted for it, just so I could have the cable and controller, and he sold me the whole thing for five bucks. He climbed up on displays to reach The Earth’s TV just to helped me test this thing. We tried everything we could to make it work, we even tried feeding it electricity from a lamp cord, hoping it would come back to life and nuzzle us sweetly like the little runt-of-the-litter alien robot in Batteries Not Included. James gave it his best, but it just wasn’t to be. He even offered to just give me the AV cable after I told him my sad story, but I paid the five anyway, because I wanted the extra controller, and because I support The Earth. Which leads me to a rant:

All joking aside, dealing with James, the rest of the staff of The Earth, and other excellent people like them, is the reason is why I go out of my way and often pay a little extra to seek out and support local businesses. Because its worth it. Its worth it every single time I step into a store, and the people there know my name. I know perfectly well that I could get on eBay and try to pay pennies for old video games or toys, or whatever else I may come across at The Earth. And, if we’re going to be completely honest, I could probably get a better deal here and there. That Optimus above, for example, cost me $60, and the online price after shipping and handling would have been around $52. So I could have saved eight dollars by shopping online. But there are a number of problems with this, not the least of which is that its one more way we have of isolating ourselves from other people. The computer age has been great on a lot of fronts, but interpersonally, it has SUCKED. I don’t want to steer this article too far into seriousness, but how many large retail stores have you ever gone into and asked about a hard to find item, and the person didn’t go hide themselves behind a computer that tells them how to answer the question? How many stores have called you to let you know an order is in, and the person at the other end of the call recognizes you by voice? Recall the last thing you bought from a Target or the like: can you name the person who sold it to you? More importantly, can the person that sold it to you name you? I doubt it. I don’t know James outside of The Earth, but he has called me at home to alert me of old TransFormers and other harder to find items that The Earth had received that he thought I might possibly like, based on nothing more than conversations we have had in the store. It wasn’t a guaranteed sale, or an under-the-table favor for a friend. He wasn’t even calling about something I specifically asked him to keep an eye out for; he just called to let me know, just in case. And because of that, I have been able to get a hold of some stuff I probably would have missed out on had I waited for a payday visit to roll around. That wouldn’t have happened if James had stuck his face in a monitor and mumbled about how the store “don’t carry that.” Think you can get that same interpersonal connection from the underpaid corporate-zombie high school student with a shitty attitude and zero conversation skills down at Toys “Я” Us? Don’t fucking count on it.

But this article isn’t about my loathing of mega-marts and big retail chains. This is about Bag-O’-Sega™. Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ was dead, but his will stipulated that if any of his circuits or gears would help, he would gladly donate them. I took the poor, dead little fella home, hoping to make Bag-O’-Sega™ live, breathe, and jump again. When I got home, I started to experiment with Bag-O’-Sega™ and Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ just to see if I could get a pulse, and was crushed.

Neither unit worked.

Bag-O’-Sega™ was as dead as his son, and the little red LED was just teasing me. The TV flickered when I turned it on, so I knew the motherboard was powering up, and the cable was sending some kind of signal to the television, but none of the cartridges worked. None of them. All I got was one “officially licensed by Sega” boot screen, just once, and then blackness. FUCK! Frustrated and pissed off like nothing I have ever experienced before, I was just about to give up, and face the fact that I had just spent the day chasing down cables and cartridges for a dead system, wasting about $50,000 dollars on gas and dead electronics in the process. I had invested time, money, and my love of Sonic in this endeavor, and I had received NOTHING back. NOTHING! Just as I was preparing to declare my life dead to me, burn the house and all my possessions, and leave to walk the Earth in misery and solitude like David Banner at the end of every episode of The Incredible Hulk, it hit me: I’ve gone through this before for The Sci-Fi Guys.

When I first started up The Sci-Fi Guys and was gathering equipment to film the first episode, I was unemployed and broke. I got an old video camera from my parents; a quality camera, but one which hadn’t been used in about ten years. I would plug it in, and everything would power up and function perfectly, but then when I hit the record button the entire thing would shut back down. Since I was the one who used it most, I knew it had been well taken care of and wasn’t damaged. I tried to get the thing to work for a week; I just couldn’t explain it. Then I remembered that VCRs have capacitors that store up a significant charge, so that when you hit the play button and the motors inside start drawing a lot of electricity all at once, the unit can draw on that stored power instead of pulling it out of the main board and causing a power shortage which shuts the system down. Capacitors drain over time, and without that backup power, the camera was shutting itself down trying to spin the motor. After I left the old gal plugged in for 12 hours to recharge the capacitors it recorded like new, without so much as a flutter, and hasn’t given me a bit of trouble since.

Could it be that simple?

I left both units plugged in while I slept. Sunday morning I tried them, and they both booted whatever cartridge I put in. FUCKING SWEET!!! Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ WAS just like the little runt-of-the-litter alien robot in Batteries Not Included; it just needed a little love… and a stockpile of electrons. Genesis: life from lifelessness. Elated, I played Sonic 2 for about thirty seconds until the urge to mutilate little cartoon foxes and devour their little cartoon souls became too distracting. I felt guilty that James had sold me a working unit for $5, until further testing revealed the sad truth; although Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ was alive and well, dear old dad wasn’t quite so lucky. Bag-O’-Sega™ had a pulse, but it was a vegetable. The carts would boot, but the controller input was hosed; it would only accept commands from one of the six controller buttons, and would only move left. After a short while it stopped doing even that. It would boot the games, but you couldn’t play them. I had paid for a dead system, but it wasn’t Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™after all. I felt the universe’s cosmic scales tip back into balance as I said a tearful farewell to Bag-O’-Sega™. At ease, old soldier; you fought the good fight, and you’ve earned your rest. Godspeed.

Sega Geneses 2 and 3 use the same AV cable, controllers, and power supply. I was able to salvage all the peripherals from Bag-O’-Sega™ for his son to use; I think that’s the way Bag-O’-Sega™ would have wanted it. Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ now sits where his father was intended to sit, at the foot of my bed, in a box that used to house a Lego-ripoff pirate ship, waiting for me to lead RoboCop or Ryu to victory again and again. All said and done, I got a Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ and six games up and running for $25 (not counting what I spent for gas and other crap). And, of all the cartridges I bought that day, do you know which one doesn’t work? Which one really is broken? The one I initially wanted. The one that started this whole thing. The very one that I went on this fucked up, dumb ass crusade just to play in the first place: Sonic The Hedgehog.

Oh, well. You can’t win ‘em all.

An old Bag-O’-Sega™ dies, a young Bag-O’-Sega Jr.™ lives.

Fair trade.

Chris