Brilliant new book tells the story of 1990s must-have the Sega Mega Drive

A year ago Darren Wall’s new games publishers Read-Only Memory released its first book charting the history of Sensible Software, a company whose creations defined many of our childhoods and teenage years.

Now Darren (aka Wallzo) and his team are back with Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, which they describe as “the definitive retrospective of the console.” It includes original hardware plans, concept illustrations for many of the Mega Drive’s most iconic games and interviews with the developers who worked for Sega during its glory years. Much of the material, which is drawn from the company’s archives, has never been seen before and an accompanying essay by The Guardian’s games editor Keith Stuart sets the Mega Drive in a wider cultural and technological context.

Like the previous book, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works came about thanks to a Kickstarter campaign which received more than three times its original goal, proving that for a whole generation the Mega Drive was the gaming experience that meant the most to us.