The late 80's and early 90's were a pretty exciting time in gaming. I say this because home consoles were getting a lot better and I think for me this was most evident when Sega started to actually become a player in the market and Atari was fading away and dying a slow death. Sure Sega has the Master System but in the United States you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that actually owned one - everyone had an NES though.
Sega was able to capture a much larger slice of the market share by doing just one thing correctly: They were the first team to enter the 16-bit arena. They were all alone in this world for more than 2 years actually and I can only pretend to understand why that might have been: Did they not have the technology? Did Nintendo believe that the NES could compete with the Genesis on its own? I don't know why but from August of 1989 to August of 1991 if you wanted a next gen system, you had to buy a Sega Genesis.
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