Blast processing: what SEGA claimed and what the Genesis did

This site is named after a marketing phrase, so the first thing it owes you is an honest account of that phrase. "Blast processing" was the line Sega of America used in the early 1990s to sell the Genesis against the Super Nintendo. By the end of this article you will know who said the words first, what technical trick he was describing, what the two consoles' processors actually ran at, how Nintendo answered in print, and why Sega itself dug the phrase back up in 2025. Everything here is traced to a page listed under Sources; where those pages fall short, we say so.

Who coined it, in his own words

The phrase has a named author. Scot Bayless was a senior producer at Sega of America from 1990 to 1994, and in an interview that Time Extension republished in September 2022 (it first ran in November 2015) he opens with a sentence that sets the tone: "Sadly I have to take responsibility for that ghastly phrase."

His account of how it happened is specific. Sega's technical director, Marty Franz, "discovered that you could do this nifty trick with the display system by hooking the scan line interrupt and firing off a DMA at just the right time." The result, Bayless says, "was that you could effectively jam data onto the graphics chip while the scan line was being drawn, which meant you could drive the DAC's with 8 bits per pixel." Then the marketing part: "during the runup to the western launch of Sega-CD the PR guys interviewed me about what made the platform interesting from a technical standpoint and somewhere in there I mentioned the fact that you could just 'blast data into the DAC's.'" The PR team, he says, "loved the word 'blast' and the next thing I knew Blast Processing was born."

Two things follow from that. First, the phrase began as an engineer's description of a display trick, not as a name for the main processor. Second, it was elicited around the Sega CD launch, and only then attached to the base console's advertising.

The advertising machine it landed in

Ken Horowitz's 2006 history of Sega's advertising on Sega-16 gives the campaign its context. The earlier slogan, "Genesis does what Nintendon't," was launched under Michael Katz from October 1989, with the Los Angeles office of the Bozell agency holding the account from May 1989. Tom Kalinske replaced Katz as Sega of America president in January 1991 and, in Horowitz's telling, ran a strategy of direct comparison against Nintendo. In July 1992 the account moved to Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein, with a stated budget of 65 million dollars for that year. Horowitz also notes that "Welcome to the Next Level" ran alongside the Sega Scream for a while and then settled into being the Sega CD slogan.

That timing matters. Bayless says the phrase was born in the run-up to the Sega CD's western launch; Horowitz places the agency change and the big budget in mid-1992. The blast processing campaign sits at the intersection of those two facts. We want to be careful about one thing we could not verify on 5 September 2026: the Sega-16 article does not describe the blast processing television commercial itself, and the pages we reached do not state which games it showed. Readers will remember the ad; we are not going to reconstruct it from memory on a site whose rule is that every claim carries a source.

What the hardware actually ran at

The clock speeds are the part of the story that was true, and Rodrigo Copetti's hardware write-ups are the clearest public source we could reach. His Mega Drive analysis puts the main CPU, a Motorola 68000, at about 7.6 MHz, with a Zilog Z80 at about 3.5 MHz handling sound and a Video Display Processor running at about 13 MHz. The 68000 has sixteen 32-bit general-purpose registers, a 16-bit ALU, and a 24-bit address bus. The VDP has a Direct Memory Access unit that moves data into video RAM, colour RAM (128 bytes of it) and vertical-scroll RAM without the CPU copying it byte by byte. That DMA unit, fired at the right moment in a scan line, is the mechanism Bayless was describing.

Copetti's Super Nintendo analysis describes the other side: a Ricoh 5A22, a superset of the 65C816, that reaches "up to 3.58 MHz for register operations" and drops to 1.79 MHz when it touches the slowest buses. On paper the Genesis CPU ran at roughly twice the clock, and John Szczepaniak's Retro Gamer piece (reprinted on Sega-16) notes that the machine "had a faster processor" and was based on Sega's System 16 arcade hardware. The catch is the word "paper." Clock speed is one input to how a game feels; the graphics hardware, the memory bus and the software matter as much, and the SNES could put 256 colours on screen at once in its richer modes, per Copetti, which the Genesis could not match.

What the trick was good for, and what it was not

Bayless's description is of a way to push colour data into the display during drawing. The point of doing that is to show more colours than the palette hardware allows in a normal frame. The Sources here do not include a shipped Genesis game that used the technique in play, and we are not going to name one; Bayless's own framing, in which the trick was a curiosity that PR seized on, is the honest summary. If you have played a Genesis game that showed a still image with far more colours than its usual sixty-odd, you have seen the family of technique he means. Whether any game used it while also running gameplay is a question the sources we reached do not settle.

Nintendo's answer, and a rival "blast"

Nintendo Life's May 2020 article records Nintendo's reply, which ran as magazine advertorials: "the console speed has nothing to do with how fast a character moves across the screen. A plumber can run as fast a hedgehog if programmed to do so." That is correct as a matter of engineering and is the cleanest rebuttal of the campaign ever printed.

The same article adds a footnote we enjoy. Jeff Peters, formerly of Sculptured Software, says his team used "blast processing" as an internal name for a technique in the Super Nintendo port of Mortal Kombat, reading audio samples straight from the cartridge into sound memory. "That was before Sega adopted the slogan," he says. "We could just blast sound from the cartridge onto the game scene." Same words, different chip, different purpose.

Why Sega brought it back in 2025

Time Extension reported on September 16, 2025 that Sega had remade the commercial to promote Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, which was heading to every major console including the Switch and Switch 2, and that the new ad "takes aim at Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World, even going as far as to claim that its open world gameplay is boring." Thirty-odd years on, the phrase is still doing the job it was invented for: comparing a Sonic game to a Nintendo racing game in a way that flatters Sega.

What to take from this

The phrase was real, the engineer was real, the trick was real, and the campaign attached the trick to a claim about overall speed that the hardware only half supported. If you want one line to remember, take Bayless's: he is sorry. If you want two, take Nintendo's plumber. The Genesis did have a faster main processor than the Super Nintendo, and it also had a smaller colour budget; both are true at once, which is why the war was worth watching.

This site's dataset does not carry a row for a marketing phrase, but every Genesis game it covers, starting with the one the phrase was sold alongside, gets its own page with the dates and credits sourced the same way this one is.