That's a great write-up. I've never seen an SG-1000 outside of the National Video Game museum in Texas.

I just looked up Girl's Garden and the article is correct, it does look incredible! Parallax scrolling backgrounds, big bright colorful graphics, and a REALLY fun stage win screen.

I was surprised years later when I learned this was a thing. I had a Genesis and a Game Gear and I was aware that the Master System was a thing, even though I've never seen one to this day, but the SG-1000 was a mystical beast that almost didn't seem real. Then I learned SEGA was short for Service Games and that they used to make mechanical games and I was good and well blown away.

The SG-1000 is brought to my attention just infrequently enough, that it feels like new knowledge every damn time.

After all these years, I still haven't even played anything from it. It's like my brain wants to ignore its existence.

Jeremy Parish has a whole video series about the system if, like me, you never heard of it: https://jeremy-parish-fanclub.neocities.org/video_series/segaiden

I'm not much of an 8-bit gamer but it's cool to hear about these early consoles. The general narrative is that the Famicom ruled in Japan, but it had some competition and it's interesting to see what other companies released.