Certain electronic rebranding moments are hilarious in retrospect. In 1984, when the computer company Apple wanted to make it seem like its new computers were better than its old computers, the moniker “Macintosh” was applied, in an effort to remind people of different kinds of apples in real life. Apple, thankfully, stopped there and didn’t try to market any “Red Delicious” or “Granny Smith” computers, but the term “Mac” stuck anyway and is still used today. Interestingly, in 1989, just five years after the introduction of 1984’s Apple Macintosh, a similar name-game rebranding happened in the gaming world — but with a much shorter lifespan. Today, we don’t live in a world in which people casually refer to their latest gaming console as a “Genesis.” But from 1989 to about 1993, it really felt like we would all have Genesis forever.
