In 2009, that was the situation one poor 60-year-old woman found herself. A hostage for ten whole hours being held up by a Sega Light Phaser. The man was apparently looking to collect on a debt, so decided the best option was to break into her house in the Brazil Federal District. And demand payment by threatening to shoot with his Light Phaser.
The plan, as you can imagine, was not thought out very well at all. You see most people in Brazil would have recognized Sega’s famous Light Phaser. The lady that was being held up, though definitely a scary circumstance to be in, may even have laughed in his face. If someone ran into your place of work with an XBOX controller as a weapon, would you be able to take them seriously?
The accessory that was shipped with the Sega Master System was extremely common in Brazil. In fact, when released in 1989, Brazil became one of Sega’s strongest markets.
The Master System was a home video game console based on the Sega Mark III that was released in Japan in 1985. This was a groundbreaking 16-bit console at the time, but could not really breakthrough Nintendo’s big market share in North America and Europe. But due to its extremely high popularity in Brazil, Sega still produces some of the consoles today. They also had some cool 3D glasses that could work with some specially coded games. Luckily for the police, the attacker forgot to wear his 3D glasses so was not able to see them coming.
After ten hours of negotiating with the police, he released the hostage unharmed. Which was a lucky outcome for this situation because it seemed the robber was also holding a very real pair of sharp knives. But we really have to ask the question, what in the world was he was thinking of doing with the light blaster? As according to reports, it was not even plugged into the console!
