On January 20th, 2009 Sega applied for a trademark, a logo to be exact. The description of the logo to be trademarked is  "Color is not claimed as a feature of the mark. The mark consists of a dark circular outer ring and a lighter circular inner ring. The circular space within the rings contains a dark crescent in one third of the space, sitting on top a lighter oval in the other two-thirds of the space. Three white curved lines intersect across the entire circular space within the rings. A small circle sits about two-thirds of the way down the curved line of the left side of the circular space. In the far left, a thinner white line runs from the inner ring to the oval."

That’s not all that interesting until ten days later Sega applies for two more trademarks, one called RINGWIDE and the other one called RINGEDGE. The Goods and Services were listed as, arcade game boards, namely prerecorded magnetic data carriers featuring arcade game programs; video game software; computer game programs, stand alone video game machines; arcade game machines with built-in screens. All three of the patents were labeled the same.

We do know that it is a hardware system with software probably going on a disc.

Is Sega considering getting back in the console market? I can’t say for sure, but after finding these three I went investigating and ran into something that triggers even more curiosity. I was checking to see if there were any patents filed to go along with the trademarks and found a patent (find Sega half way down) that was issued to Sega back on the 6th of January (#7473180). The patent is for a controller. If you look into the patent, it was originally filed for back in February 1998, (it looks like it was abandoned) and then refiled again in March 2002, which it was issued #7081051.

Both of the patents have the same description (abstract): An expansion unit 50, 60 or 70 is connected to a controller body 10 including an analog direction key 12, a digital direction key 14, command buttons 20a-20z, command levers 22l, 22r, etc. An expansion unit 50 including a photo emitting unit 52 is connected to thereby make the controller cordless. An expansion unit 60 including a photo detecting unit 65, whereby shooting games in which an enemy on a monitor screen can be shot can be played. An expansion unit 70 including a vibration unit 75 is connected, whereby a vibration is given to the controller body 10 to make a shooting game more realistic. New functions can be added to the conventional controller, and the new functions can be added freely without making no change to the controller body. (The graphic on the right was submitted with patent 708105 back in 2002)

The question remains, why would Sega need a wireless controller and expansion unit at this time? The best answer we can come up with is the possibility of a new console coming out, possibly a console and handheld? It does refer to arcade, which throws me a bit, as we all know here in the states, Arcade is all but over. I wish I had a more definitive answer, but we are on the case and stay with GDN as we look deeper into this.

What are your thoughts? Should Sega get back into the game? (No pun intended)