NVIDIA & SEGA are celebrating 30 years of collaboration, as SEGA's "Legendary" gaming titles are announced for RTX Spark PCs.
There Would've Been No NVIDIA Without SEGA, & Both Brands Celebrate Their 30 Long Years of Collaboration, Starting With NV1 To RTX Spark PCs
NVIDIA's first graphics accelerator, before the term GPU existed, was the NV1. The 3D/2D chip was released back in 1995 and enabled the porting of classic SEGA games such as Virtua Fighter over to PC.
From Troubled Beginnings to a 3-Decade-Long Collab
The NV1 was the first and only chip to feature quadratic texture mapping, a step up from the triangular primitives that competitors (over 100 startups at the time) were using at the time. NVIDIA CEO recalled during the Joe Rogan podcast last year that the architectural choices that they made with the NV1 were flawed. Competitors were relying on inverse texture mapping while they were using forward texture maps; they used curved surfaces instead of triangles, and they didn't include Z Buffers, a fundamental of modern-day GPUs.
Still, the release of Microsoft's DirectX API, which supported triangle primitives, rendered NVIDIA's technology obsolete. Both companies also encountered many hurdles with Sega Saturn failing against the Sony PlayStation, while the NV1 was removed from shelves only a few months later in 1996. Its successor, the NV2, was also scrapped before completion.
Despite the hurdles, SEGA invested $5 million in NVIDIA, and the company would go on to roll out the RIVA 128 and the first GPU, the RIVA 256 & that is how NVIDIA really started its GPU journey.
Classic Franchises, Reforged For The Next-Generation of PCs
So today, NVIDIA and SEGA celebrate 30 years of working together, and they do it by announcing the launch of classic SEGA franchises, such as Virtua Fighter and more, for the RTX Spark PC.
Announced at Computex 2026, NVIDIA RTX Spark is the first AI SoC of its kind for the PC platform, offering new levels of performance and capabilities. We saw several RTX Spark PCs during the event last month, and the franchise that started it all for NVIDIA, Virtua Fighter, will see its newest title, Virtua Fighter Crossroads, release on the RTX Spark PC.
NVIDIA confirms that even more "future" SEGA titles will be coming to the NVIDIA RTX Spark. The announcement was made at the heart of Akihabara, a global gaming technology hub centered in Japan, where the original SEGA Akihabara Arcade (GiGO Akihabara 3) was based.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined SEGA CEO Haruki Satomi; SEGA chief operation officer Shuji Utsumi; Yu Suzuki, creator of Virtua Fighter; and former SEGA President Shoichiro Irimajiri, at the birthplace of countless arcade memories to celebrate the milestone.
The upcoming titles will not just be supported on NVIDIA RTX Spark PCs, but will also feature the latest gaming technologies such as Ray Tracing, DLSS, and several other NVIDIA-powered AI technologies.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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