The strangest story has to be with this little Mega Drive. It's a small portable Mega Drive without a screen, which may sound totally useless to most of you. Well the reason for this was that it's not supposed to be a portable console at all, it is in fact an airline console. It's designed to be built into the backs of plane chairs and gives you consoles to play on your flight to Malaga (Well, wherever the Japanese go for holidays). They plugged directly into the armrest monitor on Japan Airline (JAL) flights.
The earlier ones floating around for sale are actually stolen products, part of an Indonesian Sea-pirate raid and distributed illegally by collectors. This makes them quite rare, but surprisingly they're not that expensive, you can pick one up for under £100 if you shop carefully.
The MegaJet does not run on batteries, meaning the ones from the Airflights needed to be plugged in to even operate, and comes with several features. The console itself is the first-player controller, however there's a controller port for multiplayer gaming on the front edge of the machine, accompanied by the headphone jack and volume wheel. At the back edge of the console is the Mega Drive cartridge slot and the connectors to the Airplane seats.
On the front you'll find the D-Pad, six button controller setup and two additional buttons above them (Reset and Start) as well as the power light above the D-Pad itself.
There was a commercial release in March 1994 which allowed Japanese consumers to buy their own as a portable Mega Drive (This directly influence Sega of America to create the Nomad). The ones sold to the public actually have some modifications to the original. The Airplane inputs were replaced with an AC Adapter input (Again, required for use of the MegaJet) and a new Mono DIN output for sound to reach the TV when plugged in, this was left out of the in-flight version because the TVs had no speakers.
Surprisingly the MegaJet was quite a success in Japan, despite only being sold in limited quantities. This was due to it's small price and even smaller size (The Japanese have very little living space generally, so a full console this size suits them just fine) gained it the sales it needed, even as a short term project.
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