Sega of America · 1993 · Sega Genesis
"Blast Processing"
Sega took an obscure hardware quirk that no commercial game ever used, gave it a name that sounded like physics, and won an argument in every school playground in America.
The term was coined by Sega around 1992 and reached most people through a 1993 television advertisement produced by the agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. It had a real technical referent, which almost nobody who repeated it knew: "blast processing" described the high bandwidth and fill rate of the DMA unit inside the Genesis's VDP graphics processor — you could, in the phrase of the engineers, simply blast data at the video display processor. Sega's technical director Scott Bayless has traced it to a conversation with engineer Marty Franz about a bug discovered in the video hardware, which is a remarkable pedigree for a marketing slogan. The rest is a study in how little the referent mattered. Most people who heard the phrase assumed it meant raw CPU speed, and in fairness the Genesis did have a numerical advantage there — its Motorola 68000 ran at 7.67 MHz against the roughly 3.58 MHz Ricoh chip in the Super Nintendo. Sega never needed to correct the misunderstanding, because the misunderstanding was better than the truth. The truth, awkwardly, is that the technique was difficult enough to exploit that no commercial game ever actually shipped using it. Sega sold a generation on a capability that was, in practice, never used. The phrase has long outlived the console as industry shorthand for confident technical gibberish, and the man credited with coining it has since publicly apologised for "that ghastly phrase".