A Trip to Saturn

In the article entitled "Sega did what Nintendidn't " I broke down all about how my school yard generation viewed the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

SEGA's 16-bit powerhouse, the Genesis/Megadrive had kicked Nintendo's butt and forced it to remember that it wasn't the only video game console manufacturer. By 1993 SEGA had begun work on a new console internally which was to be the ultimate two dimensional machine, with some three dimensional abilities.

It saw only two competitors in it's wake at the time, since it's closest rival in 1992 (the SNES) was merely two years old. Those two competitors would prove to not be anything of the sort. There was Atari's latest and last console, the Jaguar . There was also Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts and his new console concept called the 3DO. There would also be an all-new console name appearing in the video game world, a savage underdog that everyone laughed at.

This generation of consoles and video game releases was one of the most progressive changes in video game history, until the Wii and other similar efforts.

Slowly but surely two dimensional side scrolling quests began to morph into three dimensional adventures full of polygonal pleasure. You might have heard of Tomb Raider , which no doubt became rather popular due to the busty buttress Laura Croft .

In this era, a new competitor was born. A competitor that sought to destroy Nintendo while given ample opportunity to trample on SEGA.

Nintendo desired to have a CD add-on to their SNES console to rival that of Sega's and NEC's (for the Genesis and the Turbografix, respectively). Back in this era, between 1989 and 1993, the CD was understood to be the ultimate form of video game media for a variety of reasons:

-Cheap to make, package, ship.

-Held a lot more than a standard cartridge could for a lot less money.

-Since it was a relatively new medium, it would produce a wow factor among consumers 

-It would also still provide relatively good copy protection since most consumers would not have a CD-ROM or knowledge of them for a decade or more.

Nintendo, looking for the best of best for their new SNES accessory decided to go to a source of this relatively new technology. There was Phillips...or, Sony. These two companies jointly developed the format for the compact disc, and without them they would not exist. Obviously, Phillips not being a Japanese company wasn't on the list of people to seek out.

That leaves us with Sony.

It's important to note that Sony was already gathering steam to enter this arena, which was fueled by a Mr. Ken Kutaragi . He is the grandfather of the Sony Playstation...the leader of this new threat, beginning to emerge.

At the end of the day Nintendo scrapped the idea.  Because of the plethora of new consoles entering the market at the beginning of the 32-bit era, Nintendo's once vice-like grip was totally a n after thought, especially after SEGA had eroded much of the market share it with it's Mega Drive/Genesis. Nintendo was about to journey into a time wrought with danger, but it would fair better than it's rival SEGA.

So...where was SEGA, with all this stuff? Good question! Let's take a look at their issues during this period.

In just one console iteration, the SEGA Genesis, it had for a moment begun to beat Nintendo--the console king.

Sure, "okay," they made a few mistakes along the way--the 32X, as I mentioned briefly before, being one of them. The SEGA CD, too, was destined to fail. Why these two issues occurred has more to do with internal politics and how developers who signed up to produce for these systems had to commit to a number of titles.

SEGA was a fractured company...Sega of Japan, Sega of America, and Sega of Europe believed strongly that video games needed to be highly localized to their regions and that particular styles of game play popular in Japan (where the video game resurgence took place! ) would not carry over to different markets necessarily.

To top this off, SEGA was an arcade company. That was not at all a problem , but this console iteration would be the first to really go head-long into home video games. Arcades weren't as popular as they were in the 80s at this point and between Sony and Nintendo the software they were about to release would begin to redefine the experience.

I could recount the torrid history, but someone already eloquently has:

So, ultimately, while the SEGA Saturn would be a killer classic in Japan, the United States and the rest of the world just didn't get into it.

The poor marketing due to the "surprise" that Saturnday was fake (which it wasn't of course; SEGA was reacting to the looming PlayStation) and the lack of software on launch left the console dead in the water.

There are a few select stand out titles...some in my collection, some that may be added one day..

But there could have been many more, had SEGA of America imported more titles, namely RPGs. Guess what Japanese game really sparked Playstation sales?

Final Fantasy 7 like Pokemon for the Gameboy, or Halo for the X-Box, shipped Playstation hardware and put it into the homes of millions of gamers.

SEGA would ultimately lose the 32-bit war, discontinuing the hardware outside of Japan in late 1998, giving it effectively a three year life span. (It's odd that their next hardware iteration would suffer the same fate under completely different circumstances.)

The Saturn had a couple of neat innovations, continuing the trend SEGA had set forth earlier.

As the videos mention above, it was a dual CPU system. But being way ahead of it's time, parallel programming was not a skill video game developers had much stock in. Let alone the quadrilateral graphics processing. The sophisticated hardware was costly, however, and made it largely difficult to implement redesigns.

This explains why that there are so many different Saturn versions, but they all roughly are the same size.

The NetLink Adapter was pretty far ahead of it's time, representing one of the best innovations the system had to offer. Before X-Box Live, there was Sega's NetLink. This trend would again be followed in the next hardware iteration, but this time it would be built right into the console it's self.

The Saturn never received a proper Sonic title, the killer app for their Genesis. Instead it would get treasured titles like NiGHTs Into Dreams, Clockwork Knight, Virtua Fighter, Panzer Dragoon, among others. It would also birth Shenmue, one of the most expensive video games ever made.

It also boasted ports of arcade titles like Daytona USA, Virtua-On, Virtua Cop, House of the Dead, and other successful titles of the day.

These franchises, save for Clockwork Knight , outlived the console it's self.

But the marketing in America was strange, and overall the system was too high on hype for what it delivered come launch.

A wounded SEGA would learn from it's mistakes, and produce one last Dream console for hardcore gamers. But that is of course, another story...