It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

This narrative has been pushed quite heavily by former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske, but it leaves a lot out. Kalinske claims the Japanese president of Sega, Hayao Nakayama, forced him to launch the Saturn in NA before Kalinske was ready, and because of that, the Saturn failed and Kalinske resigned shortly after. As always, it&#x27;s best to approach with caution when CEOs are assigning blame for company failures under their tenure.<p>The reality is far, far more complicated. Kalinske himself was against the Saturn going back to 1993, due to the predicted high cost of the console. This in turn led to the development of the 32X add-on for the Genesis as a low-cost entry into the 32-bit generation in NA, but the 32X failed spectacularly.<p>Most relevant, however, is that Sega failed to adequately compete against Sony in terms of garnering third-party support, both in Japan and NA. This is discussed at length in the excellent book Revolutionaries at Sony by Reiji Asakura (English translation available). The Saturn was difficult to develop for and Sega did not have good development tools early on.<p>Also worth reading is the recent account from former Sega president Hideki Sato, who was the head designer of the Saturn. He discusses many of the shortcomings of the console and Sega&#x27;s strategy for it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sega-16.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;showthread.php?33506-Hideki-Sato-on-the-Sega-Saturn-(incredible-new-interview)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sega-16.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;showthread.php?33506-Hideki-Sa...</a>

I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake.<p>&quot;Hey let&#x27;s release a weird upgrade pod for our successful last-gen console almost completely simultaneously with our next-gen console, I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines! Especially if both of them have really weird architecture that&#x27;s hard to program on.&quot;

For me as a kid, there was this sense of confusion and whiplash when it came to post-genesis hardware. The CD came out in 92, with no real notable games at launch: Sonic CD came out a year later, and Snatcher + Lunar at the end of its life in 95. The 32x came out shortly after in 94, and only saw a handful of games before being buried by the more powerful Saturn in 95.<p>With two major peripherals and a new console in a short period of time, each with its own library of games, it was hard to understand all that as a kid without internet access, much less afford it, so I stayed clear and sold my genesis for a SNES, then got an N64.<p>The short hardware life probably spurned a lot of 3rd party developers too.<p>Nintendo was much smarter, with longer cycles between major consoles, and no expensive enhancement add-ons to segment its games. When you bought a Nintendo console, you knew it would have a 5+ year road map and was a good investment (okay, ignoring the virtual boy). <i>Every</i> gameboy has had backwards compatibility with at least the previous generation, so it always felt &quot;safe&quot; to buy the newest model.

There&#x27;s something beyond the obvious nostalgia factor that makes these 25 year old video game business stories so captivating. It might be from these massive corporations moving with a gut-driven, ride-or-die mentality or the fact that the only indicator that matters is sales.<p>In comparison, today&#x27;s gaming industry is fragmented beyond all recognition. The audience has grown and matured, but every major player is a unique gumbo of F2P, overplayed IP, indie risks, and speculative technology. Also, they&#x27;re all subservient to some larger corporate strategy.<p>Once again, my cynicism may just stem from my age, but it seems like there hasn&#x27;t been much excitement for the past 5 years or so.

I’m been doing some Nintendo 64 development lately, and sometimes all ask the CEO at my workplace for advice or insights as he worked on Nintendo 64 games when he was younger.<p>It’s not uncommon for him to finish the conversation with noting that he worked on Sega Saturn before the Nintendo 64, and the former was difficult to work with due to its particular architecture.

It&#x27;s hard to say what the biggest mistake was exactly. The Sega CD and 32x were bad ideas, compared to just creating a new console. The Sega Saturn would have been a great 2D console, but they delayed it to add a really strange (quads versus triangles) underperforming 3D capability to their design. I think the Saturn should have been released earlier in 2D only form, so they could move on to making a 3D capable console that trounced the PlayStation and N64 on a delayed timeline, perhaps even backwards compatible with the 2D Saturn.

Oh, fantastic! I love reading everything about this period of history.<p>The Saturn is my person favourite console and I greatly enjoy writing homebrew for it.<p>If you haven’t, and this is of interest to you; check out JO-engine, a fantastic FOSS Saturn homebrew development kit.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jo-engine.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jo-engine.org</a> :)

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I remember the disappointment. I had a Genesis at the time, I loved it, and I was primed to be a continued customer for Sega. From my perspective, all they needed to do was to release a decent next-gen console with games support.

Not just Sega, but Nintendo as well. The N64 was a moderate success, but if it was a CD-based system and came out a year earlier, Nintendo would have cut the PSOne at the knees and maintained console dominance.

Hindsight is always 20&#x2F;20, but I wonder why Sega made decisions like using quads instead of triangles, and dual CPU&#x27;s.

The Sega Saturn was the first console I purchased with my own money.<p>The Saturn had some great games.<p>Three of the Four launch titles were great: Daytona (Rolling Start....), Virtua Fighter, and Panzer Dragon were far better than anything else available.<p>Street Fighter Alpha 2 was far superior on the Saturn compared to the PS version.<p>And Guardian Heroes (available now on Xbox Live Arcade) is probably one of the best, most underrated sprite based beat-em-ups.<p>Ultimately Sony crushed the competition with titles like, Resident Evil 2, Tekken 3, FFVII, Twisted Metal, etc etc. Which is crazy considering how strong the N64 was.<p>It&#x27;s sad that Sega laid an egg, but the Saturn had it&#x27;s time and place.<p>I&#x27;m really looking forward to what the Series X can do with it&#x27;s project X-cloud. My feeling is that it&#x27;s going to move towards PC gaming--once your console can no longer play games natively, it will switch to pixel streaming.

The article misses the point entirely. It wasn&#x27;t about launching early, or not having enough games, or wait times.<p>It comes down to pricing.<p>In gaming, the same thing has always played out. The console that can deliver the best value wins.<p>$399 vs $299 is a huge difference. That&#x27;s the equivalent of $500 vs $750 today.<p>And don&#x27;t forget that this was a huge step up already from the $150-199 price point of Super Nintendo.<p>At the end of the day, when it comes to mass appeal, it isn&#x27;t the better technology that wins, but the one that combines the best price and performance, and people always underestimate that price is the bigger factor than performance.

As a teenager with a job, the cost wasn&#x27;t really an issue and the launch window meant there was plenty of time to save up the difference. What killed the Saturn for me and my circle of friends were the games.<p>I remember we rented a Saturn with all the games from Block Buster for like $50 for the weekend and were thoroughly unimpressed. Not long after, a Playstation popped up at Media Play (remember that store?) with demos you could play. I remember specifically going there multiple times to play Battle Arena Toshinden.