What if SEGA waited to 1996 to launch Saturn

[gamegenie]

they saw how Nintendo was going for the 64-bit market with it's 64-bit RISC console they were about to unveil.

so

SEGA realizes they only built Saturn up to rival the PlayStation and decides to go a step further into Atari Jaguar territory and reprogram it's dual Hitachi 32-bit CPUs to read 64-bit instructions.

Then launch Saturn in Fall of 1996 as a "64-bit" CD system.

and even boast it's backward compatibility with with the 32X/Genesis (they decide at last minute to code a rom chip to emulate the missing Z80 CPU)



and another big What IF

Yuji Naka decides to revive the co-collaboration with SEGA STI on the next Sonic sequel following Sonic & Knuckles.

Build a new project called code name NeedleMouseLXIV

and on November 1996 the Genesis successor, Sega Saturn launches with the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 64, SONIC 64.


NINTENDO vs SEGA wars continue. :D



mean while PlayStation doesn't do as good as planned. With no rival launch in 1995, they revealed at E3 their console price tag of $399.

Which the 3DO company responds with a $349 price tag drop of their 3DO.

3DO and PlayStation battle out the 32-bit wars, but are quickly overlooked when Nintendo and SEGA releases their 64-bit platforms.




:| now why couldn't history been like that above ??/

[Iron Lizard]

I think it could have been 128 Bit and been able to do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs and it wouldn't have mattered.

I do think having Saturn day as planned would have helped though. I don't think it would have saved Sega but at least people would have known it existed.

All I think they needed was

-Lower Price
-Saturn Day
-No 32x
-Easier to program

[roundwars]

All I think they needed was

-Lower Price
-Saturn Day
-No 32x
-Easier to program

This was the ONLY one they needed. If the Saturn had had Playstation-like hardware they could have shrugged off the 32X debacle like it was nothing.

[Iron Lizard]

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sega even when they were kicking ass with the Genesis. They burned up a lot of credibility with the Sega CD and 32x. I don't the 32x could be so easily forgotten.

[roundwars]

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sega even when they were kicking ass with the Genesis. They burned up a lot of credibility with the Sega CD and 32x. I don't the 32x could be so easily forgotten.

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sony either:


I can visibly remember that the media pundits and the analysts and the retailers... To some degree, I think the world was betting against Sony at the time. It's easy to forget that at that time Sony was a huge underdog.

Now, people think of us as a leader in this category, and that's flattering, but at the time, again, we didn't have a pedigree in the games business. It was really the early days of Sony making the hardware parts of the company work together with the software parts of the company.

And I can vividly remember a front-page article in the New York Times business section that predicted that not only we wouldn't be successful, there wouldn't be another console at all that would be successful because PCs were going to be where gaming was going and, you know, console gaming was dead.

So, there was a lot of noise in the pre-PlayStation phase. Conventional wisdom was we weren't going to be successful, and "What does Sony know about competing with the mighty Nintendo and the mighty Sega?" Well, again, 15 years later, Nintendo's still here and Sega's still in business, but of course they got out of the hardware business, and the rest is history.

Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6122/birthday_memories_sony_.php?page=2

[sheath]

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sega even when they were kicking ass with the Genesis. They burned up a lot of credibility with the Sega CD and 32x. I don't the 32x could be so easily forgotten.

As near as I can tell, the first sentence is especially true in the US except in certain urban centers. My experience all over Texas, Missouri and Colorado is that retailers and consumers never thought much of Sega. I run into people who ever owned a Sega console very rarely, and almost all of them never heard of anything *but* the Genesis.

I think it is more true of consumers that when a product doesn't grab their interest they ignore it.

To gamegenie's alternative history idea, I honestly cannot think of a better situation in the US than to have the Saturn launch in mid-late 1996. I don't think it would have mattered if it had any hardware or software lineup changes. Just having a huge Saturn launch with all of those games people somehow missed in 1995 plus 1996's excellent lineup (http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/view/browse/notablegames?field_system_value_op=word&field_system_value=Saturn&title_op=contains&title=&field_year_value_op=between&field_year_value[value]=&field_year_value[min]=1995&field_year_value[max]=1996) would have been epic.

Having the 32X last with solid low cost software support from interested developers wouldn't have hurt anything either. Though that apparently gets me labeled a "blind fanboy" (a technical term only people smarter than you can utter you see) every other time I say it. ;)

[Iron Lizard]

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sony either:


This is true but its like walking into a bank and asking for a loan with no credit vs bad credit. Sony was an unknown but that did not stop sales one little bit. People loved Sony, it was cheaper, well advertised, its games were more appealing, and was easier to make games on. Sony was not brilliant by any means, Sega just got to big for their britches just like Nintendo had in the early 90's and stopped doing what they were good at. All Sony had to do was fill the gaps. It was depressing to watch. I was a hardcore Sega kid.

[cabear]

i remember saving up the cash to buy a psx when ti first came out. goddamn that was an incredible day. i bought ridge racer with it but returned it for battle arena toshinden. i can't even begin to describe the fun my brother and i had that day.

i bought the saturn late in it's life, probably around 1997. it came bundled with vf 2, virtua cop and daytona usa. i liked the games but it just didnt feel right, or have the same amount of fun that i had with the psx

[Aarzak]

Saturn hardware was already finalized some 6-9 months before Japanese launch; there was no turning back hardware-wise. SoJ was hell-bent on beating PS1 to the punch, launching Saturn in Japan with a scant launch window lineup of software (and an underwhelming port of VF1 which still sold like hotcakes), and of course the SoJ-influenced decision of launching Saturn in the U.S in May 1995, before U.S software devs had finished up their original launch lineup (for September 1995). Not to mention hastening the 32X's death......SoJ of course didn't give a damn about that console.

The simple architecture and promotional hooplah of the PS1 really made SoJ shit their pants.

[Christuserloeser]

It made SOA shit their pants as well... which is why Kalinske announced the earlier surprise launch for Saturn at the E3 in 1995.


He didn't sound as intimidated by Sony a few weeks earlier tho:

"Now, I can sit here and tell you today that no matter how great Saturn is, or PlayStation is, or Ultra 64 is, we will outsell them by an enormous amount with 32X -- simply because of the price."

Some mo' Kalinske quotes: http://www.defunctgames.com/shows.php?id=theysaidwhat-22

[sheath]

Why are all of these quotes so hard to find actual sources for? Most of them could be contextualized by the basic marketing principle of under-promise and over-deliver.

Granted Kalinske's public quotes are equivalent to today's corporate shill quotes. Yet he adequately continued Katz' Genesis regime, nearly saw the Sega CD hit mass market success, and accurately forecast the generational change sales wise.

You should know by now that I agree that Sega of America made mistakes. I would just like to document them as thoroughly as possible. For proper documentation, I need to see the real questions asked to Kalinske before he answered, and I need to see a real date at the least.

Kalinske seems to be one of the most responsive of the old SoA staff. Let's not destroy that.

[Da_Shocker]

It made SOA shit their pants as well... which is why Kalinske announced the earlier surprise launch for Saturn at the E3 in 1995.


He didn't sound as intimidated by Sony a few weeks earlier tho:

"Now, I can sit here and tell you today that no matter how great Saturn is, or PlayStation is, or Ultra 64 is, we will outsell them by an enormous amount with 32X -- simply because of the price."

Some mo' Kalinske quotes: http://www.defunctgames.com/shows.php?id=theysaidwhat-22

Well that sounds good in theory but when you look at the 32X games compared to everything else they looked 299-399 dollars better than those cheap lookin 32X games.

[Aarzak]

I believe Kalinske commented on the early launch and the mandate by SoJ to can development on all non-Saturn Sega consoles as being bad ideas in retrospect. At the time (1994-1995), he may have just been towing the company line but not really agreeing with what he was saying. SoJ grabbed SoA by their balls and pretty much forced them to release Saturn early, did they not?

[kool kitty89]

Well that sounds good in theory but when you look at the 32X games compared to everything else they looked 299-399 dollars better than those cheap lookin 32X games.
Yeah, but the 32x could have pushed way further than it did: hell there isn't even any 4 MB games on it and no CD games beyond FMV.
And while I'm not a proponent of the 32x's release in general (without specific context), I definitely think it could have offered reasonable competition with early generation PSX and Saturn stuff, let alone 3DO or Jaguar. (polygonal jaguar games at least... get into some other rendering methods or effects and you're in a different ball game -32x Doom was never going to be as good as jaguar Doom and Jaguar Doom was about as rushed as the 32x as it was -but with a full 4MB of ROM and much more RAM to open things up in the system even if some other bottlenecks were worse than the 32x).

The sound could have jumped to about 8x better once they got DMA working (and that's for cart games, so not counting CD users), and it was canceled only a few months before some of the really promising games could have come out. (Amok seems to have been among them -and a prototype of that seems to be in the Lemon 32x demo video)






they saw how Nintendo was going for the 64-bit market with it's 64-bit RISC console they were about to unveil.
That wouldn't have been it... the PSX alone would have been far more threatening given the general performance (even real world, let alone the massive PR tweaked specs) and multimedia capabilities as well as the high-level programming environment supported. (not sure when the latter would have become known)

That and being 64-bit has nothing to do with anything. The N64 would have worked about just as well (and likely been cheaper to make) had it been fully 32-bit, and as it is the CPU ran in 32-bit mode most of the time in most games. (there actually was a high performance 32-bit MIPS derivative available as well in the R3900, but the chipset had been designed around the R4000 architecture starting in 1993, and the "64-bit" marketing angle was a strong point -albeit the RSP alone would be enough for such a marketing gimick -and technically the R3900 was about as 64-bit as the R4300 except the R4300 did offer the full 64-bit address mode while the 3900 was locked into 32-bit mode and saved 32 pins on the package -again the N64 usually ran in 32-bit address mode anyway and even that was really overkill for what it needed)

Plus, if SoJ had't been exceptionally impressed by the SGI chipset when they saw it in early/mid 1993, why would they be worried about Nintendo picking it up just a couple months later? (or perhaps they had been impressed, but as some accounts imply, it was more a matter of questionable cost effectiveness -something the N64 obviously had a lot of work put into to optimize -especially the single bus and narrow width RAM configuration)




SEGA realizes they only built Saturn up to rival the PlayStation and decides to go a step further into Atari Jaguar territory and reprogram it's dual Hitachi 32-bit CPUs to read 64-bit instructions.
That's crazy and totally incorrect. The Dreamcast has a 32-bit CPU in any case and if they jumped to the SH3 for an updated Saturn (the next step up and fairly close to the N64's R4300 I believe) And in terms of system bus the Dreamcast is 64-bit like the GC though the Xbox is 128 bit. (with a 32-bit CPU -but 128-bit DMA to a dual channel DDR bus)

And in terms of instructions, the CPU core of the SH1, SH2, SH3, and SH4 use purely 16-bit length instructions. They can all do 32-bit operations and have 32-bit ALUs, but the ISA is fully 16-bit. (unlike the fully 32-bit ARM and MIPS CPUs of the time or CISC CPUs with variable word length -the 68000 in the Genesis has 8 16 and 32-bit instructions I believe and a 32-bit address model, but is considered 16-bit due to the ALU -the data bus is also 16-bit but given the 386SX is considered 32-bit and the 8088 and 65816 are considered 16-bit, that's not a factor for the CPU bitness as such)

The Jaguar has no 64-bit CPU at all, but it does use a 64-bit system bus and 3 graphics coprocessors with 64-bit DMA (blitter, object processor, and the RISC GPU which is actually a 32-bit architecture with a 32-bit ALU though it does feature some 64-bit instructions and all 64-bit registers -like the 68000 is all 32-bit registers- and is flexible enough to serve as a CPU though it's rather inefficient at that -way better than the 68k's configuration in the Jag unfortunately)
The 32x uses 16-bit buses only, so it's 16-bit in the sense the jag is 32-bit, likewise the SNES uses only 8-bit buses (not sure about the VDP) and the N64 uses a shared 32-bit bus for the RSP and CPU.

"Bittness" is a rather worthless marketing term and it's a damn shame that NEC's marketing wasn't smart enough to dispel that myth by 1990. The Channel F, RCA Studio 2, and VCS are just as 8-bit as the NES and SMS and from a CPU standpoint also as 8-bit as the PCE/TG-16 while the SNES's CPU is no more 16-bit than the Intellivision's. :p (IV's CPU is 10-bit externally vs 8-bit for the NES, but fully 16-bit internally)



and even boast it's backward compatibility with with the 32X/Genesis (they decide at last minute to code a rom chip to emulate the missing Z80 CPU)
You need WAY more hardware to make it backwards compatible, emulation would not be an option. Remember though that by 1995 or maybe '96 Sega had a single chip genesis.
And 32x compatibility would be a no-go without a compatible VDP and dual SH2s, let alone the Sega CD.

So going forward from the Saturn, you'd have no compatibility at all.


Really though, in the context of halting the Saturn's design and moving to a more advanced one it's would likely be very attractive to use as much of the Saturn's hardware as possible given how far along it was and remove that which was unnecessary:
looking at the Saturn they could easily drop the audio DSP (pretty much never used) swap the SH1 for a much cheaper MCU and use slower/cheaper DRAM for the CD-ROM cache rather than SDRAM (possibly less RAM too -512 kB was pretty massive compared to the 32k on the PSX and 3DO), you could probably drop the geometry DSP as well if you supplied enough CPU resouce to mitigate that, possibly drop the 68k and dedicated audio RAM (again depending on total CPU resource) and drop the SH2s in favor of a single SH3 at perhaps 60 MHz with fully SDRAM. (the lower end of the range with 100 MHz being high-end)
Then take VDP1 and VDP2, consolidate them, buffer VDP1's texture mapping capabilities and probably add a texture cache plus a general unified cache for the VDPs and perhaps 64-bit DMA (you'd get the 64-bit gimick too) and in any case buffer to allow the SDRAM to run at or near full speed (at least 66 MHz -but goign to what was convenient based on the system clock, though if it was 10 ns SDRAM and not 15 ns they could bump it up considerably to up to 100 MHz).
In fact, perhaps consolidate the RAM into a unified 4 MB block shared by the VDPs and CPU with enough caching and buffering to do so efficiently. Add hardware triangle rasterization if practical within time constraints and maybe a Z buffer, perspective correct rendering, or bilinear filtering. Whatever the CPU was clocked at would likely be the system bus speed and if the SH3 has 64-bit DMA (like the SH4, Pentium, Power PC, etc) going to a unified 64-bit bus could have been very attractive, otherwise sticking to 32-bit and engineering accordingly could be OK. (if you aimed at sticking to the ~28.6 MHz system speed used, a 60 MHz rated SH3 would probably be at ~57.3 MHz and at 64-bits that would give ~458 MB/s which is more than triple the bandwidth of the PSX's main and video buses and 4x the speed of the fastest buses in the Saturn -but all shared of course, not dedicated -so like the N64, Jaguar, Xbox, 360, etc)

A single bus design would really cut-down on cost and the SH3 should have been powerful enough to fill the gap for the omitted hardware (audio coprocessing and the geometry DSP -albeit the Saturn normally used the CPUs for that anyway) if the SH3 had an onboard FPU that would definitely make it attractive for handling the vertex calculations too. It woudl also be useful for other software rendering effects and rather capable video decoding. (I wonder if it would have been enough for software MPEG-1 decoding -I think even the Saturn managed that, but not full VCD quality)
Maybe bump the CD drive up to 3x or 4x as well.

And of course they'd need to invest in at least decent high-level programming support as well as detailed low-level access.



mean while PlayStation doesn't do as good as planned. With no rival launch in 1995, they revealed at E3 their console price tag of $399.
Which the 3DO company responds with a $349 price tag drop of their 3DO.
That's a very broad guess, but given the Saturn launched at roughly $450 in Japan and the PSX launched at roughly $400 as well, it probably would have been $350 tops in the US, and 3DO seemed to match prices not undercut them given the $400 price drop about the time the Saturn came out.
The PSX didn't start selling really big until mid 1996 in any case and they dropped their price months after Sega dropped to $300 in September of '95. (Nintendo had promoted a $250 N64 launch price that dropped to $200 to match Sony)

In any case, the same thing could have been accomplished with the historical Saturn by not revealing the true launch price until later, and perhaps even announcing a vaguely high figure to throw competition off and not reveal the real price until a couple weeks prior to the September launch.



3DO and PlayStation battle out the 32-bit wars, but are quickly overlooked when Nintendo and SEGA releases their 64-bit platforms.

I'm sure Sony would have figured a way around that with good marketing. They probably could have broken the BS bittness "benchmark" that had persisted too long as it was. Still the performance would have been less in some areas (more the Super Saturn than the N64 depending on just what the former could do -and the latter was artificially limited by use of carts and restricted support for RSP microcoding -but there's also the CPU access latency issue -PSX generally had higher res textures and higher polygon count by a good margin while the N64 had filtering, perspective correction, hardware z-buffering, reflection effects, etc)


now why couldn't history been like that above ??/
Because SoJ wanted the Saturn out ASAP and they may have even delayed it a good deal longer than desired. (there's some claims that they'd really wanted a successor to the MD out by late 1993)
That and they thought beating Sony to market was their only chance to get a lead on them. (though it had the opposite effect)

[Da_Shocker]

Kool Kitty see here http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?p=307356#post307356

ANd why is this in the Genesis forums anyways?

[16bitter]

Why are all of these quotes so hard to find actual sources for?

That Kalinske quote comes from Next Generation magazine in early 95.

[Mordan]

i remember saving up the cash to buy a psx when ti first came out. goddamn that was an incredible day. i bought ridge racer with it but returned it for battle arena toshinden. i can't even begin to describe the fun my brother and i had that day.


How could you have fun with PSX game pads? They are the reason I never bothered about Playstations.

[Christuserloeser]

Have you seen the Western Saturn pads ?

http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/detail/saturn.jpg

There has never been a mainstream video game console with a controller as phenomenally shitty as this one. This is the worst controller ever made for a mainstream video game system.

[Da_Shocker]

Have you seen the Western Saturn pads ?

http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/detail/saturn.jpg

There has never been a mainstream video game console with a controller as phenomenally shitty as this one. This is the worst controller ever made for a mainstream video game system.

Try playing SF with these controllers. Now while this controller wasn't great it wasn't as bad a people try and make it out to be.

http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/detail/psx_a.jpg

http://www.gaminggenerations.com/store/images/xbox_duke_controller.jpg

http://media.arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.media/n64-controller.jpg

[cabear]

the psx controllers i could rock the shit out of anyone in a fighting game for some reason. the saturn controllers... well they sucked. the japan versions are sooo much better.

[gamegenie]

Have you seen the Western Saturn pads ?

http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/detail/saturn.jpg

There has never been a mainstream video game console with a controller as phenomenally shitty as this one. This is the worst controller ever made for a mainstream video game system.

that controller is rock solid. There were far shittier controllers from other brands if you want to talk about crappy. N64, Jaguar were horrid, and the PS controller isnt that great for games like MK and SF.

SEGA 6-button pad has been the choice of fighting games for like forever.

It is why companies still make 6-button SEGA inspired controllers for 360/PS3 for fighting games.

[kool kitty89]

that controller is rock solid. There were far shittier controllers from other brands if you want to talk about crappy. N64, Jaguar were horrid, and the PS controller isnt that great for games like MK and SF.

SEGA 6-button pad has been the choice of fighting games for like forever.

It is why companies still make 6-button SEGA inspired controllers for 360/PS3 for fighting games.
There's nothing functionally wrong with the N64 or Jaguar pads, especially the jaguar pads. (many N64 pads seem to have had problems with the stick's springs wearing out though I've not had that really for the 11+ years of used mine have gotten -a bit loose, but no worse than the GC, PSX, Xbox, etc tend to get) The Jag pad is fine other than the lack of needed butts for some games. (the pro controller addressed that -and the keypad left tons more potential for porting certain PC titles that otherwise were limited)





Try playing SF with these controllers. Now while this controller wasn't great it wasn't as bad a people try and make it out to be.
Hmm, the N64 pad should be pretty good, at least better than the SNES by a significant margin: the 6 face buttons (A+B+C) aren't as good as the Genesis/satuturn, but at least they're there and quite usable (especially a and b) vs using shoulder buttons on the SNES (and the N64's triggers are far more usable too).
The D-pad may be similar to the SNES, but is also superior due to the more raised surface, more concave molding around it, and better feel in general.
If the N64 had actually gotten some good fighting game ports to exploit that, I doubt people would be claiming some of these things. (it's almost certainly the best stock Nintendo controller ever made for fighting games) The N64 actually should have been well suited to 2-D fighters as well with the large block of unified RAM and use of ROM for fast updates (let alone the expansion pak) and even using the standard fast 3D microcode it had quite decent 2D performance. (the "turbo 3D" cose sounds liek it would be much more well suited for 2D given it supposedly speeds up rendering by about 6x while omitting certain 3D effects -presumably Z-buffering, filtering, perspective correction, mipmapping, reflection, and such- making it more liek a faster PSX GPU, but the description is vague; of course a proper 2D opimized RSP code would be preferable in general)

[mick_aka]

I've always found the Jaguar pad really nice to hold, ten billion useless buttons aside I think it's actually a pretty nice design.

One of the few console pads that doesn't favor people with tiny effeminate hands.

[Christuserloeser]

that controller is rock solid. There were far shittier controllers from other brands if you want to talk about crappy. N64, Jaguar were horrid, and the PS controller isnt that great for games like MK and SF.

SEGA 6-button pad has been the choice of fighting games for like forever.

It is why companies still make 6-button SEGA inspired controllers for 360/PS3 for fighting games.

You are talking about the original Saturn controller as released in Japan:

http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/detail/saturn_a.jpg

That controller is rock solid indeed.

[sheath]

You are talking about the original Saturn controller as released in Japan:

http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/detail/saturn_a.jpg

That controller is rock solid indeed.

Best-controller-ever.

[mick_aka]

Best controllers ever IMHO both are fantastic:

http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/detail/saturn_a.jpg

http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/detail/genesisb.jpg

[Greg2600]

I think SEGA would have still found ways to shoot themselves in the foot, regardless when the Saturn was released. They were the 16-bit era's Atari. They had this great brand recognition and just always seemed to make stupid decisions. I stand by the belief that they turned off a lot of buyers with the failed SegaCD and 32X platforms. Both were expensive and both saw Sega release a mostly forgettable library that they failed to support after a year. Then here comes the Saturn, again highly priced. Clearly their stupidity resulted in pissing off 3rd party developers like EA and big retailers with that early launch date. That effectively killed the system right there. Still, launch titles didn't explain how the Playstation outsold the Saturn in a few days what SEGA sold in several months. No, people were excited about Sony's entry and they were tired/fed up with buying from SEGA.

[old man]

They shouldn't have bought into the 3d hype so much. People didn't stop liking 2d games just because the machines could do 3d. When that first run of 3d stuff came out I thought they looked like crap. I stuck with 16bit stuff until the N64 came out, and I didn't get a Playstation until FF7, Castlevania SOTN, and Metal Gear Solid were released. It wasn't until late in the Saturns' life that I got started getting interested in the Saturn as people were getting better with the hardware, and some better stuff from japan was getting ported. The price was a big turn-off as well. There was no way I was going to spend $400 dollars on a system that didn't offer anything more than the other two. Then Sega went and canceled the system, and that was the end of that. Of course, Sega completely ignoring their popular franchises (Sonic, Phatasy Star, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, etc.) didn't help things. It's mind boggling to me why know one thought to release a port of Golden Axe: Death Adders Revenge with the system. Talk about out of touch with your core user.

[sheath]

Best controllers ever IMHO both are fantastic:

saturn_a.jpg

genesisb.jpg

You're right, I actually prefer the Genesis 6 button (original) to the Saturn pad. I can use the Saturn pad in emulation and it just doesn't feel right for Genesis games to me. Of course the Saturn pad's shoulder buttons are the first time I ever liked shoulder buttons on a game pad, and they do add significantly to Saturn games in particular.

[kool kitty89]

You're right, I actually prefer the Genesis 6 button (original) to the Saturn pad. I can use the Saturn pad in emulation and it just doesn't feel right for Genesis games to me. Of course the Saturn pad's shoulder buttons are the first time I ever liked shoulder buttons on a game pad, and they do add significantly to Saturn games in particular.

I like the genny 6-button better too, though I'm not sure if they could have managed triggers that worked as well with that shape.
I still prefer the 3 button for 3 button games though. (both are great... unless you get into some of the crappy revisions)



You are talking about the original Saturn controller as released in Japan:


That controller is rock solid indeed.
No, he's clearly referring to the US model 1 Saturn controller... unless you were being sardonic. :p

[kool kitty89]

I think SEGA would have still found ways to shoot themselves in the foot, regardless when the Saturn was released. They were the 16-bit era's Atari. They had this great brand recognition and just always seemed to make stupid decisions. I stand by the belief that they turned off a lot of buyers with the failed SegaCD and 32X platforms. Both were expensive and both saw Sega release a mostly forgettable library that they failed to support after a year. Then here comes the Saturn, again highly priced. Clearly their stupidity resulted in pissing off 3rd party developers like EA and big retailers with that early launch date. That effectively killed the system right there. Still, launch titles didn't explain how the Playstation outsold the Saturn in a few days what SEGA sold in several months. No, people were excited about Sony's entry and they were tired/fed up with buying from SEGA.
Umm, the problems Sega and Atari hard were somewhat of similar cause:
Atari had problems due to dual management from Atari and Warner and bureaucratic red tape, but especially distribution problems. (especially inflated demand/sales figures)

The 5200, ET, Pac Man, etc were really symptoms of the conflicting management and distribution issues and overlying problems throughout the industry. (in fact Ray Kassar of Atari explicitly rejected ET when Universal asked too much money for the license but Warner then went over his head and did an inside deal with Spielberg for several million dollars and Spielberg's condition that the game HAD to be released by Christmas -albeit the contemporary Atari 8-bit computer game "ET Phone Home" was just as rushed but considerably better -I'm not sure if that made it to the 5200 or not)

By late 1983 James Morgan became president and was working hard to reform Atari and things were looking extremely promising up to the point where Warner haphazardly broke up and sold Atari in 1884 with the consumer properties becoming part of Trammel Technologies LTD. (renamed Atari Corp) Atari Corp's budget was much smaller and the staff was cut way back (especially the game programmers who were not hired at all) But Warner's random and sloppy management of the sale screwed a lot of things up.

Atari Inc then died (living on as a corporate shell for legal reasons) while TTL (renamed Atari Corp) continued to support their products, but it was a totally different company. And unlike common myth, Tramil was very intersted in continued support of Video games (he needed them to support the company), but it was a conflict with Warner (over ownership and the partnership with GCC)) that delayed the 7800 from continuing its launch and a general lack of funding that limited things thereafter.

And of course you had Commodore toppling the (already unstable) video game industry in 1983 with their price war. (not unlike what happened with Sony on the mid 90s in some respects, but very different in others -most similar due to the price war and vertical integration)

Atari very well could have continued being the market leader in spite of the crash had Warner not panicked, though the crash could have been avoided had Atari started reforming 6 months to a year sooner and/or the computer price war not occurred when it did.

The brand name was a big part of how the managed to sell so many 2600s and 7800s (and established the niche with the ST) in the late 80s and a very limited marketing budget with relatively few new games. (double the market share of Sega in North America, or more so, mostly with the 2600 but an additional 3.77 million 7800s in the US alone)


Sega had dual management issues as well and compounded with culture clash and conflicts of interest. Then there were external issues driving many other problems. (North American market slump from '93 to '97, Jaguar, 3DO, PSX, etc -in Japan you had Nintendo and NEC driving other things as well and general regional conflicts of interest)
Conflicts of interest and international markets were things that Atari didn't deal with as much, though more so for the latter (ET is an obvious example of conflicting interests), but the foreign market was something Atari generally missed out on (screwed up their chance for the 8-bit computer market in Europe and the console market in Japan by not releasing the 2600 until 1983 as the 2800 AFTER the SG-1000 and Famicom...)


The conflicts of interest were almost certainly the biggest issues Sega dealt with in general and intertwined with the complexity of dual management. Sony's presence on the market severely exacerbated those problems and more or less prevented reasonable recovery or compromise of the problems.

Nintendo, of course had different problems entirely and considerably different business practices.






They shouldn't have bought into the 3d hype so much. People didn't stop liking 2d games just because the machines could do 3d. When that first run of 3d stuff came out I thought they looked like crap. I stuck with 16bit stuff until the N64 came out, and I didn't get a Playstation until FF7, Castlevania SOTN, and Metal Gear Solid were released. It wasn't until late in the Saturns' life that I got started getting interested in the Saturn as people were getting better with the hardware, and some better stuff from japan was getting ported. The price was a big turn-off as well. There was no way I was going to spend $400 dollars on a system that didn't offer anything more than the other two. Then Sega went and canceled the system, and that was the end of that. Of course, Sega completely ignoring their popular franchises (Sonic, Phatasy Star, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, etc.) didn't help things. It's mind boggling to me why know one thought to release a port of Golden Axe: Death Adders Revenge with the system. Talk about out of touch with your core user.
That's just it: if people wanted 2D they stuck more to where cost was low with the 16-bit consoles:
With the nextgen hardware for the money being paid in most cases, they expected nextgen games: ie polygons or advanced pseudo 3D (like Doom, Duke 3D or Amok).

3D was coming one way or another and 2D would have been expected, but only for niche things like arcade ports and a few exclusive games, but mainly 3D. (and any 2D had better be stunning or at least inexpensive)

Sony pushed that further, but that was hardly the main route: if anything they pushed POLYGONS over other forms of "3D" that could have continued emerging (ray casting based height maps and voxel engines combined with scaling "sprites" and polygons), but not 2D over 3D in general.

Thinking otherwise is as unrealistic.


And most of all, "before the N64" was before the 5th gen consoles were even in the mass market: they were pretty mcuh the high-end niche while 16-bit ruled until mid/late '96 and the N64 took off right away and the PSX took off at the same time and even the Saturn's popularity increased significantly. (but market share plummeted due to the drastic rise of competition -in the US/NA at least... in other regions the N64 didn't rise quickly at all)

[Christuserloeser]

No, I agree with old man: We wanted more 2D games for Saturn.

[sheath]

I know I wanted more 2D games with that entire generation. There were only a few genres that I felt needed 3D (racers, flight sims, adventure and isometric games, and overhead shooters) , and the rest could have exploded within the limitations of this generation's 2D or even 2.5D capabilities.

As things are, most genres were not even attempted after 1995, and those that were were summarily rejected by the masses. This was, in fact, the beginning of my distrust of mass media and the mass market in general. Meanwhile the much vaunted Loaded on PS1 is considered an early high quality title, while Shinobi Legions, Astal, and even Guardian Heroes are forgotten by the masses.

There is Symphony of the Night to Tide us all over though, if we only play what "everybody" thinks is fun I mean.

[kool kitty89]

No, I agree with old man: We wanted more 2D games for Saturn.
"we" as in a niche segment of the market which made up a few million users, or "we" as in the vast majority of the worldwide market?

We've been through this before and I never argued there wasn't a niche, but the masses wanted 3D and that wasn't going to change.

Look at the sort of games that were being pushed even before the PSX became a truly massive driving force for the whole industry. (ie up to mid 1996)
PC games were the first to really push "advanced" 3D (ie fairly high polygon counts and reasonable framerates or alternate rendering methods like ray-casting and voxels -Doom, Duke 3D, Wolf3D, Comanche, etc)
And look at the arcades.

And even the big-time, well reviewed 2D games of the 5th gen ended up being relatively niche or cult status titles like with Symphony of the Night. (Yoshi's Story was pretty popular, but that was often seen as "2.5D" in any case due to the occasional 3D cutscenes and some added in-game effects, but mainly due to the prerendered 3D models used for the graphics... that and it had a big name franshise tied to it so it was inflated just like the Sonic Spin-offs if not more so)




I know I wanted more 2D games with that entire generation. There were only a few genres that I felt needed 3D (racers, flight sims, adventure and isometric games, and overhead shooters) , and the rest could have exploded within the limitations of this generation's 2D or even 2.5D capabilities.
You had more than that: on-rails light gun games, flying/vehicular railshooters, and then you had 3D platformers were huge and among the biggest killer apps of the generation and FPSs emerging as a major genre as well also becomign killer apps. (Doom, Quake, Quake II, Goldeneye, etc)

Unless with "2.5D" you meant pseudo 3D with general use of advanced ray-casting based height maps (including voxels) in which case, yeah that's very significant. (but those would be best with polygons mixed in as well, but many, many fewer)

Graphic adventure games didn't benefit so strongly from 3D, but they did from multimedia with large, detailed still and animated stuff possible that wasn't before, and then you had 3D intermixing with that later. (Grim Fandango took the "few polygons over detailed prerendered/animated background" approach, but before that the top adventure games tended to be purely streaming/buffered multimedia/2D based)


As things are, most genres were not even attempted after 1995, and those that were were summarily rejected by the masses. This was, in fact, the beginning of my distrust of mass media and the mass market in general. Meanwhile the much vaunted Loaded on PS1 is considered an early high quality title, while Shinobi Legions, Astal, and even Guardian Heroes are forgotten by the masses.
Huh? After 1995 is when 3D really got mainstream... it was '96/97 that it really hit across the board. In 1995 you still had 2D quite strong with lingering into '96 but a shift that had been growing alongside multimedia from the beginning of the 90s.
And even in '95 with the nextgen consoles it was expected that even with a fair amount of 2D (that had better blow away what was on last gen systems) that 3D would be THE thing to come and the industry had been pushing for it for several years by then. (be it computers, a limited extent on 16-bit consoles -some even on 8-bit, mostly pseudo but a few cases of real 3D- and then you had consoles specifically aimed at 3D capabilities in general with the 3DO and Jaguar and following from there -and parallel to that you had 3D arcade systems pushing more and more form the Hard Drivin' board in '88 to Namco's System 21, Sega's model 1, Sega's Model 2, Namco's System 22, etc)

And many people had been getting tired of the same sidescrolling/platforming game mechanics... better looking incarnations of the same things weren't going to change that and many were ready for a more drastic change in style of gameplay (unless they'd already shifted to PC gaming or done both). Or that is at least many current gen non-budget gamers who'd had 16-bit systems for several years and were ready for something new vs others who had just gotten 16-bit systems or were still yet to get them. (we didn't get an SNES until '96 and it was NES up to then... and PC)

Others have compared it to the early 80s games with a huge amount of simple arcade style pick up and play games and especially a ton of space shooters and then sidescrolling platformers, beat em' ups, and more advanced shmups came roaring in with the late 80s and changed things.
Were there still some simpler arcade style games (including some older ports), yes, and were there many who wanted those kinds of games: yes, were there those who enjoyed Mario Bros and Galaga more than Super Mario Bros? Yes, but were those niche users? Most definitely. ;)

3D and pseudo 3D stuff was more niche (especially true 3D) up into the early 90s, but you had people who dug into those games to a huge extent even then... and you had genres that hugely benefited from 3D (or advanced pseudo 3D), or others which couldn't exist at all without 3D. (3D platformers were a new genre entirely)


The retro community in general is going to be biased to 2D for the most part sheerly due to the fact that many stick to retro because they don't like the newer games in general or have their favored genres peak on older systems... yet among those there are people who can't stand the simpler 70s/80s arcade games and others (especially those who love the simple arcade games) who can't stand some of the newer "advanced" 2D games from the 90s in general... and even some who skipped over those to 3D. (or some who never got really interested beyond the simpler arcade style games of any generation)

Now I know I don't fit that profile at all, but my interest in retro is a bit different as well... but that doesn't even matter in my comparison as I wasn't speaking personally, but from the mass market perspective of the time.