16bitter
08-08-2005, 04:43 PM
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3142283&did=1
If you know Sega, you most likely are familar with all this. Still, it's fascinating to consider how badly Sega fumbled nearly everything to do with the system. And this again gets back to what I originally remember: Sega of Japan, as dumb as they were, didn't come up with the idiotic surprise launch as retrospectives now claim in making them the devil and Kalinske their victim. No, it was Kalinske himself. His excuse that it would have been worse later doesn't fly with me: I think that if the Saturn would have been released at the same time as PS with the extra software it was sorely lacking upon the surprise release, it would have given the consumer at the least the perception of parity. And what is more important in marketing?
I get the feeling Kalinske's own dislike for the system -- as was the case with the whole of Sega of America -- helped to doom it in that he had absolutely no respect for the hardware and therefore no confidence in it. As a sidenote, creating the 32X was one stupid move by the American side of the company, and it was even dumber of Sega of Japan to allow its creation from a market standpoint. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
Kalinske may be responsible for what our beloved Genesis became, but he probably deserves quite a bit of blame for destroying its successor. Though Bernie Stolar was one pathetic replacement in ways (check out the Working Designs sidebar), his launch of Dreamcast was what the Saturn's launch should have been 4 years earlier.
If you know Sega, you most likely are familar with all this. Still, it's fascinating to consider how badly Sega fumbled nearly everything to do with the system. And this again gets back to what I originally remember: Sega of Japan, as dumb as they were, didn't come up with the idiotic surprise launch as retrospectives now claim in making them the devil and Kalinske their victim. No, it was Kalinske himself. His excuse that it would have been worse later doesn't fly with me: I think that if the Saturn would have been released at the same time as PS with the extra software it was sorely lacking upon the surprise release, it would have given the consumer at the least the perception of parity. And what is more important in marketing?
I get the feeling Kalinske's own dislike for the system -- as was the case with the whole of Sega of America -- helped to doom it in that he had absolutely no respect for the hardware and therefore no confidence in it. As a sidenote, creating the 32X was one stupid move by the American side of the company, and it was even dumber of Sega of Japan to allow its creation from a market standpoint. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
Kalinske may be responsible for what our beloved Genesis became, but he probably deserves quite a bit of blame for destroying its successor. Though Bernie Stolar was one pathetic replacement in ways (check out the Working Designs sidebar), his launch of Dreamcast was what the Saturn's launch should have been 4 years earlier.