There’s a belief that you might see going around every now and again that simply will not die: that the Sega Saturn, which came out 30 years ago this month, failed because Sega was not aware that 3D videogames were going to be important during the 32-bit era. That they just weren’t prepared for what was coming. Only Sony knew of the true power of 3D, you see.
This whole thought process stems from the idea that, because the Saturn wasn’t quite as 3D-focused as the Playstation, that Sega just wasn’t aware that 3D was going to be The Future of Videogames. That the Saturn added additional 3D-strengthening hardware later in development only strengthened the resolve of these folks to be very wrong—why else would Sega need that, if they weren’t completely unprepared for the rise of 3D? So goes the thinking, anyway.
It’s all a bit silly, especially since we can see pretty clearly why the Saturn failed, without the need for going all conspiracy theory. You don’t need to invent issues with Sega’s processes where they didn’t exist, because Sega was plenty capable of doing that on their own. Here’s the quick version: the Saturn failed in North America because Sega of America decided to surprise launch the system in May of 1995 at E3 during their presentation, instead of in September of 1995—on Saturday, September 2, to be specific, a day nicknamed “Saturnday” so you are aware of the level of thought Sega had put into the launch date already—when, oh, every retailer and third-party developer and also a bunch of Sega’s own development partners and internal studios were going to be ready for the launch.
Because there were fewer consoles than expected available given the surprise launch, some retailers had to be left out entirely. Like KB Toys, a huge retailer from the era that had a couple thousand American locations at its peak, and oh, refused to carry any Saturn products for the life of the system following this launch snub. Not that there was much to stock at first, or later: there was Clockwork Knight, and a good but not amazing port of Daytona USA, the impressive but short Panzer Dragoon, a version of Virtua Fighter that received an updated re-release later on, and two sports games, Pebble Beach Golf Links and Worldwide Soccer: International Victory. This was the Saturn’s launch lineup in North America. And then there was nothing, at all, for two-and-a-half months later, until Bug! released, with more games coming in September at what was originally supposed to be the Saturn’s launch date.
Why did the Saturn fail in North America? There’s the above, and also that Sony got on stage at the same E3 that Sega surprise launched the Saturn at to say, “by the way, the Playstation will be $100 cheaper if you want to just wait a few more months.” The Playstation reportedly outsold the Saturn’s five-month totals in North America in mere days when it finally launched a week after the original Saturn release date. And then Sega of America didn’t release nearly as many games for the Saturn in their region as Sega of Japan did in theirs, and that third-party publishers ended up following suit to even more extreme degrees: while about 45% of Sega’s games from the era ended up in both Japan and North America by the end of the console’s life, just 253 of 1,028 total Saturn games came out in the latter. The market was smaller because of the lack of console sales, yes, but the lack of console sales continued because of the lack of games. There’s a reason the Saturn managed to finish ahead of the Nintendo 64 in Japan, despite the Dreamcast releasing in the region in 1998 and taking over as Sega’s primary vehicle from that point forward, and it’s because there were games to play and retailers to buy those games from.
Would there have been more games for the North American Saturn if Sega had paid more attention to the rise of 3D? Sega of America’s marketing was almost exclusively 3D-based, with COO and then-president Bernie Stolar—who had come over from Sony in 1997 after co-founding Sony Computer Entertainment America and helping it to an early lead in the region over Sega—focused heavily on things that were going to look impressive in a commercial. And the Saturn in Japan was the same hardware as America’s, just in a different color. Maybe the color of the system was the problem, then…
Anyway. Sega wasn’t surprised by the rise of 3D, which should be self-evident to anyone who has paid even a little attention to the company’s history. The Saturn was released in November of 1994 in Japan. Virtua Racing came out in August of 1992 in arcades, on Sega’s brand new Model 1 arcade board that had been designed exclusively with 3D in mind, and Virtua Racing was meant to be the project that would show off just how much better Sega’s tech was at that point than their rivals, Namco, who had released Winning Run in 1988. Virtua Racing used actual polygons—flat shaded polygons, yes, not textured, but true 3D, not pre-rendered to look that way and not faux. The Model 1 board was capable of rendering 180,000 polygons per second, compared to Namco’s System 21 board, the “Polygonizer,” used for Winning Run, which rendered 60,000 polygons per second. Development of this board began in 1988, when Sega was figuring out how to stay well ahead of the curve at home in the arcades. As Tom Petit, then an executive at Sega of America, told RePlay magazine in January of 1993:
About five or six years ago, we had a global strategy session for Sega as a company. In that room, we discussed entering the consumer business. We talked about the 8-bit unit and the 16-bit unit which became the Sega Genesis System, which as you know is leading the home game market. In that same discussion, we also knew that in bringing out a product like Genesis, we’d be taking a dramatic step forward in home game technology, one that would penetrate current parameters of coin-op technology. In fact, we would be growing the two markets closer together, instead of creating a separation in technology which is always desirable in coin-op. So at that meeting, we discussed what the next level of coin-op technology would be. We set out then to conceive and create our polygon hardware system, which has now come out on the market in the form of Virtua Racing. We initially commissioned a hardware development program that, honestly speaking, was going to be introduced about a year and a half ago. However, it takes more than one or two years to develop a system that generates 6,500 polygons. You’re dealing with a lot of leading-edge technology, including custom chips that didn’t exist and had to be designed.
In the late ‘80s, 16-bit arcade hardware was still dominating the scene, and it would take some more time for 32-bit technology and true 3D to take over. It was evident to Namco and Sega, at the least, that this was the direction things were heading in. Namco’s Galaxian3, with its untextured polygons shown on a massive theater screen, arrived in 1990, and while difficult to replicate in a more standard-sized arcade machine (well, standard for Galaxian3, anyway) Namco released revised versions of it. These things don’t happen overnight, however. Namco had begun their explorations into 3D-style gaming in earnest with Pole Position in 1982, which was in development concurrently with Sega’s Turbo, an early chase-cam racer, but in 2.5D rather than full faux 3D like Pole Position. Of course, Sega would get in on the faux 3D game themselves with their incredible run of super scaler titles, like OutRun, Hang-on and Super Hang-on, After Burner, Space Harrier, and Galaxy Force, and they’d attempt to get many of those working on the Master System and Genesis, as well. Obviously not in as enjoyable or impressive of a form as their arcade counterparts, but getting them in playable form at all was its own kind of achievement, considering the gap in the technology.
Sega’s Virtua Fighter was released in arcades in the fall of 1993, and was the first fighting game to feature fully 3D polygonal graphics—Capcom’s Street Fighter II had brought on the rise of fighting games less than two-and-a-half years earlier, on 16-bit hardware that was originally brought to arcades by Capcom in 1988. In that short of a time, Sega had brought Virtua Fighter to life in 3D, on the same Model 1 board that Virtua Racing ran on… and then they replaced the Model 1 with the more powerful Model 2 before 1993 ended, giving them the ability to make arcade games with texture-mapped polygons. Sega wasn’t aware of the potential of 3D and its importance to the future of videogames, however, we can all agree on that, yes?
Sega believed in the polygon and the need to give it textures so much that it partnered with literally GE Aerospace to get their hands on technology that military simulation developers utilized. And Sega even agreed to help them develop their own arcade games to keep the price for that kind of access low, low, low. They were throwing considerable weight behind 3D in the arcades, and that considerable weight wasn’t cheap—in fact, this is the moment where Sega and Namco diverged in their rivalry. Namco decided that, instead of an arms race that had become both figurative and literal with the introduction of a future Lockheed Martin acquisition, they would begin to develop their arcade games on hardware that was quite similar to what Sony put inside of the Playstation. It would be cheaper to develop for, make porting to the Playstation easier for Namco, and also let Sega be the ones investing time and energy and money into more and more powerful tech that outpaced the home market: there’s a reason that Namco stuck with Sony throughout the Playstation era, from its beginnings with a port of Ridge Racer through the first few Ace Combat games, into the first years of Tekken, and then to new, uncharted territory.
It’s true that Sega didn’t quite believe that homes would be ready for the kind of cutting-edge 3D they were working on and working toward, but this wasn’t an issue of not believing in the power of 3D. It was that the cost of competent 3D hardware had been out of reach for all but the most dedicated when Sega began this journey, and then in the hands of a military contractor only, and then… things changed. Sega had designed the Saturn with 3D in mind, but they had also assumed that 2D and the era of sprites would remain in place, that the 32-bit era would be one of transition, but not an instantaneous one. When they realized how 3D-focused the Playstation was going to end up being, and how quickly 3D hardware was evolving, the Saturn had another video display processor added in 1994, before launch.
It still wasn’t quite as powerful for 3D as the Playstation, but then again, the Playstation wasn’t as good at 2D. And it’s not as if the Saturn was at a disadvantage across the board, either. That it was designed to use its 2D capabilities to warp and morph 2D sprites into 3D graphics, as Chris Kohler put it in an interview with the developers of Panzer Dragoon at Kotaku, was a little odd, yes, but it helped home consoles get a workaround for the lack of textured polygons that, early on in the Saturn’s development, had been a clear issue. And it did have specific 3D-centric technology in it, as well, such as a graphics chip that could draw these huge 3D planes with textures that went all the way to the horizon—if you’ve played Panzer Dragoon, you already know what this was used for. The Playstation couldn’t do anything like that, for all its 3D capabilities, and would have to utilize some of its allotted on-screen polygons to do what this chip just allowed the Saturn to do without the same kind of associated cost. There was also the difference in creating graphics for water: the Playstation, being polygon-specific, could struggle with this in comparison to the Saturn, which was able to use raster scrolling and layers to draw what was, at the time, realistic water.
It’s worth pointing out, too, that what drove Sony to make the Playstation so 3D-focused in the first place was Sega’s own work in the arcades. Specifically, Virtua Fighter. So to say that Sega didn’t see the rise of 3D coming is to ignore Sony’s own take on the issue, which is that Sega drove the push to 3D in the industry, and Namco and Sony into each other’s arms, to try to overtake them in something of a two-front war. The console wars get all of the attention, but the arcades were still a real battleground at this point in the industry’s history, too, and the works of Namco and Sega impacted all of it from there for years. Geez, no wonder Sega shacked up with GE Aerospace, with all of these analogies flying around.
The only thing Sega was truly surprised by was the speed at which 3D became normalized in the home. Which isn’t exactly a Sega-specific miscalculation, either, but the industry—and customers—bought what the Playstation was selling, and 3D became the norm, basically to the detriment of 2D or any understanding of what made it still worthwhile in this era of 3D. There are a couple of reviews for the Saturn port of Taito’s RayForce, known as Layer Section, that haunt me, because the reviewers criticize that this 32-bit game with sprites that plays at roughly 1,000 mph with a zillion bullets on screen at once and detailed backgrounds—layers of backgrounds with layers of sprites in them, which you can interact with with your weaponry and they to you with theirs, hence the name of the port—was even on the Saturn to begin with. The implication being that it should have been on weaker hardware instead, where it would have made more sense, rather than being “severely outdated in terms of graphics and gameplay” or wondering if “Come on—be honest now—is this really the sort of game you coughed up £300 to play with your high-tech next generation gaming system?”
Layer Section was leveraging the power of the Saturn to create something that was absolutely impossible on 16-bit systems. Just like Linkle Liver Story leveled up the already impressive graphical output of developers Nextech, who were responsible for Ranger-X on the Genesis. Just like Radiant Silvergun maxed out the Saturn with an impossibly impressive-looking game that played even better—too bad for those of you who didn’t want to play a shoot ‘em up on your “high-tech next generation gaming system,” though, because you missed out on an all-timer that was only possible on the Saturn. (Please ignore that Radiant Silvergun was only released in Japan for the purposes of this decades-later dunk, even though this just brings us back to the earlier point about what actually caused the Saturn’s failure in North America, anyway.)
Sega might have miscalculated just how much 3D would dominate the market for the rest of the ‘90s as they plotted out the Saturn, but the thing here is that they managed something even more impressive than identifying that future. Sega, which admittedly was not known for its foresight or quality decision-making when it came to console hardware, saw much further into the future than Sony had. Whereas the Playstation built itself on the idea of a world of 3D, Sega saw how things would eventually turn out: a hybrid, a joining of 2D and 3D, where developers could choose to utilize whichever strengths they wanted, to make the game that they wanted, whether the concept powering it was brand new, or deigned to do something as low as build on the foundation of successful, old-school games, as Layer Section had. A fitting console for a different time, one that has more in common with the platforms of today than those it was competing against. The Saturn belonged in an era where past is present, and future, too, where the idea of “retro gaming” can be debated and argued as contrived when the lines are as blurred as they are today.
That’s not the era it was released in, however, so it became a commercial failure, especially in North America, where—well, you saw the list of egregious mistakes that piled on top of each other earlier. What could have been, if the environment was different, is something we can only guess at. What we do know, though, is that Sega was not taken aback by the intriguing potential of 3D videogames. And the next time you hear someone say that’s why the Saturn failed, you can just show them this article instead of engaging with them. Or go find a way to play Sega Saturn games. Both are pretty good uses of your time.
Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.
