It's summer 1996. How can the USA Sega Saturn become successful?

[Tanooki]

Well as I recall reading, when the clueless Japanese office caught wind of the ads they weren't too pleased and eventually fired the group considering them both angry and dishonorable since they amounted at first to angry, then later to lies and misdirection. Even as a teenager the ads made me furious, not just them but other companies, this isn't a NIntendo fanboy thing to be clear. I've taken a stance for years now when people do blatantly lie to sell their goods I refuse to buy them. I swore off Sega and didn't even own their stuff until the very late 90s because of it with the Dreamcast. Sony with all the strong arm tactics and combative rudeness in the press towards both Nintendo and Sega to keep just twisting the knife stopped me from owning anything of theirs console wise until 2001 when I got a PS2 at Midway and shortly after in 02 I got a PSOne+LCD combo system too. I don't 100% block out bastard behavior, but when they stop and prove they can be less douchy I'll come around. With Nintendo and Play it Loud, I hated those ads, I got the point but I hated 90s hip crap advertising so I didn't buy any of their play it loud systems, and the games were mostly ignored too, but I mean most of the stuff had it branded on the cardboard anyway which was annoying even if they weren't really part of that offensive stupidity campaign.

[Jorpho]

I don't really have a personal bias with Nintendo anymore, in the 80s and 90s sure, but not now.

wat the actual i can't even

...Wait, you're using some weird definition of "personal bias", aren't you?

[TonyTheTiger]

Don't let your personal bias towards Nintendo blind you to what really happened. Sega pretty much screwed themselves over by releasing the Sega CD and 32X in North America. The Mega-CD became a necessity in Japan, because of the popularity of NEC's PC-Engine and it's CD add-on in Japan. The Mega-Drive was a distant 3rd in Japan and Sega had hoped that the introduction of the Mega-CD would help gain some ground there. The introduction of the Sega-CD slowed down the momentum that Sega had built with the Genesis and the 32X pretty much killed it all together. It would have made more sense for the Genesis to have been just the console, with a slow progression towards the Saturn, than having the confusing add-ons they had brought with the Sega CD and 32X. The momentum that SOA had created with the Genesis was pretty much killed with the introduction of those add-on devices.

Eh, the Sega CD didn't do much damage. If anything people were just generally apathetic about it. It didn't come out late enough to encroach on the Saturn. But the key issue was that, even during it's heyday, Sega never quite figured out the home console market. Sega was primarily an arcade game manufacturer that got lucky for a brief period in the 90s thanks to some very fortuitous circumstances. A lot of people forget that the Genesis had a completely different personality for the first couple years of its lifespan. It was marketed in the same way the Neo Geo eventually would be. As a means of playing "real" arcade games in your home. Golden Axe and Altered Beast were set up to be its system sellers but that didn't really cut it. People were still happy with the NES. It wasn't until Sega switched gears and picked a fight with the Super Nintendo with Sonic the Hedgehog and Mortal Kombat that the Genesis hit its stride. The company was always struggling with mismanagement and its stream-of-consciousness "put to market whatever random idea we had this weekend" behavior eventually caught up with it. And the straight up antagonistic relationship the American and Japanese branches had going for years made it effectively impossible for any unified "voice" to exist within the company.

People love to talk about how great the Saturn did in Japan but let's be real here. It only did halfway decent because Nintendo made some questionable choices of their own with the N64. The Saturn did okay in Japan. It was hardly a phenomenon. So what's really the question here? Is it "what could Sega have done to make the Saturn perform as satisfactory in the U.S. as it did in Japan" or is it "what could Sega have done to make the Saturn a success?" The former is answerable with some revised history. The latter is basically a fantasy land scenario where Sega is a completely different company.

[Gentlegamer]

Tony, you left out the EA 'special relationship' that saw Genesis get nearly royalty-free optimized versions of Madden and NHL while SNES received bad ports until about 93/94.

Sega really rode the reputation of being the sports system of choice among that era's "bro gamers."

[Tanooki]

wat the actual i can't even

...Wait, you're using some weird definition of "personal bias", aren't you?

No I don't and why you keep got to acting like a douche towards me? I think I was quite clear, my bias with them was from previous generations. Currently I don't own a modern Nintendo console, and I don't have the one from last generation too. They've driven me off their home systems, so I wouldn't call that a positive personal bias towards them when the only new system I have is a PS4. I'll throw the praises of theirs pre-Wii, but from there forward I ditched every piece of hardware they've made other than the 3DS.


I never heard of that being used before, bro gamer, when it came to Genesis with how EA handled their releases and the royalties around them with Sega vs the big fees and watered down garbage EA shoveled elsewhere for some years. I imagine since there weren't really many console based FPS then that the sports games really were the bro games of the era I guess along with the more edgy platformers that did the run and gun stuff, and racing had its thing even then too along with the big following for the dudes who wanted the ever more violent 1on1 fighters.

[Jorpho]

They've driven me off their home systems, so I wouldn't call that a positive personal bias towards them when the only new system I have is a PS4. I'll throw the praises of theirs pre-Wii, but from there forward I ditched every piece of hardware they've made other than the 3DS.

...Yes, that's called a bias. A "negative bias" if you want to be picky, but the word "bias" by no means is limited to a favorable opinion.

[Tanooki]

I follow that, but as I also said I'm positive on the 3DS. On the larger scale I see myself fairly neutral to their further existence. I'd rather not see them make another console if they keep going down the same path, but I really do enjoy their handheld division and what they've done in that space. It's why you find when topics come up I go back to the thing about hoping the NX is maybe some device going by their own talking that's scalable hardware so it can be a console or handheld, the games work on one device, they don't play into the game with Sony and MS, but do instead invade the growing space of the other mobile markets. A good Nintendo box would be one that can take Android made games along with stuff genuinely made for it, easily coded for, cheaper priced on itself and the media, yet while having the high end performance of like the Nvidia Shield console and then some for good measure so it lasts some years. I'm just neutral on it really for now, waiting pattern to see how they approach the future. Depending how they go, they'll be a memory to me, or one to make more. I don't want the company dead or alive at this rate as I have no stake in it other than the occasional random 3DS game purchase.

[Gentlegamer]

And speaking of EA Sports, I think that's another reason Sega dropped off after the Genesis. EA moved to Sony, and gave token support to Sega, costing it the sports prestige it once enjoyed.

This quote from the videogamecritic.com Saturn review describes it fairly well:

My personal memories of the Saturn involve my longtime buddy Eric, who opted for a Saturn over the Playstation for Christmas 1995. I had purchased a Playstation in November of that year, and for weeks I tried to convince Eric to go with the Playstation instead. He was convinced however that a Sega system would deliver far better sports titles, which he preferred. Unfortunately his assumption proved incorrect. The early Sega Saturn sports games were fairly awful, and Electronic Arts delayed its Saturn sports titles for months at a time. I still remember Eric calling EA out of desperation to obtain the latest release dates for upcoming games. Years later, Eric relented and bought himself a Playstation. Ironically, he gave me his Saturn, and I've been enjoying it ever since.

And after Saturn, EA famously refused to support Dreamcast until it sold a million consoles... then continued to refuse after it easily passed that sales mark.

I believe it was either Saturn or Dreamcast where EA tried to get another sweetheart deal by demanding to be the exclusive sports licensee, even excluding the Sega Sports line.

[Tanooki]

EA has always been about lying and manipulating consumers both behind the scenes and publicly. They acted like they still cared about Sega but we know now they were ticked off about the system and at Sega so they threw them under the bus. Then they pulled the classic Nintendo treatment type garbage to come (with Wii and WiiU) on the Dreamcast saying they'd not support until X systems sold, then didn't do a damn thing what so ever. The tactic worked so well it helped put one of those final nails in the Sega coffin and then the left over nailed and unused hammer were then directed at Nintendo by them and most other third parties. There's a lot of vindictive tactics some studios take part in and due to their size the other small fish and sheep roll right along with it. It was super sleazy when they made like you'd find them on the Sega stage for support, to then have that bomb of a shock that year at E3 where the EA head stood up along side of the Sony one promoing the PS2 basically waggling a big middle finger in their direction.

[Gamevet]

Eh, the Sega CD didn't do much damage. If anything people were just generally apathetic about it. It didn't come out late enough to encroach on the Saturn. But the key issue was that, even during it's heyday, Sega never quite figured out the home console market. Sega was primarily an arcade game manufacturer that got lucky for a brief period in the 90s thanks to some very fortuitous circumstances. A lot of people forget that the Genesis had a completely different personality for the first couple years of its lifespan. It was marketed in the same way the Neo Geo eventually would be. As a means of playing "real" arcade games in your home. Golden Axe and Altered Beast were set up to be its system sellers but that didn't really cut it. People were still happy with the NES. It wasn't until Sega switched gears and picked a fight with the Super Nintendo with Sonic the Hedgehog and Mortal Kombat that the Genesis hit its stride. The company was always struggling with mismanagement and its stream-of-consciousness "put to market whatever random idea we had this weekend" behavior eventually caught up with it. And the straight up antagonistic relationship the American and Japanese branches had going for years made it effectively impossible for any unified "voice" to exist within the company.

I think you're missing the point. The Sega CD took game development away from the Genesis, which was still going strong in late 1993. It was like the Sega CD was competing against the Genesis for consumers interested in a Sega console. You also had Sega of America investing in a multi-media creation studio that created very little to justify its existence. Sega of Japan pretty much killed off any game development offers for the Mega-CD in 1994 and then did the same for the Genesis in 1995. The shift from the Genesis being #1 in North America, to the SNES starting to dominate in late 1994 had a lot to do with software production for the Genesis dropping off.

You're way under-selling what Tom Kalinski did to get the Genesis where it was by the end of 1991. He used the same strategy he had used to sell the He-Man toyline while he was at Mattel. He pushed the product by having a cartoon to promote the character (much like he did with He-Man) and he made sure that every Genesis sold had the game in the box. It's not like Mattel hadn't used a similar strategy when they were advertising the Intellivision. They compared the Intellevision head-to-head with the Atari VCS. The Sega Scream also had a pop-culture status, as even people that didn't play videogames were saying it.

The Genesis was already picking up steam before Sonic the Hedgehog was released. My adult friends and I were playing Madden and other sports games on the Genesis back in 1990/1991. I also had friends that didn't play Sonic and strictly bought sports titles for the console. Sega advertising pushed Sega Sports, and they licensed pro athletes like Joe Montana, Tommy Lasorda and Buster Douglass to promote their sports titles.

People love to talk about how great the Saturn did in Japan but let's be real here. It only did halfway decent because Nintendo made some questionable choices of their own with the N64. The Saturn did okay in Japan. It was hardly a phenomenon. So what's really the question here? Is it "what could Sega have done to make the Saturn perform as satisfactory in the U.S. as it did in Japan" or is it "what could Sega have done to make the Saturn a success?" The former is answerable with some revised history. The latter is basically a fantasy land scenario where Sega is a completely different company.

Yeah, Sega's home consoles were never successful in Japan. If SOJ was up-front with SOA about the Saturn, the game developers for the console in the West might have been better prepared for the launch in North America. They pretty much put a road-block on the chances for the Saturn's success outside of Japan. They were prideful fools whose actions led to the demise of the company.

Tony, you left out the EA 'special relationship' that saw Genesis get nearly royalty-free optimized versions of Madden and NHL while SNES received bad ports until about 93/94.

Sega really rode the reputation of being the sports system of choice among that era's "bro gamers."

The Genesis got optimized versions, because it was the lead platform for those sports titles. It's like the 1st Earthworm Jim being a better game on the Genesis, because it was the lead platform, while EWJ2 was better on the SNES because it was the lead platform for that game.

[Gentlegamer]

Genesis was lead platform because EA blackmailed Sega into a sweetheart licensing deal.

[celerystalker]

You know, until that Console Wars book came out, almost nobody talked about Tom Kalinske. Now, it's quoted like it's the new bible and he's the new Jesus. Seriously, I'm sure there's quite a bit of merit to his stories and interviews, but let's be real about this. It's one perspective in a massive picture. If you want to talk overselling importance, let's stop acting like industry insiders because we read books and articles. Being aware of a new perspective is great. Revising history with it as the new truth is as stupid as a kid going away to school, hearing that the moon landing was fake and FDR planned Pearl Harbor, and going home to "educate" the little people back home. I'm not saying it should be ignored, but keep it in perspective with this stuff.

We're all armchair quarterbacks here, guessing like we know better. Be honest, we're all guessing. It's fun to speculate. Then, in a few years we can do this shit all over again about something else like the Wii U, and our hero can be Reggie. We'll act like we were there when he helped reimagine VH1, and talk about Nintendo of Japan was too stubborn to embrace his vision. It'll be great.

These topics are fun, but the crap of quoting these books like they're absolute truth is getting out of hand on the internet.

[Tanooki]

No doubt, why think for yourself when the research is already there, must be true, and is so easily copied and pasted thanks to keyboard shortcuts?

Reggie, in that role? About as likely as people waking up someday with all the confederacy overkill lately and deciding to call the civil war going forward the war of northern aggression. Not happening.

[Gamevet]

Genesis was lead platform because EA blackmailed Sega into a sweetheart licensing deal.

That's pretty much a moot point. EA also supported the Amiga and C64, and there were many Amiga ports brought over to the Genesis by EA.

Compared to Nintendo's restrictions for 3rd parties, everyone got a better deal by publishing for the Genesis.

[Bhris]

Well, Sega was screwed out the gate considering that the system was not originally built for 3D games which was the future.

However, do you think they could have carved out a larger market for themselves had they released more arcade-style games like Capcom's Alien vs Predator? I read that a version was supposed to be released for 32X but canned. Games like that were pretty popular from what I remember and I myself would have looked more forward to that then Shinobi Legions. Digitized sprite games, aside from Mortal Kombat, looked like they would be more at home on the already outdated 3DO and Jaguar systems. But having a system that could do full justice to traditional arcade-style graphics would have been a good selling point for gamers like me.

I think trying to get Japanese games localized would also have been a wise decision. Anime was starting to blow up in the US and they could have taken advantage of that. Policenauts in the US would have been great. I was a big fan of Japanese cartoons since a little kid and to me, any game that had anime/manga style art in the cover got me interested because it looked more like a cool cartoon as opposed to the sword and sorcery Boris Vallejo-style art that every Japanese game seemed to get.

[calgon]

I honestly don't believe by that point sega could have won, or even claimed second place. They were blindsided by Sony and looked and felt irrelevant next to some of the newer ideas the psx was pushing.

You could definitely have mitigated the loss though. First, and apologies because many people have said this already but, keep Genesis titles and hardware in production. Phase out game gear which admittedly was on its way out anyway.
Get sonic xtreme out at all costs, regardless of quality even. Sonic had the power to be a system seller and if STI were allowed to keep the nights engine some cool things would have come of it.

Bring all the fighters out and bill Saturn as THE arcade conversion machine for hardcore gamers. Do not announce that Saturn is not our future...

I believe those steps would have kept sega going a little while longer at the very least

[SparTonberry]

Probably with Genesis games is that Japan had already largely called it quits when the Saturn launched. I think there were a few MD games released in Japan post-Saturn but after that it was mostly western-developed games.

The problem with making it the "ultimate hardcore machine" is... would the "hardcore" crowd have kept the console afloat? Not likely.
I'll have to wonder that same sort of thing when Nintendo's next portable comes, if it's going to be in a similar boat (with that one Sony guy suggesting they're going to just give that market to Nintendo since there's not much room anymore). Or is going to be "a Pokemon console"?

[Bhris]

You could definitely have mitigated the loss though. First, and apologies because many people have said this already but, keep Genesis titles and hardware in production. Phase out game gear which admittedly was on its way out anyway.

Probably with Genesis games is that Japan had already largely called it quits when the Saturn launched. I think there were a few MD games released in Japan post-Saturn but after that it was mostly western-developed games.

I remember games like Pulseman being previewed in DieHard Game Fan, which should have been released in the US. Sega had created a loyal audience with the Genesis.

Bring all the fighters out and bill Saturn as THE arcade conversion machine for hardcore gamers. Do not announce that Saturn is not our future...

I believe those steps would have kept sega going a little while longer at the very least

The problem with making it the "ultimate hardcore machine" is... would the "hardcore" crowd have kept the console afloat? Not likely.
I'll have to wonder that same sort of thing when Nintendo's next portable comes, if it's going to be in a similar boat (with that one Sony guy suggesting they're going to just give that market to Nintendo since there's not much room anymore). Or is going to be "a Pokemon console"?

I think it would have been possible. If Sega had gotten Genesis owners to view the Saturn as the next level of gaming, AND had a launch title Sonic game to make the new system feel more familiar I believe they could have fared a lot better. Of course polygon games were the future, but had they gotten more third party arcade games ported for the Saturn (Alien vs Predator being associated with Capcom and the Fox film franchises would have been one big help), and continued their more recent franchises like Streets of Rage, Eternal Champions, Phantasy Star, etc, I for one would have been asking my parents for a Saturn.

Instead the 32X was advertised to Genesis owners and the Saturn to...who? They were dividing their own audience. 32X got a Sonic-related game before the Saturn. Doom, Star Wars, and Virtua Fighter were also on the 32X. That was a lot of incentive to do a mild upgrade with the 32X versus the big investment of the Saturn.

[dendawg]

They were blindsided by Sony and looked and felt irrelevant next to some of the newer ideas the psx was pushing.

They also pretty much blindsided themselves by pullilng a surprise early launch without telling 3rd party devs and pissing them off, driving them into Sony's waiting arms.

Instead the 32X was advertised to Genesis owners

Who the hell else could they have marketed it to? It was a Genesis add-on, after all.

[Bhris]

Who the hell else could they have marketed it to? It was a Genesis add-on, after all.

Sega put out ads that pretty much told Genesis owners could upgrade their old consoles to a 32-Bit machine for that fraction of what it would cost to buy a 3DO, Jaguar...and even Saturn. So you had a portion of the market that believed that, so what incentive did they have for buying the Saturn?
SOA was dividing up their own fan base. Back then multiple systems in a household wasn't common. So some Sega fans like me got the 32X, while others went with the Saturn. Instead of that, SOA should have never put out the 32X, and instead should have focused on getting ALL Genesis owners, and everyone else, to get ready for the Saturn.