
It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake - raudaschl
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2020/05/11/its-25-years-since-sega-of-america-made-its-biggest-ever-mistake/
======
gryson
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's best to approach with caution when CEOs are
assigning blame for company failures under their tenure.

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.

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.

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's strategy for it:

[https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?33506-Hideki-
Sa...](https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?33506-Hideki-Sato-on-the-
Sega-Saturn-\(incredible-new-interview\))

~~~
klodolph
I agree that this is way more complicated.

Nobody knew what 3D hardware would look like in 1994, they were too busy
inventing it. For example, the Saturn provides quads as your primitive, which
seems weird to anybody looking at the Saturn today. The PlayStation and
Nintendo 64 both used triangles.

You might have various reasons to prefer the Nintendo 64 or PlayStation, but
from a developer's perspective, the main reason you would prefer the Saturn is
probably because of its 2D performance. But a higher price point for better 2D
performance is a tough sell.

It's also interesting to look at the different companies through the lens of
what their strengths are. Sony has generally had pretty solid hardware design,
Microsoft has generally made systems that are easier to develop software for,
etc.

~~~
Firehawke
Better 2D performance and more RAM. The lack of RAM kneecapped the Capcom
fighting game ports on PSX.

~~~
robin_reala
The Saturn’s RAM expansion pack helped too:
[https://sega.jp/fb/segahard/ss/ram.html](https://sega.jp/fb/segahard/ss/ram.html)

------
egypturnash
I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake.

"Hey let'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's hard to
program on."

~~~
jklinger410
Not to argue with your point because it is certainly valid, but the N64 had
that expansion module for DK 64 and a few other games, yet managed to survive
that.

~~~
masklinn
The expansion pak was only _required_ for 2 or 3 games, and bundled with one
of them.

Most of the games with epak support used it to increase quality and / or
framerate, the game worked fine without. It was also relatively cheap ($50).

~~~
yellowapple
> It was also relatively cheap ($50).

Which is kinda impressive (for the time at least) considering how expensive
RDRAM was/is relative to e.g. SDRAM.

------
jmcgough
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.

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.

The short hardware life probably spurned a lot of 3rd party developers too.

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). _Every_ gameboy has had backwards
compatibility with at least the previous generation, so it always felt "safe"
to buy the newest model.

~~~
duxup
I recall the same thing.

Everyone understood what Nintendo was up to. Sega friends (that's how I
thought of them, defined by the console they owned) would tell me about this
or that technology, but not many games for this new tech.... on the Nintendo
systems (and later my PC) I had games.

By the time the Saturn was out.... most Sega friends had converted to
something else, it was already over.

------
schnevets
There'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.

In comparison, today'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're
all subservient to some larger corporate strategy.

Once again, my cynicism may just stem from my age, but it seems like there
hasn't been much excitement for the past 5 years or so.

~~~
jonny_eh
And there's far less meaningful innovation in gaming today. VR was pretty
promising, but has failed to be transformative. The new consoles' graphics
frankly don't look much better than current ones IMHO, despite having 10x or
100x the performance. Game streaming is the most interesting and disruptive
technology, once the major players figure out the right business model.

Back in the 90s, opening a gaming magazine was so exciting due to the crazy
stuff you might glimpse.

~~~
lostgame
VR will be a lot more exciting when we hit ‘retina’ VR, where immersion will
be much more effective. The screen dooring effect of the original Vive and
Oculus was a huge negative for me.

~~~
jonny_eh
I bought a PSVR, arguably the least impressive of the bunch, but was still
blown away. It was really neat. But I didn't touch it after a couple weeks. It
was too annoying to put on, take off, clean, store, etc. So I sold it, and
don't miss it at all.

------
danbolt
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.

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.

~~~
FillardMillmore
Out of curiosity, what kind of tools do you use to do N64 development?

~~~
danbolt
The last version of the SDK and the GCC-based toolchain were leaked a long
time ago, which runs on Windows computers pre-Vista. I'll program in C with
Sublime Text, and then run the compiler/toolchain in a VM running Windows XP.
The VM can see my source code via a shared folder.

I'm waiting on the mail for a flash cartridge to run ROMs on retail hardware,
so for now I use the mupen64plus emulator on Mac OS X, but also a more
accurate (but slower) one called CEN64 from time to time. Nintendo 64
emulators are kind of odd; the popular ones don't really "emulate" a game
console the way I would have expected.

Sometimes I post pictures of my progress on Twitter if you're interested:
[https://twitter.com/danielsavface/status/1258896460604555264](https://twitter.com/danielsavface/status/1258896460604555264)

------
smolder
It'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.

~~~
som33
A CD based Sega system was a great idea but not as an add on, the reality is
the cost of hardware back then and the nature of the console market being
technology illiterate was the issue.

I was one of the few who got the original Sega CD, the early version one that
mounted underneath the genesis. It had cool games like Darkwizard. The real
issue was the cost of add on peripherals were too high to get any kind of
market penetration. Back then parents bought videogames for kids for their
christmas or their birthdays. They'd rent their favorite games from
blockbuster/convenience store and then get their parents to buy their
favorites.

The reality was consoles and games were expensive and most kids rented games
back when sega and nintendo were the kings of gaming before PC gaming had
taken off in 1990's.

So the financial barrier to console ownership and the high price tag for
parents was the real issue. Sega had a lot of good idea's but not conceived in
the right way or at the right time. They acted as if the gaming populations
parents were rich.

That was the real issue with many console companies that allowed Sony to get a
foothold into console gaming.

Playstation was as popular as it was because of piracy and backups thereby
increasing its market, it was "microsoft" method of console dominance - we
don't care if you pirate as long as you use our console.

Even if sony didn't intend that, Sony PS1 and PS2 became huge because of
ability to pirate games on the platform.

Piracy paradoxically drove sony to success. Everyone forgets places like
china, india and third world countries at the time that couldn't really afford
games because the the ridiculous prices.

~~~
jacobush
Anecdotally, I knew a bunch of people with PS1, maybe one of them knew how to
pirate games.

~~~
riffraff
Anecdote-wise, everybody in my home town who owned a playstation had pirated
games.

You don't need to know how to make illegal copies, you could just buy them for
1/10th of the original price on the street.

~~~
jacobush
Ok - update - they didn't have pirated games.

------
lostgame
Oh, fantastic! I love reading everything about this period of history.

The Saturn is my person favourite console and I greatly enjoy writing homebrew
for it.

If you haven’t, and this is of interest to you; check out JO-engine, a
fantastic FOSS Saturn homebrew development kit.

[https://jo-engine.org](https://jo-engine.org) :)

------
noer
In case anybody else is denied access because of an adblocker:
[https://outline.com/bujnmX](https://outline.com/bujnmX)

------
crusso
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.

------
macspoofing
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.

~~~
Narann
Sega fall was far more important than Nintendo in this era. N64 had world wide
acclaimed games that Saturn couldn't even hope for. And most of those games
couldn't have been created on a CD-based system at that time that imply _very_
slow loading.

N64 fall was mostly due to:

* Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures.

* (Very) bad developer API (actually ABI). Having being in N64 emulation, you truly see they have no idea how 3D rendering was supposed to be exposed.

* Cost heavy support (cartridge).

But even without fixing the last one, the both firsts killed the third party
dev investment.

~~~
macspoofing
I have to disagree with your first two points. Neither of those was a reason
for N64 being outsold by PSOne.

>Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks
because you couldn't rely on big textures.

So what? The PSOne hardware also had its own set of constraints that made
their games pixelated and ugly. In fact, I would argue N64 games were
generally better looking than PSOne games.

>(Very) bad developer API (actually ABI).

Again, who cares? If the system sold as well as the PSOne did, developers and
publishers would deal with it.

>Cost heavy support (cartridge).

This is the big one. The fact that N64 was not a CD-based system, however,
really hurt it with consumers, who wanted a CD-based system, because CDs were
new and exciting. Third-parties also hated paying Nintendo for a license AND
for cartridges because it cut into their profit margins. The fact that N64 was
a cartridge-based system also shut them out from a bunch of AAA titles that
used large amount of textures, voice/video and FMV cutscenes because it made
straight ports impossible. It may seem silly these days, but FMV in video
games was really exciting back then.

I also think it hurt them that the PSOne was released almost two years before
the N64 did.

------
bluedino
Hindsight is always 20/20, but I wonder why Sega made decisions like using
quads instead of triangles, and dual CPU's.

~~~
chrisseaton
How do you even render a quad? What if it isn't planar? Does it curve or
crease?

~~~
a_e_k
In higher-end rendering, a quad that can be non-planar is called a bilinear
patch. Yes, it can curve (cross sections tend to give parabolas), and while
you won't get infinitely sharp creases you will get saddle-shapes.

See, e.g.:
[http://www.sci.utah.edu/~kpotter/publications/ramsey-2004-RB...](http://www.sci.utah.edu/~kpotter/publications/ramsey-2004-RBPI.pdf)

~~~
chrisseaton
Wow seems like that’d be an order of magnitude or more slower to render
bilinear surfaces rather than triangles. I wonder why they did that.

------
balls187
The Sega Saturn was the first console I purchased with my own money.

The Saturn had some great games.

Three of the Four launch titles were great: Daytona (Rolling Start....),
Virtua Fighter, and Panzer Dragon were far better than anything else
available.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 was far superior on the Saturn compared to the PS
version.

And Guardian Heroes (available now on Xbox Live Arcade) is probably one of the
best, most underrated sprite based beat-em-ups.

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.

It's sad that Sega laid an egg, but the Saturn had it's time and place.

I'm really looking forward to what the Series X can do with it's project
X-cloud. My feeling is that it's going to move towards PC gaming--once your
console can no longer play games natively, it will switch to pixel streaming.

------
raiyu
The article misses the point entirely. It wasn't about launching early, or not
having enough games, or wait times.

It comes down to pricing.

In gaming, the same thing has always played out. The console that can deliver
the best value wins.

$399 vs $299 is a huge difference. That's the equivalent of $500 vs $750
today.

And don't forget that this was a huge step up already from the $150-199 price
point of Super Nintendo.

At the end of the day, when it comes to mass appeal, it isn'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.

~~~
kevinmgranger
It's pretty ironic that Sony almost made the same mistake with the PS3 at
$599.

I say _almost_, because it might have benefited Sony as a whole anyway.

~~~
fl0wenol
The fact that it was a Blu-Ray player saved it because families could justify
the purchase for that feature alone (and typically tacked on the bluetooth
remote too)

~~~
kevinmgranger
Exactly. It was almost the same strategy with the PS2: it was a ubiquitous DVD
player when that was a novel concept.

------
cptskippy
As a teenager with a job, the cost wasn'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.

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.

