What if SEGA waited to 1996 to launch Saturn

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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)

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

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.

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Originally Posted by Christuserloeser

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

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"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)

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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)

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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.

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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.