Hideki Sato on the Sega Saturn (incredible new interview)

[SonicTheHedgehog]

Fascinating interview but it seems all the things they (Sega) were talking about with regards to the design of the Saturn just wasn't good enough. They should of released a year later with a single CPU/DSP design with the machine itself using no more than 4 or 5 chips. A 1994/95 release just wasn't good for Sega just like it wasn't good for Nintendo but unlike Nintendo they couldn't wait until 96/97.

The 68020 would have been to weak and Sega wouldn't of been able to produce a powerful enough DSP to mitigate the weak CPU. Or the amount of DSP's they would have needed to offset the weak 68020 would of made the machine too expensive/complex. The 68030 still wasn't as powerful as the Playstations CPU at the same clock and offered far inferior Price/performance ratio. The 68040 was way too expensive and didn't offer good price/performance ratio either.

The SH2 offered fantastic price/performance but a single chip wasn't powerful enough with the way the rest of the machine was designed and using 2 SH2'S negated the good price/performance ratio an individual SH2 provided.

Basically i feel that as soon as the Saturn was out it was game over for Sega no matter what they did. They needed a better designed Saturn but they couldn't of afforded to release in 1996/97 as that would of given the Playstation to much time to grab the market and keeping the release date but streamlining the machine would leave it to weak for 3d gaming and the people wouldn't of accepted a purely 2d machine no matter how good it was.

Sega should have made the decision to delay the Saturn in 1993 to around August/September 1995 in Japan. I would of designed something like this:

SH3 @ 57.2mhz
2MB main SD Ram

0.5 micron 32 bit wide VDP1 doing BACKWARD rendered quads @ 57.2mhz
1.5 MB VRam (1MB for sprites/textures + 2x256kbit framebuffers) + texture cache

32 channel PCM (no FM Synthesizer chip)
1MB audio ram

SH1 on a 32 bit bus acting as both the audio chip AND CD-Rom controller
256-512KB CD-ROM

If you think about it they would have far fewer pin/trace counts with this design and less chips used as well as less motherboard space so i cant imagine it costing more and from what i have read online i get the feeling an August/September 1995 Japan launch would have been doable. Then release in the US/Europe around mid 96 at the latest.

I feel with a better 32 bit machine they would have got more 3rd party support and some of the 3rd parties that signed exclusivity deals with Sony would of been far more reluctant with a better machine from Sega being around aswel as having better games and better arcade ports and using the 4MB Cartridge we could have had respectable Model 3 ports like Virtua Fighter 3.

Dreamcast then could have been released a few years later than it's original Nov 98 launch due to the more successful Saturn and could have been more competitive with the PS2 not only because it would of been more powerful and could have used DVD-Rom but because Sega's 32 bit machine would of been far more successful and taken alot of sales from Sony's Playstation thus the anticipation for next gen Sega/Sony machines would have been evens.

[Moirai]

I kinda like saturn the way it is

[SonicTheHedgehog]

I kinda like saturn the way it is

The Saturn i.m.o physically looked lovely especially the Japanese Model 1 version and it no doubt had some absolute gems on it but there's no denying it wasn't desirable hardware for 3rd parties to code for especially compared to the PS unless you were doing a 2D game. and it wasn't good from a price to performance ratio like the PS either.

Oh and also there was a bit bigger gap in power between the PS & Namco System 22 and the Saturn & Model 2 arcade board thus Arcade to home ports tended to be a bit more impressive on the PS even though Sega Rally & VF2 looked really nice back in the day.

[zyrobs]

I would of designed something like this:

That would've been equally expensive as the Saturn we got, and in the end not as powerful as the Playstation either, plus it had no advantage in 2d games without the VDP2. Also without the Sega deal on the SH1 and SH2, Hitachi might not have had enough reason to continue developing the line and there might not have been an SH3.

The 4mb cart would not have helped in 3d titles either, since it is wired up to the CPU bus. It can store more animation, but then the VDP1 has to do double the work to use it, and it just runs out of fill rate. See Marvel Super Heroes or Cyberbots, they both have more slowdown when using RAM carts.

I would've
- add ADPCM to the sound chip
- remove the 16bit work ram, make the SH2s use only 32bit SDRAM (this may be more expensive, but it would've made coding easier),
- redesign the CD system to use less than 4 chips (SH1, YGR, plus at least two controllers on the CD drive), and see if it is possible to put them all on the mainboard.
- remove the audio/video input form the cartridge slot (the MPEG slot would still have it), to make it have less pins, and thereby allowing for a less dense and more reliable connector. Or maybe even make memory cards use a serial link and only the RAM expansion to use parallel, so you can do both at the same time.
- make the vdp1 capable of drawing a textured pixel in less cycles. Preferably only a single cycle. Make each sprite pipeline use only the parts it needs, for ex. Mesh mode should be twice as fast but it isn't. This would require removing things like end codes, but they are not needed if the chip is fast enough. Basically make it draw pixels as fast as possible. It doesn't even matter if it uses backward texturing, as long as the chip is fast enough, you can come up with efficient workarounds for that. Maybe you could go full silly and have it use 2 banks of VRAM so you can upload textures to one while drawing from the other; assuming you can save enough cost on other parts like the CD block.
- add a RGB4444 mode to the VDP1, where you have 12bits of RGB pixels and 4 bits of extra bits for the VDP2 to use for priority or blending. This allows for far easier VDP1/2 integration, you can use full gouraud shading without precalculating lightning in CRAM, and you can now use both polygon transparency and polygon to background blending simultaneously (it wouldn't look perfect but it would be way better than mesh mode). 12bit would be still enough for colours, as it would look the same as if you'd use 8bit CRAM shading like in Exhumed, but it is way easier to set up. Plus the VDP2 could still use more colours on top of that. 12bit RGB would also save on texture size, allowing for crisper textures.
- change High Speed Shrink to have more states, turning into a primitive hardware mipmapping. Easier to do than to change the entire chip design to involve forwards texturing, and saves on VRAM since you don't have to store as many mipmaps.
- add a 256px and a 512px wide resolution to the VDP2. This would allow for 512x256 framebuffer in 16 bit colour which would make 3d games look extremely crisp while still having full colour calculation capabilities. The 256px mode would also allow for easier porting of old games, especially Nintendo ones but also stuff from Master System.
- decouple the video dot clock and the main processing clocks, so the system can run at full 28MHz even when using lesser resolution modes (because of the 256px modes).
- see if its possible to make the system use SDRAM only instead of SDRAM here and DRAM there. I imagine SDRAM is more expensive, but hopefully using less RAM types means larger bulk orders that would make things less difficult - plus some years later memory would become cheaper anyway.

This may not be cheaper with all the RAM changes, but it would be a heck of a lot easier to program for and have better 3d capabilities, assuming you can get the VDP1 fast enough. And if every part uses SDRAM then some years down the road it would be easier to combine certain parts into single chips, allowing for true cost reductions.

Waiting with the system until smaller process nodes are available, to make the VDP1 run twice the input clock, would be a possible idea as well. You'd lose a year in the redesign anyway. However it may have been much less successful if released a year later, since the Playstation was out in 94.

[SonicTheHedgehog]

I don't see how my design wouldn't be as powerful as the PS1. With the 57.2mhz SH3 + 8kb cache and using 2MB SDRAM clocked at the same speed as the SH3 it would be noticably faster than the PS CPU. The VDP1 at 57.2mhz with the VRAM running at that speed + a texture cache and the total system bandwidth should be around 228.8MB/s compared to the PS 133MB/s.

Basically 1 SH and 1 VDP at double clocks with the ram at double clocks too. Alpha blending beyond half transparent would of been important if they could have done it. And i meant an advantage in 2d games from the standpoint of developers only having to worry about coding for 1 VDP and i heard that 2d games can't take advantage of 2 cpu's so surely 1 clocked twice as fast would benefit?

The DSP in the SCU clock doubled to 28.6mhz with double cache and the ability to do divide math and you would have something that would be good for matrix transformations. I would get rid of the video cd card slot and the internal save ram forcing gamers to buy cartridges to save their games but improve the cartridge/slot reliability and the ability to remove and insert cartridges whilst ingame.

As long as they can get it out by Nov 1995 and Sept 96 in Japan & the US/Europe they would of been in a much better position. And honestly it shouldn't have been more expensive as your looking at less pin/trace counts, less chips, less motherboard space and a year later release. I see your point about the SH3 existing due to funding from Sega for the SH1 & SH2 but honestly Sega wasted so much money elsewhere that they could of helped Hitachi with funds and still been ok financially if they had spent more wisely.

Then mabee try and partner with them on a long term contract so mabee they can use a Hitachi SH chip for the Model 3 instead of the Power PC 603 chip. The NAOMI arcade board would come out at the end of 1998 as usual with the design being the same but no home console so another hitachi chip in that. Then a 128 bit home console 2 years later in November 2000. Something like:

SH @ 400mhz on the 0.18 micron process + a vector unit like the SH4 with performance around 720mips
32 MB main ram @ 133mhz

Power VR GPU similar but not identical to the Kyro 2 GPU that launched for PC's in early 2001 clocked at 175-200mhz with 16MB V-RAM

Same amount of audio channels but double the audio ram and a more powerful audio chip capable of mpeg compression & mp3 playback as well as dolby support so mabee they could use a Hitachi chip for that. Adding a 2nd analogue on the controller horizontally to the right of the left analogue and moving A,B,X,Y down beneath it and adding an extra set of shoulder buttons would of been needed. It could of launched the following year around September 2001 in the US/Europe at $299.99 instead of the 199.99 price the original DC launched at.

Honestly they would of had to have made alot more money from the 32 bit gen as they spent alot designing the NAOMI and then there would be more money going out on a 2000/01 128 bit machine that would use new chips so it still wouldn' t have been easy for Sega financially but i feel they would of been in a much stronger position especially as far as there reputation goes.

[zyrobs]

It wouldn't be as powerful because the PSX has the GTE to offload the heavy matrix operations to (the SCU DSP isn't equal to that and far harder to use), and because the VDP1 is extremely wasteful and has a poor feature set. Even at twice the clock rate, it wouldn't equal or even come close to the PSX GPU neither in quality nor speed. And without the VDP2, Sega can't easily port all their old games, which is a very heavy consideration in their hardware designs: even for the Dreamcast, they had the PowerVR2 customized for this purpose. Not to mention that without VDP2 you'd have nothing to scan the framebuffer for image output.
And you'd need to source twice as fast SDRAM and fab larger chips (which means poorer yield). The pin count may be lower, but the price of the chips could be higher.

[SonicTheHedgehog]

Couldn't they have designed the VDP1 to scan the Framebuffer? At the most just have the VDP2 for Palette ram i think. Also wouldn't the SCU DSP at double the clock + double the cache and the ability to do fast reciprocal approximation be adequate to handle Matrix operations?

[zyrobs]

That's not how the VDP2 CRAM works, and I doubt the DSP at twice the clock would be as efficient as the PSX GTE (which is said to be able to transform 1 million triangles per second max).

[SonicTheHedgehog]

That's not how the VDP2 CRAM works, and I doubt the DSP at twice the clock would be as efficient as the PSX GTE (which is said to be able to transform 1 million triangles per second max).

Well the DSP at twice the clock with twice the cache and the ability to do divide math doesn't have to be more efficient than the PSX GTE just capable of performing 3D T&L. Honestly i don't know what else you would use it for.

Remember im just looking at the Saturn the way it is and trying to see if it could have been turned into a more efficient & powerful version of itself using less chips/pins and less motherboard space. Although im not educated in engineering so mabee i don't know what im talking about.

[Gryson]

The SH3 wasn't released until around 1997, and as zyrobs said, without Sega's initial interest in adopting the SH, there likely never would have been an SH3. See:

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...he-Sega-Saturn

I can't see how a delay of any sort would have benefited Sega. It would only have made the problem of Sony gobbling up all the 3rd parties even worse.

In my opinion, it was "game over" for Sega as soon as Sony entered the market. Sony's business strategy as outlined by Sato and talked about elsewhere was the real damning factor. Sega was never invested in 3rd parties the way Sony was, because Sega wanted to limit competition on its own platform. Even after Sega created basic development tools for the Saturn (I believe based off of Virtua Fighter tools), they kept them internal. As Sato says, Sega tried to do it all on its own (see the development of Panzer Dragoon Saga as an excellent allegory for Sega's unsuccessful attempts to do everything itself). But they didn't have the money to pull it off, and that just wasn't a viable business plan anymore. Nintendo suffered a similar fate, although to a lesser extent. And I don't think this was an easily solvable problem for Sega. Given the option, there was no way in hell Namco wanted to appear on its primary competitor's platform (and Sega sure didn't want Namco stealing sales away).

Conversely, the Mega Drive/Genesis is essentially defined by its 1st and 2nd party titles (with notable exceptions, of course).

[SonicTheHedgehog]

The SH3 could of been ready for Sep 95 if Sega had signed a contract with Hitachi for exclusivity of the chips for a console in 1993. And a delay would of been extremely beneficial in that it would have allowed Sega to get there own house in order as in design a machine that wasn't as convoluted as the one we got.

Sony only gobbled up the 3rd parties in 1997 after the Saturn started dying and Sega announced that it wasn't in their future. If 3rd parties were told in the run up to the PS Japanese launch that they would have a choice of a more powerful machine that was also going to be user friendly from Sega in less than 12 months that was CD based they would of been all over it.

Sega still would have had challenges to overcome but they would of sold more 32 bit machines, had more games released for it, had a longer lasting 32 bit device and made a hell of a lot more money than what they did. Not that it would be difficult to do better financially than what ended up happening.

[zyrobs]

The Saturn used 2 SH2s, 1 SH1, 3 custom ASICs, and two custom chips on its CD drive, all from Hitachi. Conservatively that amounts to 30+ million chips bought from Hitachi, not something you can just switch out with an exclusivity contract for a hypothetical console.

And besides this would only put the Saturn a bit closer to the PSX, but by 96 they are up against the N64.

Besides the SH2s were not the weak point. The weak point was the VDP1 and Sega's idiotic policies.

[Blades]

To be fair, the SH2s were weak. The only reason there are two of them is because one wasn't competitive. Putting in two was a bad idea with only one bright point, being that Hitachi remains the primary chip supplier for Saturn.

[SonicTheHedgehog]

The Saturn used 2 SH2s, 1 SH1, 3 custom ASICs, and two custom chips on its CD drive, all from Hitachi. Conservatively that amounts to 30+ million chips bought from Hitachi, not something you can just switch out with an exclusivity contract for a hypothetical console.

They still could have used the SH1 in the machine and if they had gotten everything right i think 30m consoles shipped lifetime would of been easily achieveable which would of made even more money for Hitachi assuming they stuck with them for at least 1 custom ASIC.

And besides this would only put the Saturn a bit closer to the PSX, but by 96 they are up against the N64.

Well obviously they would have needed to add more features to the VDP1 as you elaborated on earlier and i think thats what Sega would of done if they had more time. There were numerous reports that the Sega team were forced to rush the Saturn out for late 94 in the end and at one point their president didn't even think it would be ready for 94 so i think giving them more time would have meant they could have had many more features resulting in not only a higher clocked VDP with faster more unified ram but a more efficient VDP1 even if it was still rendering quads. Assuming they are designing the machine that way from the start.

The N64 wasn't a threat to 3rd party support for Sega it was Sony and only from 1997 onward when Sega announced the Machine wasn't in their future. up until the end of 96 3rd party support was fairly close despite the fact that the PSX was the better choice for 3rd parties.

Besides the SH2s were not the weak point. The weak point was the VDP1 and Sega's idiotic policies.

The SH2's together offered poor price per performance and 1 on it's own wasn't powerful enough so they were a problem nonetheless. I agree the VDP1 wasn't good enough thats why i want double clocks for it and the ram but also more features to improve it's performance. I understand that using quadrilaterals wasn't as efficient as using triangles but im trying to keep that just to keep some of the identity of the machine as i think quads wasn't the main problem and could of been gotten away with if the machine was more powerful/feature rich and also easier to program for with better libraries all which i think was doable if Sega had a higher IQ.

I would have liked to have seen the cost of the 2 VDP'S and 3 sets of ram inc pin counts compared to the PSX GTE + ram as im betting Sega's setup was more expensive. If not then an arguement can be made to just keep both the VDP's but at higher clocks for them and the ram and more features for the VDP1 and getting them to work better with each other at a latter date of 95/96.

Even then i understand it would still be a challenge for Sega but there is no way they would have done worse than they did with Saturn in terms of units shipped and money lost.

[Da_Shocker]

I'm going to address a few things that stuck out for me

Quote Originally Posted by Hideki Sato, part 3.2 pages 13-14
The Saturn actually had just one CPU at the beginning. Then Sony appeared with its polygon-based PlayStation. When I was first designing the Saturn architecture, I was focused on sprite graphics, which had been the primary graphics up to that point.

So I decided to go with polygons (due to the PlayStation). However, there weren’t any people at Sega who knew how to develop such software. Of course, we had Yu Suzuki in the arcade department, but I couldn’t just drag him off to the console department. He was developing titles like Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing. The expertise of all of the developers we had was in sprite graphics, so there seemed no choice but to go with sprites. Nevertheless, I knew we needed polygons. Using various tricks, adding a geometry engine and so on, I changed everything. In the end, just like the PlayStation, we had pseudo-polygons built on a sprite base. I felt no choice but to design a sprite-based architecture. Having said that, after some significant progress, pseudo-polygons did represent a “jump” in graphics in a certain way. There was a distinction of sorts. The processor was very powerful and could support 4,000, even 5,000 sprites, and I thought we could make the graphics work using a sprite engine after adding the Yamaha and such.

It seemed like we were finally nearing completion. Then, the final PlayStation was revealed. It supported 300,000 polygons. Well, that was ultimately a bunch of lies, but… When you compared the Saturn with the PlayStation, we were completely missing something. The response that I chose was to add another SH processor, so we ended up with two SH-2s. By chance, the SH supported two-way cascaded data transfer. You could add a second processor and connect them in a cascade and get multi-CPU performance. When you get to about the PlayStation 3, multi-processors had become common, but the Saturn was the first home console to use multi-processors. So I added a second SH-2, but I felt that the ‘impact’ was still weak. Well, the SH-2 is a 32-bit processor, and we had two of them, so we could call the Saturn a 64-bit machine. It’s a dirty way of getting to 64-bits. But we revealed the CD-ROM-based Saturn using 64-bits as our sales point.

This pretty much confirmed all the rumblings we all hear about 2D being the main focus. IIRC the Saturn was simply suppose to be better than the Jaguar and 3DO but Sony ruined that. My thing is why oh why didn't they drag Yu Suzuki from his work to help out with the Saturn. Clearly nobody from Sega knew anything about 3D technology except for him.

At the beginning, there was no compiler. You had to program the SH in assembly. The people at Sega were good at assembly. That’s all they had been using on the MC68000. C, C++ were too slow to use.

However, third parties struggled with programming the SH in assembly, and there were two of the CPUs along with a CD-ROM. We asked third parties to make games, but without development libraries, they couldn’t do anything. They’d take a week and barely even be able to get something to display on the screen, let alone be able to start making a game. Our third party support was awful. The hardware was incredibly difficult to use. However, if you worked with it a bit, you could get a ton of sprites, with scaling and rotation and so on.

We all know that but the real question is why was the 3rd party support so abysmal? Both Battle Arena Toshindens looked bad on the Saturn then you have games such as Dead or Alive and I think Anarchy in Nippon(?) both used the VF2 engine and look pretty good. There are so many 3rd party ports on the Saturn that just look really really bad in comparison to there PSx counterparts.

Sony was good at supporting PlayStation third party developers. Why? Sony didn’t have a development department. They didn’t have a software department. What do you do if you don’t have a software department? You ask somebody else. Sony went to Namco, to Taito, to Konami. They said that they were putting together a game console called the PlayStation, and they invited these companies to develop games for it. Sony exerted all its efforts on supporting third parties and enhancing their collective powers. Sony CEO Norio Ohga himself went to talk to the third parties. From their perspective, it was a big deal for Ohga to come and ask this. From Namco’s viewpoint, if they put out Tekken, they could compete evenly with Sega’s Virtua Fighter.

The number one game in the PlayStation world was Ridge Racer. And Konami being Konami, they had their typical games. It’s obvious that the PlayStation had the better games. No matter how much effort Sega put in on its own, it wasn’t going to be enough.

So Sony went to Namco, Taito, Konami, and others, and they said here are the specs, and don’t worry, there aren’t two CPUs or anything difficult like that. They said the PlayStation will be easy to develop for, and here are all the development libraries we’ll put out. Sony had a very easy-to-use SDK (Software Development Kit). And Ohga himself was making these offers, and the third parties were told they could port all of their own titles, and so on. With all of that, it certainly seemed like the PlayStation was better.

Interesting with that being said I wonder how much Sega and Sony was charging 3rd parties back then.

So we released the Saturn in 1994, and as I said before, there were two SH-2s. In addition, memory was expensive at this time, and we were using a large amount, so costs were very high. For each Saturn sold, we lost about 10,000 yen ($100). That’s how the hardware business works. But the goal was to recoup the losses from software royalties. If there are lots of third parties, lots of games sold, and we get 2,000 yen for each, it’s possible. However, if software sales are weak, and for each console sold, we’re ultimately losing 5,000 – 6,000 yen, what’s going to happen from the business perspective? We’re going to stop selling consoles. This later became a huge problem.

Every month, or even every week in Sega’s case, we had meetings to examine the current situation. Each department would report on where it stood in relation to its goals. So, imagine if the sales goal for the end-of-year sales war is, say, 3 billion yen, and the profit goal is 300 million yen—but wait, the profit is in the red. That profit is a very important factor, so what does the business side do? They decide that it’s not necessary to have sales of 3 billion yen. Instead, 2 billion yen will do. In other words, they stop selling 1 billion yen’s worth of hardware. That way, if each unit sold is losing 5,000 yen, and we extend that to 20,000 units, that’s 100 million yen lost. By stopping the sales of 20,000 units, in a way that becomes 100 million yen in profit. So they slammed on the brakes in terms of unit distribution. Even though there were people that wanted to buy the console, Sega didn’t want to sell it, because the more they sold the more they went into the red.

From the perspective of the third parties, they saw that Sega was curbing the sales of the Saturn. The more consoles there were, the more games would be sold. But if console sales were being limited, then this created a serious problem. As they say, poverty dulls the wit. This led to a negative feedback loop.

And this is why the Bernie Stolar wasn't a huge fan of the Saturn people. I know some of ya'll have never got over his canning the Saturn in 97 or 98 but that is why.

To launch a new console, you really need 50-60 billion yen at the least. You have to sell those first million units. If your costs are 30,000 yen per unit, then that comes to 30 billion yen for 1 million units. And you have to design the hardware and create the electronics, make the molds and do the tooling, and this will soon use about 10 billion yen. And then you have to create the games and do advertising. You need about 500-600 people. Without all this, you can’t launch a home console. You can’t do it little by little. You really have to go all in.

Sony had annual sales of 3 trillion yen. They made their own CD-ROM drives. They had their own semiconductor factories. Once when I was talking with Ken Kutaragi [the creator of the PlayStation], he said “Hideki-chan”—he refers to me using the “chan” diminutive—“Hideki-chan, there’s no way you can beat me. Where are you buying your processors? From Hitachi. From Yamaha. What about your CD-ROM drives? You’re buying everything. By buying from Hitachi, Hitachi is profiting. You can’t make anything yourselves. We can make everything ourselves, including custom parts. We have our own factories.” Near Nakashinden, they had a huge factory where they made audio equipment that they were using for the PlayStation. Their cost structure was completely different.

“That’s the way it is, Hideki-chan,” Kutaragi told me. “So quit the hardware business. Why not just do software? We’ll give you favorable treatment.” He wanted us to go third party. We had been going for so long in the hardware business, for better or worse, and to go third party now? We had been half-heartedly successful in America once, and this made it impossible to quit the hardware business. Maybe if the Mega Drive, the Genesis, had been a failure, things would have been different. But we had a strange taste of success.

At that time, Sega’s brand image was incredible. When you powered on a Sega console, ‘SEGA’ would always appear first. Even if it was a third party game from Namco (or anybody else), Sega’s name always appeared first, followed by Namco’s. So anybody that had a Sega console, it didn’t matter what game they played, they would see Sega’s name. This helped plant the Sega brand in peoples’ minds. This was incredibly effective. To go from that to a Sony third party… Well, we had already started so it was too late.

I would have a polite dinner with Kutaragi about once every three months. He’d tell me that because we released a console last time, they would be the ones to do so this time. We are the same age, although he’s two or three months older. I would call him the polite “Kutaragi-san,” although sometimes I’d call him “Ken-chan.” Because I was two or three months younger, he’d say “Hideki-chan, please give up!”

So we released the Saturn, and in the end, it came down to software. It’s obvious, but what do consumers look forward to? They want fun games. And that’s where we failed.

This makes so much sense. Though the chan dig seems to be a bit unnecessary But the Megadrive failed in Japan. So being I guess a half-hearted success in America made Sega want to stick it out? Even though SoJ couldnt really gain any market traction in their own country?