What Went Wrong With The Sega Saturn?

Were you Team Nintendo or Team Sega in the 90s? Can anyone hope to join the console game today as a viable 4th competitor? 🎮

Sega always had this habit of releasing consoles in-between other console's life cycles, so they always felt like a 1.5 upgrade from previous gen. There were some advantages of being first to market, but this also came with some disadvantages as well. Your competitors know what your retail price and hardware capabilities are ahead of their own launch and can counter with a lower price point and better hardware.

I absolutely loved the Sega Saturn. My older sister's boyfriend sold me his Saturn and games for really good price in around 1995. I was 14 and had a next-gen system with a decent amount of games, and it left such a great gaming mark on my life, that I'll always look back with such fondness on the Saturn. The number of hours I spent playing Virtua Fighter, Albert Odyssey, Daytona USA, Bug, Myst, Nights and others was pretty extraordinary. I also ended up getting a PlayStation and Dreamcast over the next year or two, but there was always something special about the Sega Saturn to me.

The Saturn is genuinely my favourite console of all time. Now I’m not naive, Im not saying it’s the best, but personally this is the one that I love the most. Just at the right time in my life to really hit me and there was something about it being the underdog and the specialness which came with importing games no one knew about. The games just appealed more than most PS stuff too. I loved it so much. I eventually moved onto the N64 when they stopped supporting it but this was the console for me.

I absolutely love this series. I'm a software engineer by trade and I've always had an interest in the history of the industry, so there's something about the format of a well-researched breakdown of an important event that really tickles my brain. Also, excellent biscuit prop work. 10/10, no notes.

I love the Saturn to bits, glad to have one, it's my absolute favorite Sega console.

In 2001, I did a home stay exchange in Tokyo. Dreamcast was long dead by then. My home stay brother had a Saturn with a good selection of games including DBZ Legends. Seeing the Saturn from a Japanese perspective rather than the American view was extremely different

My original release-day Saturn still works and has a place in my gaming heart. Not even close to perfect but there's still just something about it.......

1. No [mainline] Sonic game. 2. The United States market, which was responsible for Genesis' success, was completely ignored.

"We have to do something about the Atari Jaguar!" - Hayao Nakayama: Sega CEO when pushing for the 32X Sega really was the embodiment of the phrase "Ready, Fire, Aim!"

Such a sad story. I was a massive Sega fan in the 90s (still am, in truth), and I actually bought the Dreamcast the day after it was released in the UK (only games console I've ever bought on launch). It was such a groundbreaking system, so far ahead of its time, and I honestly still believe that Sega would have been Sony's main gaming rival for years to come if they hadn't burned so many bridges and tarnished their reputation so badly with the Saturn debacle.

I loved my Sega Saturn. Die Hard arcade, virtua fighter, virtua cop, Sega rally, knights into dreams. Loved it!

Sega’s incompetence and all round jackassery is absolutely mind boggling.

Imagine the atmosphere at Sega after that $299 line.

Segata died for all of us and we must respect and love his sacrifice. Also Dark Saviors is one of the strangest games I ever accidentally played, and I loved it. That and Dragon Force are my favorite memories of this blighted, misguided console.

This was a fantastic, well-researched and incredibly well-presented piece. I never had a Saturn growing up - I had a Mega Drive at launch and didn’t get a new console until midway into the Dreamcast’s life - but a friend of mine did and we spent hours playing Sega Rally at home. Weirdly, we also spent a lot of time playing Command & Conquer on it…

Even though I grew up with Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 as a kid, I've been getting into older Sega games as of the past 10 years and Saturn has to be one of my favorites for some of its fun, unique, and underrated games that don't get as much recognition that I feel they deserve.

This video showed up as a YouTube recommendation, but as a Sega Lord X viewer and a Sega fan in general it's not hard to decipher what went wrong. However, I still love the Saturn and especially the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast will always live on.

I barely even knew the Saturn was a thing. By the time anybody I knew had even talked about it, it was already gone from store shelves. I saw a few copies of its games at a second hand store, but that's about it. Later on in life I met exactly one person that had owned one and talked about a couple of their favorite games on the platform like Guardian Heroes and Dragon Force. Which is sad because having gone back and looked at it, it really had some pretty good games on it! It's not like the Jaguar that deserved its summary execution.

The thing you brought up in the video that I thought was an EXCELLENT CRITIQUE of the general perception of the Saturn and its software AT THE TIME (at least, here in the USA) was that the PlayStation and Nintendo were seemingly pushing things FORWARD with games like Super Mario 64, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Metal Gear Solid, Wipeout, Twisted Metal, Gran Turismo, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, etc. ALL THESE GAMES felt like a PROPER 3D EVOLUTION of what came before where Sega seemed to be very much “stuck in the past” making games that were ALSO high-quality and had a great “pick-up-and-play” factor to them, but they were also firmly rooted in that “arcade/coin-op design mentality” which made them GREAT for the few hours they lasted but they just didn’t offer as much longevity and substance as the “heavy hitters” on the PS1 and N64. It’s like you look at stuff like Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy VII on the PS1 or Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time on the N64 versus like Daytona Racing and Virtua Cop on the Saturn and it made Saturn games look QUAINT and ANTIQUATED by comparison (not that they weren’t GOOD GAMES, but they just kind of had this perception of, “ohhh, look—an arcade shooter and racer and some fighting games that’ll last you a couple hours of playtime for a single session UNLESS YOU REPLAY THEM OVER AND OVER AND OVER—that’s CUTE”).