įor most of the 1990s Sega of Japan and Sega of America were at loggerheads. ![]() Analysts were predicting that only 4 million Saturn consoles would be sold globally (versus 10.9 N64s and 10.8 PlayStations), and production was slowed to 3 million units for 1997 versus the originally planned 4 million. Īfter the holiday shopping season in 1996, the Saturn had fallen behind the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 in North America and Europe, prompting calls from Sega of America's senior management for a new platform. Sega had dismissed the idea of expanding the Saturn by mid-1997, after finding it could not deliver meaningful improvements for a reasonable price. ![]() Other factors may have included a delayed Nintendo 64, which would have been the main competitor to the Eclispe. The Eclipse project would have come into fruition in 1996, but is thought to have been held back due to poor response from third-party developers wary of a second Sega 32X debacle. Eclipse was thought to be either a stand-alone system or a unit designed to make use of the Saturn's expansion port. įrom as early as Winter 1995, a persistent rumour suggested that Sega were planning a "64-bit" add-on to the Saturn, codenamed "Eclipse" - something which was publicly denied by Sega. Sega were said to have been aware of the Saturn's poor performance and were hoping to regain ground by February 1996. Conflicting reports in fact suggest that by the end of 1995, 3.4 million PlayStation consoles had been sold worldwide versus 3 million Saturns, Sony likely having overtaken Sega much earlier. But the momentum was with Sony, and Sega quickly lost its commanding position over the summer. By April of that year, mostly on the shoulders of Japan, the Saturn has been cited as owning 51% of the worldwide 32-bit console market. In a sense this meant that while Saturn development was technically feasible, prior to this date developers were forced to do a great deal of hardware research and library building of their own, slowing down game development considerably.īut despite all of these faults, worldwide Saturn sales were very strong up until the middle of 1996. It was, however, very difficult for third-parties to meet expectations during its first six months of sale, leading to Sega AM2's Tadahiro Kawamura creating the Sega Graphics Library (SGL), under orders to ease arcade-to-Saturn conversions by Yu Suzuki.īy mid-1995 the old Sega Saturn Programming Boxes were replaced with cheaper CartDev units, and shipped to developers alongside an SGI Indy workstation, Softimage, SNASM2 and AM2's new SGL software. While it is certainly true that it handles 2D graphics better than much of its competition, every Sega game demonstrated on the hardware during its development - even in Japan where the 3D craze was not as significant - utilised real-time 3D graphics, and were pushed as selling points of the system. ![]() It is a common misconception that the Sega Saturn was developed to be a 2D games machine. While significant volumes of Virtua Fighter were sold during its first few months of sale in Japan, it was a game not without its criticism, with many citing the game's "glitchy polygons", possibly caused by a rushed development timeline but more likely a lack of understanding of how to effectively render 3D graphics on the hardware. In many ways the Saturn was on the back-foot from day one. 2.1.4 Bernie Stolar and market presumptions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |