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author: admin
generator: pandoc
title: Sega Saturn
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admin
2013-01-24T08:02:22+00:00
I've always been fascinated by Sega's video game consoles. Only a few of
them succeeded, and among them there are just as many failures as
successes. So many of them were either horribly designed, poorly
launched or woefully supported that it's almost impossible not to wonder
how such a big corporation--one time industry leaders--managed to make
such eccentric decisions. My first instinct was to conclude that the
choices Sega made as a corporation bore the mark of a considerable
amount of creative freedom: perhaps there was, structurally, within the
company, more room to move in terms of experimenting with ideas. After
looking closer at what happened in the video game industry between the
years 1989 and 2001, I was surprised to find that I was absolutely
wrong. In that decade-odd period of time, the home console 'region' of
the video game industry was a veritable hurricane of corporate politics:
inter- and intra-organisational factional warfare. The entire industry
was up in arms in a struggle for prestige and financial supremacy, and
Sega was caught up in it. One such example of the tumult video game
companies went through during this period is the Sega *Saturn*. The
politics involved in the jump to 3D graphics in video games was
difficult for everyone involved, none more so than Sega, and in what
follows, the reader will find the definitive explanation for the reason
why Sega released such an incredible (although not totally unsuccessful)
mess as the *Saturn*.
The *Saturn* is a perfect example of a complete mess. Sega did nothing
to foster goodwill for the platform by launching it four months earlier
in the US than originally scheduled, at their 1995 E3 keynote, in an
abortive attempt to one-up Sony, alienating developers and retailers
alike. If industry groups weren't turned away, they were forced to incur
great costs to secure their cooperation with the company. Gamers were
presented with a very small number of launch titles (and a lengthy wait
for any more), and would be set back \$500 to purchase a console, which,
adjusted only for inflation, equals almost exactly 800 Australian
dollars in today's terms. Add to this the previous debacles associated
with the Sega CD and 32X, and you have, at the consumer end, a critical
and financial nightmare.
{.alignright
width="100" height="130"}How did it come to this? Rewind to late
80s-early 90s where you have Nintendo and Sony collaborating on the
soon-to-be-released 16-bit console. Here is a match made in heaven.
Nintendo, true to form, desires to control every facet of the
proto-CD-ROM medium's distribution by encasing everything in a
proprietary plastic caddy (echoes of the 64DD here). Sony wants the
absolute opposite: licensing for the technology for anyone would pay.
Sony gets up at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1991 and publicly
announces this without prior notice to Nintendo. Infuriated, Nintendo
cuts the (as it were) R&D umbilical cord and announces that it has
instead signed on with Philips, the creator of the CD-ROM, for the
development of an optical medium. The outcome of this was two-fold:
Nintendo's efforts with Philips were disastrous (NB. the 'full-motion
video' Zelda game for the CDi, in all its hilarity), and the resulting
legal quagmire to which Nintendo was subjected ensured that it would be
forced to totally rebuild its next console, and base it on the age-old
cartridge medium --- not in-itself a bad outcome, in my opinion --- and,
secondly, to the horror of the then mainstays of the video game
industry, Sony would be prompted to enter the video game console market.
It's important to recount the entry of Sony into production of video
game consoles because the Sega *Saturn* was, in effect, a reaction to
the Sony *PlayStation*. Sony had connections in the third-party
industry, and they exploited them. The *PlayStation* was built around an
improved version of a processor that Sony had been manufacturing for
Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations for years. The specific details of
the CPU are irrelevant; the important thing to take away from the
to understand (therefore easy to program--and, prospectively, would be
well supported in terms of programming libraries), and, for its time,
very powerful.
Sega's upper echelons were rocked, upon learning of this information,
when leaked. Sega had, for decades now, been an organisation heavily
rooted in arcade gaming, and the *Saturn* was, like the Mega Drive
before it, to be based on the architecture of an arcade board (in fact
it's worth mentioning that the reader might find the ease with which
Sega shoe-horned the Mega Drive into its case very interesting). The
ultimate 2D console, but, in its original iteration, was easily eclipsed
by Sony's offering in raw 3D processing power.
[![P-HidekiSato\[1\]](http://doubledashgames.com/subdomains/exportingblogs/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/p-hidekisato1.jpg){.alignleft
.size-full .wp-image-659 width="96"
height="120"}](http://doubledashgames.com/subdomains/exportingblogs/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/p-hidekisato1.jpg)Sega's
President, Hayao Nakayama, ordered that the *Saturn*'s original hardware
design be completely scrapped, and rebuilt from scratch. The person
responsible for virtually all of the design of Sega's hardware, Hideki
Sato, was sent back to the drawing board. He came back with the
parallel-processor based platform that the *Saturn* eventually became.
The concept behind this architecture was fairly radical, and, given that
Sato and his team of engineers (the 'Away Team') had virtually no time,
it was all assembled out of off-the-shelf components.
All of this was occurring at the same time as a bitter struggle between
Sega's main office and Japanese division, and the company's North
American division. Sega of America was then headed up by Tom Kalinske,
who had previously lead the toy company Mattel. When he was parachuted
into his position in Sega by Nakayama in 1990, he knew nothing about
video games, but he was a marketing professional: he instituted
aggressive advertising (Sega Does What Nintendon't) and business methods
('spend into a profit') that were employed in both Europe and the USA
that well and truly rustled the jimmies of his Japanese counterparts.
Kalinske's decisions were, for a time, insanely successful, winning Sega
an enormous chunk of the Western video game market, but it rewarded the
company with mountains of debt, a sour taste for Japanese business
ethics. When Kalinske and his council of elders found themselves
thoroughly unimpressed with a demonstration of Hideki's team's efforts,
instead suggesting to Nakayama that Sega instead construct a console
with a unified processing structure based on *another* chip from Silicon
Graphics, they were silenced. Against Kalinske's protestations, also,
Nakayama discontinued Sega's support for the Mega Drive in 1996, when
the platform was still performing very well (compare with the Apple II).
Sega of America was forced into launching whatever Sega of Japan wanted,
whenever it wanted.
{width="300"
height="210"}
The result of the *Saturn*'s parallel-processing architecture, on the
other hand, was (justly or unjustly) a nightmare for game development.
The hardware assembled by the Away Team would have easily outclassed the
but it was based on the idea of parallel processing, something which was
not (and still isn't) very commonly understood or employed in video
games. By comparison, Sony's console was based on a
unified architecture, and, critically, the SDK released for
Sony's \_PlayStation \_provided for development in C, higher level of
programming than what had been the traditional language of game
development, assembly language. This coincided with a broad generational
shift in the industry to higher-level programming, which made the skills
of programmers from a great many other disciplines suitable for game
development. Old hands might have looked on in derision at this virtual
army of less experienced programmers gravitating to the *PlayStation*,
but the unified architecture and readily-understood SDK of the
by contrast, by and large required low-level assembly language to access
its potential; real programming genius. There was indeed genius expended
in a fair number of *Saturn* titles, but, when it came to finance, it
was too little too late.
The *Saturn* was discontinued only three years after its US release, hot
on the heels of the Sega *Dreamcast*. By that time, Sega had suffered
crippling losses, sacked almost a third of its global staff, and Hayao
Nakayama --- among other company leaders --- had tendered his
resignation. Sega's corporate structure was almost entirely flushed out
and replaced with new faces. However, like its predecessor,
the *Dreamcast* would also fail to turn Sega some success. Ignoring the
significance that the lack of a DVD drive would have made with respect
to the *Dreamcast*,\_ \_the enormous amount of consumer goodwill that
Sony had built with the original *PlayStation*, and the equally
horrifying amount that Sega had squandered with the *Saturn* (let alone
with the *Sega/Mega CD* and *32X*) guaranteed that the launch of
the *PlayStation 2* would blow the *Dreamcast* out of the water. Sega
was more or less finished in the home console business.
The fantastic thing about this whole story is that console that Sega
finally produced was not based on any rational or scientific reflection:
it was based on political machinations. Many have labelled the decisions
of Sega of Japan to force their American counterparts to pull rank
'corporate arrogance', and I think I agree with that assessment. Despite
that, though, the Saturn is such an interesting piece of hardware.
Furthermore, there are a plethora of platform-exclusive games that are
both innovative in concepts and in programming. Take, for example, the
game *Powerslave*/*Exhumed*, a first-person shooter (something of a Doom
clone) that featured spectacular graphics for its time because its
programmer, Ezra Dreisbach, decided to take the time to get to know the
console's architecture. Read all about it
[here](http://www.segasaturn.co.uk/dd/interviews/ezra_dreisbach.html).
To become better acquainted with some of the games that defined the
popular life of the Saturn, see Racketboy's article
[here](http://www.racketboy.com/retro/games-that-defined-sega-saturn).
The *Saturn* is worth your time *because* it failed. Not because it
provided Sega and onlookers with a lesson, but because it avoided the
inauthenticity that so frequently accompanies success. And I think that
that might go the same for anything that fails.
I have the
[write-up](http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index.php?page=segabase+saturn)
on *[Eidolon's Inn](http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index.php)* to
thank for this post. As you'll no doubt discover if you read both this
article and the six-page one at *Eidolon's*, much of this article is
simplify paraphrased and/or retold. I make no claim that any part of
this post that resembles *Eidolon's *is original work. If you have some
time, take a look around. The frankness with which the multiple authors
describe their projects and musings (a 4-bit handheld console called
the *[Jaguar](http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index.php?page=Jaguar)*,
complete with its CPU's instruction set) is pretty cool.