It’s Out There: The Story of Saturn
excerpt from the book, published August 2017
In the immediate lead-up to “Saturnday”, the hype of the gaming public reached a fever pitch. Good word of mouth and encouraging reviews, not to mention a $60 million advertising campaign
[1], had done their part to inform the public of the impending 32-bit revolution. If that and the solid-looking launch lineup weren’t enough, the impending release of the first 3D installation in the world-famous Sonic the Hedgehog series could have easily carried the affair on its back. It is safe to say that most of the people camped overnight outside KB Toys and Electronics Boutiques across the US and Canada on the night of September 1st were there for the Blue Blur more than anything else. But Sega of America would never complain.
When the doors opened, gamers and harried parents both flocked to the displays and the counters, finding not quite enough units to go around. In twenty-four hours, the entire first shipment of 300,000 consoles would find itself sold out, which might seem wild in light of the fact that buyers could have waited a week to spend $100 less on the PlayStation. That was the power of pack-in games at work, as the inclusion of “Sonic 4” bundled with the console more or less made up the difference in respect to the PlayStation, which would not release with any pack-ins.
[2] Sega of America had capitalized on Americans’ sheer enthusiasm for their prickly protagonist, repeating their Genesis/“Sonic the Hedgehog” bundle success from a few years before – this time in spades.
A strong stable of additional launch titles and continued Sonic hype would continue to drive Saturn sales once the next shipment arrived, coinciding with the PlayStation launch on September 9th. Sony would briskly sell 120,000 units by the end of its own launch day, a respectable number driven by positive reviews for its flagship launch titles “Ridge Racer” and “Tekken”, but it was clear they had been bested yet again in an apparent reflection of Saturn’s earlier successes in Japan. The scene was repeated once more in miniature a month later, when both consoles were released at the end of September in Europe. As the holidays drew closer, it was clear that Steve Race’s confident predictions were wrong: Sega had beat the odds yet again.
Sega Saturn North America launch titles [3]
from Wikipedia
- Astal (Sega CS)
- Battle Arena Toshinden (Tamsoft)
- Black Fire (NovaLogic)
- Bug! (Realtime Associates) [4]
- Clockwork Knight (Sega CS1)
- Cyber Speedway (Nextech)
- Daytona USA (Sega AM2)
- Doom (id Software)
- Dragon Warrior VI (Heartbeat/Enix)
- Ghen War (Jumpin’ Jack)
- Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder (Sega AM1)
- Madden NFL ‘96 (High Score/EA)
- Myst (Sunsoft)
- NBA Jam Tournament Edition (Iguana Entertainment/Acclaim)
- NHL ‘96 (High Score/EA)
- Panzer Dragoon (Team Andromeda)
- Parodius (Konami)
- Pebble Beach Golf Links (T&E Soft)
- Phantasy Star: Age of Strife (Sega RPG Production)
- Rayman (Ubisoft)
- Roar of Thunder (Hudson)
- Robotica (Micronet)
- Sega Rally Championship (Sega AM3)
- Shanghai: Triple Threat (Activision)
- Shining Wisdom (Sonic! Software Planning)
- Shinobi Legions (Sega CS2/Tose)
- Sonic the Hedgehog 4 (Sonic Team)
- Street Fighter: The Movie (Capcom)
- Virtua Fighter (Sega AM2)
- Virtua Racing (Time Warner Interactive)
- Virtual Hydlide (T&E Soft)
- World Series Baseball (Sega Sports)
Console War ‘95 - The Launch Titles
excerpts from a Sega fanblog, retrieved 21 September 2023
Platformers
Following up on their last hugely successful Sonic game would prove to be a challenging task for Sonic Team, and even more so on this new 32-bit hardware. The early stages of development soured the project for Yuji Naka, who would go on to say that he was not especially proud of his work on “Sonic the Hedgehog 4”. It might just be that his heart was not in it, as Naka was already thinking ahead to his next project, “Nights into Dreams”. Other Sonic Team members would recall it as a lopsided development cycle, with a beginning plagued by bugs and turns of ill fortune, from the coffee machine exploding the day that Sega top brass visited the studio to the source code of the game almost being lost due to a technical fault in early 1995. Fortunately, the “Hedgehog Curse” would be broken; after this incident, the remainder of development was remarkably smooth, and would be remembered fondly by many of Sonic Team.
The story of “Sonic 4” picks up on the time travel trends last seen in “Sonic the Hedgehog 3 CD” for the Mega Genesis. Having successfully stolen the Chaos Emeralds at the beginning of the game, the devilish Dr. Robotnik uses their power to break time itself in his last desperate attempt to stop Sonic the Hedgehog, by going back before their first confrontation to destroy the earlier Sonic with his advanced technology. With the whole world fluctuating rapidly between past and present, Sonic and his buddies Tails and Knuckles are sent racing through bizarre landscapes including a Precambrian volcano field, the age of the dinosaurs, and ancient Atlantis, defeating Badniks all the way. Along with the three heroes that Sonic fans knew so well, the game would also mark the first appearance of Team Chaotix, including Espio the Chameleon, Vector the Crocodile, and Charmy the Bee, who are rescued from captivity by Knuckles early in the game and join the fight against Robotnik.
[5]
Ultimately, having recovered the Chaos emeralds, Super Sonic dukes it out with the Doc in a dramatic battle, ending with Robotnik’s latest mecha breaking up and sinking into a whirlpool in a stormy ocean, a maelstrom caused by the time rifts backfiring. In the face of this more final defeat, Sonic wonders if this is really the end of Robotnik, but puts it out of mind to enjoy a beach party with his friends and enjoy the peaceful world they created.
In gameplay terms, the player alternates between Sonic and his friends on different missions. Sonic’s missions took inspiration from the half-pipe bonus levels in “Sonic the Hedgehog 2”, starting off in a side-scrolling view before the hedgehog takes a right or left turn, after which the player would be free to dodge around the track with the camera following him from behind. Dramatic rises and falls in the path gave a convincing feeling of speed, but for a taste of true third-dimensional gameplay, players would need to wait for the boss at the end of each zone, where Sonic and friends could move freely around a circular arena while dodging attacks. By contrast, Tails, Knuckles, and Charmy’s levels would have more verticality and traditional platforming.
While the characters, tracks and platforms were all polygonal, the backdrops were parallax scrolling 2D paintings, with occasional objects and animals close to the track (such as the
Brachiosaurus in Jurassic World Zone
[6]) being fully modeled. The game contains several FMV cutscenes, without character voices but instead with text on the screen to indicate character dialogue; scrolling boxes would perform the same purpose outside of cutscenes. The choice to not add voiced dialogue was ultimately a question of space on the disc, which was pushed to its limit by the game’s ambitious scope. Some criticized the choice not to take advantage of the move to the CD medium in this way, but others were relieved, feeling that it would have been a little weird to hear the Sonic characters chatting audibly. Sonic would find his voice in later games in the series, of course, but players would at least hear the characters exclaiming while jumping, attacking, or taking damage.
The CD medium was used to its full advantage in the realm of music, but the choice of how to soundtrack the game proved a difficult one for Sonic Team. An orchestral score was much desired, but the cost involved ultimately ruled it out. The final soundtrack instead took inspiration from house music, with synthetic noises playing on the game’s sci-fi themes and a thumping bassline to add to the feeling of speed and energy. Sega of America considered a grungy rock soundtrack as a replacement for the NA market, but Sega of Japan put their foot down on the matter, and “Sonic 4” would ultimately release with the same soundtrack in all regions.
Posters everywhere boldly advertised the game, showing a familiar red cap being left in the dust. “Sorry Mario,” they boasted, “you’re too slow!” These celebrated the milestone of Sonic arriving in the 3D landscape well before his Nintendo rival.
The critical reception was overwhelmingly positive. Despite occasional frame drops in the fastest sequences, the game otherwise ran smoothly at 30 FPS and looked phenomenal for the time, albeit rough by the standards of later Saturn games. A few critics sighed at the fact that the game was mostly “on rails” and did not permit the player to fully explore a 3D world, accompanied by chuckles in gaming magazines about players spending most of the game staring at Sonic’s butt.
[7] But for most players this limited locomotion wasn’t much of a negative. The gameplay itself was fun and fast, just what Sonic fans were expecting. It would become the console’s first million-seller, then later multi-million seller, helped along by its pack-in status and the hedgehog’s enduring popularity. While superseded in gamer’s hearts by later, more polished 3D entries, it is still remembered as a classic today.
Despite this, Yuji Naka and his colleague Naoto Ohshima were both eager to move on from Sonic, feeling they had done all they could with the Blue Blur and overstayed their time with the property. They would move on to “Nights into Dreams” as soon as “Sonic 4” development wrapped, leaving many to wonder what sort of future Sonic would have.
While the other first-party platformers that made it to launch day all had their fans, particularly the humorous “Bug!” and the fanciful “Clockwork Knight”, it was generally agreed that both were rendered dead on arrival in terms of technological advancement, Sonic having blazed past them. The Ubi Soft platformer “Rayman” also out-competed its 2D counterpart, “Astal”, which while a gorgeous and quite solid game did not have nearly as much content. Though “Sonic 4” was the obvious leader, “Rayman” still surprised many, who were playing it for the first time despite its original release on the Atari Jaguar earlier that year. It would go on to spark the beginning of a successful franchise.
Fighters
Sega’s own “Virtua Fighter” led its charge into the Fifth Generation fighting-game space, just as it had done in arcades before. Compared with the arcade original, players were impressed by the texture-mapped character models as well as its faithful translation of the arcade experience.
[8] Critics compared it favorably with “Battle Arena Toshinden” by Tamsoft, a cross-platform title, but the matchup against Namco’s “Tekken” on the PlayStation was less clear. Many pointed out that, gussied up graphics or not, “Virtua Fighter” still felt a bit outdated when up against the newer game on Sony’s machine. It was received well by the gaming public as well, albeit soon overshadowed by later releases.
Racing games
Ever since the release of “Virtua Racing” in arcades in 1992, Sega had been a leader in pushing racing games to the next level. But with the debut of the fantastic “Ridge Racer” from Namco on the Sony PlayStation, it seemed like there was a worthy challenger. Sega riposted against this new challenger with three titles of its own, including an expanded port of “Virtua Racing” by Time Warner Interactive
[9], a home version of “Daytona USA”
[10], and “Sega Rally Championship”. Between these three and “Ridge Racer”, the latter was ultimately considered the best-looking game, though Sega’s assortment of racers gave it a serious run for its money. By sheer quantity, at least, Sega were the victors.
RPGs
RPG fans were disappointed with the early PlayStation lineup, which carried no RPGs in the American market at all. Sega fans would be far happier with their own selection, as Sega of America, while a bit skeptical of the genre, had responded to positive feedback for the Mega Genesis release of “Phantasy Star IV” by greenlighting three RPGs to be localized from Japan. “Phantasy Star: Age of Strife”, the first 32-bit entry in one of Sega’s premier series, would prove to be the flagship of this valiant offensive, and fans would not be disappointed.
With the story line of the first four games having wrapped up in the previous entry, “Age of Strife” takes players out of the Algol system for the first time, spanning a wider part of the same galaxy in the third millennium, the titular age of instability and war following the events of “Phantasy Star IV”. The game follows the story of Flair Trill, a cargo pilot who finds himself wrapped up in the quest to prevent the rise to power of a dictator who intends to end the Age of Strife with fire and steel.
While still 2D in its overworld segments, the 3D dungeon-crawling segments of the game, inspired by those of the first “Phantasy Star”, would be widely praised, and the art direction of the game was considered stunning overall. All things considered, it was a great transition to the new generation for the series, and many would consider it the best game out of the starting lineup.
Not to be left out, another venerable RPG series would come exclusively to the Saturn in time for the launch: “Dragon Warrior VI” (“Dragon Quest VI” in Japan) from Enix. Enticed over by the benefits of CD storage capacity for music and game worlds, as well as the opportunity to tweak the nose of their rival Square who seemed set to hop into the Sony camp, Enix would in fact go on to primarily favor the Sega Saturn for the duration of the Fifth Generation console war. Unlike “Age of Strife”, “Dragon Warrior VI” would have few 3D elements to speak of, aside from some monsters. These would be praised, but some in the gaming press would grumble that it looked little better than a Super Nintendo game. To those who took time with it, it was considered another winner in the Saturn RPGs column.
[11]
“Virtual Hydlide” by T&E Soft would receive a more mixed response, with its graphics praised by most, but its gameplay praised by few.
[12] Most gamers overlooked it in favor of the stronger offerings by Sega, and today copies are quite rare.
Shooters
The headliner in the shooters department was, by far, “Panzer Dragoon”. Developed by the comparatively new Team Andromeda at Sega, this futuristic rail shooter was widely admired for the strength of its gameplay and beautiful graphics, if sometimes with the caveat that the game didn’t have much mechanical depth besides. Immediately after its development wrapped, Team Andromeda split its efforts to work on two follow-ups in the same world.
It was joined by a new game from Hudson, acquired by Sega in 1993. Hudson Soft had last developed a game for a Sega platform in late 1993 with “Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys”, which released exclusively on the Mega Genesis, although they had also recently ported their excellent shoot ‘em up “Lords of Thunder” to that same system in early 1995. Now they were ready for another go with “Roar of Thunder”, a sequel to the aforementioned. Once again, Duran takes up arms against the demonic legions with an array of magical projectiles. Although the story was considered a bit thin, the game excelled as a shoot ‘em up, and its use of 3D characters and locations were considered highly impressive at the time.
Shoot ‘em up fans would also be pleased to see Konami’s “Parodius” finally make it stateside in the form of a two-part compilation of their hits “Parodius Da” and “Gokujou Parodius”. Konami had started to foster a stronger relationship with Sega since the launch of the Mega Genesis, with this bizarre but fun shooter being the first of many hits that would come from them to the Saturn. Thanks to this semi-exclusivity, PlayStation fans would need to wait until early 1996 for their own copies.
[13]
Inevitably, id Software’s “Doom”, that groundbreaking first-person shooter, also made the jump over. The port was generally well-regarded and would open the way for many “Doom-likes” on the Saturn over the next few years.
Sports games
Although sports fans were for the most part content to keep buying 16-bit editions of their favorite series, the appeal of polygons drew more than a few for the launches of both the Saturn and the PlayStation. “Madden NFL ‘96” was not technically the first 32-bit game in the series, that being “John Madden Football” (1994) for the 3DO, but that wasn’t exactly a hot seller. The game arrived right around the start of the 1995-96 American football season on both Saturn and PlayStation and sold a hilarious amount of copies. It is still well-regarded despite the inevitable clumsiness inherent to early 3D sports titles.
[14] 3D hockey and baseball games, and an updated “NBA Jam”, would round out the early Saturn sports stable, although it no longer had a strong lead over the competition with the “Joe Montana Football” series seemingly in limbo.
Conclusion
All in all, the Saturn enjoyed one of the strongest launch lineups of the 90s, and few gamers found anything to complain about in the variety and quality of the games available, as evidenced by the console’s healthy sales through the end of 1995. PlayStation being put on the back foot and forced to keep up with Sega was definitely a good sign for the blue titan, which had justified its own bravado while making Sony’s look premature…
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[1] - Compare with OTL’s $50 million campaign, which included some of the
weirdest damn commercials I’ve ever seen.
[2] - IOTL, the pack-in game at Saturn’s May 11th launch was “Virtua Fighter”.
[3] - This list may seem a little inflated at first glance, but this is basically every Saturn game that should have been released around its original September 2nd launch window IOTL, plus several extras on account of Sega not bungling their third-party relationships ITTL. The PlayStation’s NA launch titles list is
similar to OTL, but with the addition of “Madden NFL ‘96” and “NHL ‘96”.
If a game isn’t mentioned in the paragraphs below the list, feel free to assume that it is largely unchanged from OTL.
[4] - “Bug!” was famously conceived originally as an American-made Sonic game when it was clear that the Saturn wouldn’t have a Sonic game at launch. SOJ put the kibosh on that idea and it was reworked into this original concept instead. ITTL, “Bug!” arrives nevertheless. Realtime Associates, who were always most at home in this genre, just developed it anyway. It was probably conceived during the troubled early production of “Sonic 4” when it wasn’t certain if Sonic would make it to the launch after all.
[5] - “Knuckles’ Chaotix” for the 32X obviously never happened ITTL, but was canned after the character concepts for these three were finalized.
[6] - No relation, but the Brachiosaurus was probably picked because of its famous appearance in
Jurassic Park (1993).
[7] - OTL’s “Sonic's ass game”, starring a certain bandicoot, will be covered in a future update.
[8] - It has been known for years that, despite launching the Saturn with the original pack-in version of “Virtua Fighter” with all its glitches and textureless polygons, Sega had the fixed and prettied up “Virtua Fighter Remix” pretty much ready to go by E3 1995. Their decision to withhold this improved version of the game until later baffled many. ITTL, the Saturn is comfortably able to launch in North America with the “Remix” version instead.
[9] - IOTL, Time Warner Interactive didn’t exactly
port “Virtua Racing”. In fact, Sega refused to give them the source code for the arcade version and they had to build it from scratch instead. All things considered, it was still a great version of the game, but players noticed the difference in how vehicles handled. This weird blunder manages to be avoided ITTL, allowing the game to release in time for the launch.
[10] - A smoother product than OTL’s original Saturn “Daytona”, basically resembling “Championship Circuit Edition” with its 30 FPS and reduced pop-in issues.
[11] - Released on the Super Famicom IOTL, the series’ early transition away from cartridge games is the work of dedicated schmoozing by Sega and money.
[12] - Believe it or not, this is as OTL. The game is mostly a meme nowadays, but apparently people were really easy to impress in 1995 as long as you put polygons in front of them.
[13] - This two-part “Parodius” collection was released on Saturn and PS1 in Japan IOTL, but despite being localized to English for the EU it was never released in North America. The reasons why are still quite mysterious. ITTL it manages to make it, but Sega gets first dibs.
[14] - This game didn’t actually make it to the next-gen consoles in OTL’s 1995, though God only knows why.
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There you have it. The changes made by Sega so far reap big dividends here, but it's not over yet. The 1995 holiday season is coming up next.
