Topic: 20 years ago Sega's biggest blunder occured

Can you guys belive it the Sega Saturn is 20 years old today in NA. Of course the release day will live in infamy for Sega since many have claimed that this day was the nail in the coffin for Sega, and not even the Dreamcast could save it.

Long story short Sega originally announced the Saturn's release date as September 2nd but do to Sony's announce of the Playstation Sega of Japan got scared and bumped up the Saturn's release date to May 11th. Well by doing that it caused alot of third party companies to not be ready for the May 11th date and be six months behind now. Only a few select stores has Saturn's to sell and big chains like Walmart, Best Buy and KB Toys didn't have any or the room for them causing them to lose sales. As a result the companies would stop supporting Sega from developers to retailers. Some retailers and developers even carried it over to the Dreamcast.

So what do you guys think? Did you enjoy the Saturn or was this the downfall of Sega?

Only Sega systems I played was Genesis and Dreamcast.

I think the biggest blunder happened when they chose not to put the video output pins into the expansion port for the Megadrive.

That is when the mess started. (A Mega CD with better video hardware as well would have been a completely different proposition).

SEGA's biggest blunder to me was the 32X. I actually enjoyed playing Saturn and Dreamcast back in the day, in spite of their ill-fated demise.

Yeah, this was a mistake. I wouldn't call it their biggest blunder, but it's definitely up there.

Eh, I dunno. The Saturn was kind of just the next step in Sega's master plan of making themselves irrelevant. Sad part is that the Dreamcast actually got pretty much everything right, but by then it was just too late. I guess it would have just gotten steamrolled by the PS2 like everything else anyway.

But yeah, that Saturn launch was stuff of legends. How to destroy your own brand and make every publisher and retailer hate you: a guide.

On the plus side, it did have the best non-analog controller of all time. Handled like an absolute dream for 2D games.

Sega downfall never happened.

It certainly put the nail in the coffin

watch it pal

Agreed. People might've forgiven Sega for the Saturn's poor western performance if they hadn't released the 32X first.

I've never even seen a Sega Saturn. I knew no one who had one back in the 90s. I'm not even sure it exists.

I bought a Saturn back in 1996 - it came with a demo with Panzer Dragoon and Baku Baku Animal on, and my dad bought Virtua Fighter 2 too for me. I'll always remember it as a pretty good console: it had Resident Evil, the Sega sports game (Sega Worldwide Soccer was the best pre-W.E. football game around) and its fair share of fighters and FPSs.
It also had very cool lightgun games but by that time lightgun games had become stuff for rich kids.
I think nowdays anybody will agree it had a pretty limited game library.
I think Sega's mistake was their inability to capitalize on the success of Sonic. That character was still very popular in Europe, so releasing a new console without a Sonic game was like shooting yourself in the foot.

I loved my Saturn (bought in 1996, still my favourite console ever owned - so many great games on it, I was the only person I knew that owned one) but the launch games were rushed (scrambling to deal with last minute hardware changes) and although they played great looked shoddy especially when compared to their PS equivalents. Virtual Fighter may have been the better game, but Battle Arena Toshinden looked a lot prettier. Less clear cut on which played better, but Daytona (while playing great) looked like ass compared to Ridge Racer and Wipeout. It's telling that Sega later rereleased both games with the graphics fixed, they screwed the games up that much. And with no Sonic game (and none on the horizon other than the poorly received Flicky's Island) SEGA pretty much flushed the brand they had built with the Genesis/Megadrive down the toilet. Some fantastic games came out over the Saturn's life (although I had to rely on importing towards the end for the Capcom Vs. games), but Sony marketed the PS so well from launch that Sega never recovered from their initial stumble.

The reason the Model 2 & Model 3 games were not good enough is the Arcade was miles more powerful. (Same as why stuff like Thunderblade and Galaxy Force 2 was junk on the Megadrive).

SNK & Capcom did a great job (And the Titan games were obviously pretty much perfect ports).

All I remember is the commercial with all the rods and cones in someone's eyes going crazy over how great the graphics were. That commercial was awesome, lol.

Winning Eleven has been around since the mid nineties as International Superstar Soccer. It's even on the SNES.

ISS and Winning Eleven are separate different dev teams.

yeah the two series existed as two separate entities for quite a while, they are not just two different localizations of the same game. The ISS you mention would be Jikkyou World Soccer in Japan.On the other hand, Winning Eleven would become known in EU as ISS PRO, but everybody still calls it Winning Eleven to avoid confusionion.
SWWS on Saturn is right there in the football game olympus with WE2002 and Sensi. Another one of Sega's inexplicable blunders occurred on Dreamcast: letting Silicon Dreams (a studio known for producing the most inaccurate football sims on the market) produce the follow up to their best football game.

I actually love the Saturn. I didn't have a chance to play it at the time, but I picked one up about a year ago and couldn't be happier with it. It may not have done well from a marketing perspective, but it has a great library with amazing exclusives, a great controller, the best 2D graphics for its time, and is a well-built, solid system from a durability standpoint.

I think it's a telling thing that Saturn game prices are skyrocketing on Ebay. The same thing is happening with Gamecube games. It's quality stuff, and although it may not have won the marketing war at the time people are realizing that the games are some of the best of their time.

Segas biggest mistake was having no Sonic games that looked good asides for the remake of Sonic 3d blast, and more important almost ever game was on the Genesis or SNES. So owning an Saturn was deemed pointless. Then when FF7 came around along with Metal Gear, that was it. Resident Evil also called it along with Dino Crisis. SEGA had nothing to compete with asides for Netplay which was limited and they wanted to charge money for.
Kids those days just wanted to play together and play Mario RPG and FF7 and before that was sports games outside and at home; or Mario and Sonic type games. Then their was the Neo-geo, and other consoles as well including the Atari-Jaguar which had an big foot hold on the X-box market.