Want to kick off 2022 with an amazing revelation? How about this? Virtua Fighter 3 might have made its way to the Nintendo 64, had former Sega of America boss Bernie Stolar gotten his way.
This particular bombshell comes from former games journalist James Mielke, who is now a producer at Limited Run Games. We need to travel all the way back to the year 1999 for this one; a time when Sega was still actively supporting its Dreamcast console but was at something of a crossroads. The company was in dire financial straits and, unbeknownst to fandom at the time, it was close to taking the long, painful step into the world of third-party publishing. However, the official announcement of this seismic shift wouldn't come until early in 2001, and in 1999 – the year the Dreamcast launched in North America – there was certainly no shortage of people who were utterly convinced that Sega would remain a hardware maker forevermore.
The crazy thing is that to my knowledge Bernie just did the deal with Greg Fischbach, without getting the approval from Sega of Japan
It would seem that Stolar – who, prior to joining Sega, was the first executive vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America and was instrumental in launching the original PlayStation in the US – was already planning ahead, because, according to Mielke, he had brokered a deal with Acclaim CEO Greg Fischbach to bring select Sega titles to rival systems.
"I was previews editor at Gamespot in San Francisco, and I had a reliable source within Acclaim," Mielke explains. "One day, in the thick of the early Dreamcast era, my source told me a behind-the-scenes story about a crazy day at work, where s**t had basically hit the fan, because Bernie Stolar had made a deal with Greg Fiscbach to port Virtua Fighter 3 and Crazy Taxi to Nintendo 64, which technically speaking just sounded bonkers as that platform would have been unable to produce anything resembling Model 3 levels of quality."
Amazingly, it seems that Stolar went rogue for this particular agreement. "The crazy thing is that to my knowledge Bernie just did the deal with Greg Fischbach, without getting the approval from Sega of Japan – they had a contract executed and everything. From how I remember the scenario, Sega Japan got wind of this and was naturally like 'there's no way we're doing this'. I don't remember if this rebuke came from upper management or from the dev teams coming back and saying 'this is not even possible' but the short version was Stolar being told he would have to break that contract because there was no way it could happen. A colleague at Sega of America — who worked two floors above us in San Francisco — corroborated this story to me, as well."
Mielke's recollections give valuable context to a rather odd situation that took place around the same time. Remember when Acclaim's name appeared on the box for Ferrari F355 on the Dreamcast – one of Sega's big AAA titles for 2000? It seems we now have a partial explanation for this weirdness. "Whether it was due to contractual reasons or just a face-saving exercise, Bernie ended up letting Acclaim publish Ferrari F355 on Dreamcast as compensation for not getting those two pieces of fantasy vapourware," says Mielke. It's worth noting, too, that Acclaim was working on its own Ferrari video game at the time – Ferrari 360 Challenge – so there's a chance that could be another reason for its getting the rights to publish F355 Challenge (thanks to Games Asylum on Twitter for pointing this out). Acclaim's game – developed by UK-based Brain in a Jar Games – would never see the light of day, apparently due to escalating development costs and undisclosed issues with the license itself. Acclaim would get to publish more Sega games, too – but more on that shortly.
So, why wasn't Stolar's deal with Acclaim reported at the time, you might ask? Well, Mielke wanted to, but it wasn't quite as easy as that. "Amazingly, my source was going to let me run this story – or at least wasn't going to stop me – but I was not going to name my source, firstly because I protect my sources, and secondly, they wouldn't have been long for Acclaim if this was in any way connected with them. Somehow, the managing editor of Gamespot, despite her journalistic credentials which she reminded me of fairly frequently, demanded to name my source or else she was going to kill this story. Her argument was that without the source, this was basically an unsubstantiated rumour, which didn’t make any sense as they do this in sports and political reporting all the time. If I recall correctly, Gamespot ran a bastardized, almost apologetic, version of the story, because it gained zero traction, as no one actually remembers this."
Whether it was due to contractual reasons or just a face-saving exercise, Bernie ended up letting Acclaim publish Ferrari F355 on Dreamcast as compensation
For additional context, it's worth pointing out that around the same time, Mielke's fellow Gamespot staffer and long-time friend Sam Kennedy ran a piece that hinted that Sega was considering a future away from hardware. "Sega of America had invited myself and Sam to a CSK/Sega charity event where we got to interview Sega and CSK chairman Isao Okawa. At the time, Sega was one of the Big Three, and this was before they went multi-platform," Mielke explains. "He had recently injected a huge sum of his personal fortune into Sega to ensure the Dreamcast’s success, so I asked him point-blank if Sega would continue on in the console market, despite the increasing challenge coming from both PlayStation and Nintendo. He responded quite directly, saying 'hardware is not Sega's future.' When Sam ran the story on Gamespot, I distinctly remember Sega fansites explicitly challenging this news, basically saying 'It's obvious this was something that was lost in translation,' even though I was actually there and there was no mistaking what was said."
Sega even went as far as to respond to the report, saying “perhaps there was a mistranslation of what Okawa stated in Japanese.” Despite the signs being plain for all to see (Sonic Pocket Adventure had come out on the Neo Geo Pocket Color in 1999, for example), there was still a surprising amount of faith in the fact that Sega would remain a hardware manufacturer — with an SOA rep going so far as to tell Gamespot "we definitely do have another hardware coming.”
As we all know, that faith was misplaced. Sega would officially announce that it was exiting the hardware business in January 2001. And guess what? A PlayStation 2 port of Crazy Taxi would appear in May of that same year – courtesy of Acclaim. 18 Wheeler followed in November (it would come to GameCube in 2002) and F355 Challenge came the following year, also published by Acclaim, and there were apparently plans for Acclaim to bring Zombie Revenge to PS2 and GameCube, too (which sadly never came to pass). So, while Stolar's astonishing deal to get Virtua Fighter 3 and Crazy Taxi onto the N64 was nixed in the end, he would eventually get his way – albeit in a manner that probably wasn't as elegant as he would have liked. Not that he will have been very concerned at the time; Stolar was famously fired from Sega just before the Dreamcast's North American launch and would join Mattel in December 1999.
This article has been updated to amend an incorrect date (the year of this event would have been 1999, not 2000) and the fact that 18 Wheeler was published by Acclaim on the PS2 and GameCube, but not Dreamcast. A reference has also been added to Acclaim's cancelled Ferrari video game from 2000.
Comments 46
Wow, that's incredibly interesting! To see that Sega was already having a lot of doubt in their consoles at this point makes it pretty clear why they immediately went for Nintendo exclusives when they stopped making consoles. It also makes you wonder what could have been if Sega stopped making consoles earlier. They could have made much better games in the dark ages of the mid 2000s if they had simply quit while they were ahead.
It sounds crazy but to be fair Sega were no strangers to putting their games on rival hardware, some of their games had Famicom versions back in the day. Altered Beast being one.
@Orpheus79V
Fantasy Zone being another.
@EarthboundBenjy Yeah. Funnily enough Sega was also pretty ahead of the curve when it came to PC ports of their first party content, which we now see as standard for Xbox and even Sony are dipping their toes in that pool.
Stoker must have out of his mind to do this. I reckon he had too much Coke.
Couldn't imagine those games on anything other than a Dreamcast, that is such an iconic console with such distinctive games.
The Dreamcast didn't even run VF3 that well... Not sure what they were thinking.
I have an even better idea: release Virtua Fighter 3 and Crazy Taxi on Switch!
@Orpheus79V to add to your list, Im sure there were also official versions of After Burner and I believe Puyo Puyo. And we had also Puyo Puyo on the Game Boy and SNES, and even a Nintendo-branded version in Kirby's Avalanche/Ghost Trap.
I do wonder how much of the Puyo Puyo IP SEGA owned back in the 90s.
We also got a planned Streets of Rage on the Nintendo 64 in Fighting Force.
The fact is, as long as Sega insisted on staying in the arcade industry, their console arm was always going to fail. Developing for arcades and developing a home console was fine in the '80s and early '90s, when cartridges could only hold so much data, but with the rise of the CD format, arcade ports just weren't going to be a selling point for a console gamer looking for a deeper experience. And when you're devoting half your dev teams to arcade games, you're essentially tying one arm behind your back in console game development, especially for a smaller company like Sega.
It is true that the botched Saturn run and the 32x hastened their departure, as well as rampant piracy on the Dreamcast, but for as great a system as the Dreamcast was, I think people forget how large a portion of it's library was arcade ports that were only ever going to be niche in homes, and how much that contributed to Sega being forced out of the console market. Stolar probably saw that and thought it would've been better for Sega to take money wherever it could get it.
At least Crazy Taxi made it to the GameCube, why Virtua Fighter 4 didn't make it is anyone's guess but not really that big of a loss as all VF games had no story to follow anyways and are merely tech demos from one gen to the next. To make up, we did get Soul Calibur II and Bloody Roar: Primal Fury, two of the best 3D fighters for GameCube.
Given how Stolar managed to tank the Saturn market with his comments and now this I’m beginning to wonder if he was actually a plant for Sony all along. 😅
I'd love crazy taxi , 18 wheeler , jet set radio , sonic adventure, outrun 06 & house of the dead on switch
@BLAZINOAH That explains why he got fired before the Dreamcast launch but I'm still puzzled why Sega didn't go through with it, it's only more money in their pocket and they had made games for Nintendo platforms before: Shinobi and Space Harrier for NES, Fantasy Zone 1 & 2, and Altered Beast for Famicom, Columns and Frogger for Super NES, Sakurai Taisen 1 & 2 and Columns GB: Tezuka Osamu Characters for Game Boy Color, etc. Why they made it an issue during the Dreamcast era is anyone's guess, a potential money making deal is about to take place and stupid Sega just throw it all out the window, this is why the Dreamcast failed. Had Stolar not gotten fired, I'm sure the Dreamcast would had been a success. All the millions of dollars they used to make Shenmue 1 & 2, they never made it back. Even worst they kept Shenmue 2 on the Xbox in NA pissing the NA Dreamcast owners even more and losing even more money in the process.
It always felt strange that Acclaim published Crazy Taxi on the PS2 and GameCube. If I recall, Sega claimed that they were “too busy” to handle the ports.
With all due respect to the N64, it wouldn't have been capable of running those games. This man effectively killed off the Saturn when it still had some promising titles on the way and essentially left Sega with no market presence in the US for over 12 months
@BulkSlash The Saturn was dead before Stolar got to Sega. All he did was bury the corpse.
@carlos82 Yeah but Sega Saturn wasn't capable of running Virtua Fighter 2 either and look how that went. VF2 on Saturn couldn't even handle the 3D of the Sega Model 2 arcade board and it had a decent port. I'm sure the N64 could run Sega Model 3 ports just fine as the system was made with 3D in mind unlike the Saturn.
Crazy Taxi 64... can you imagine how much fog would be in that game? "Take me to Pizza Hut!"
"Ma'am, I can't see anything. Just get out."
@Specter_of-the_OLED VF4 is one of the most content-rich and replayable games I've ever played, and would loved to have seen a Gamecube version rather than the constantly-loading CD-Rom version on PS2, storyline or not. It might have been a storage issue with the GC disc format, and the lack of a suitable controller on Gamecube. Or it just might have been a PlayStation 2 exclusive, much like Rez was post-Dreamcast. Everyone got a little bit of Sega.
Just think about how janky an N64 version of Crazy Taxi would be in regards to the soundtrack.
@BulkSlash Dude the Sega Saturn was dead even before it launch (just like the Sega 32X), Sony pretty much puts them in their place when they announced $299 for the PS1 at E3 95 that year. Stolar came to the rescue by helping Sega market the Dreamcast and what did they gave him in return, a pink slip and an early burial of the Dreamcast.
@Specter_of-the_OLED not initially but it's more than capable of handling 3D and it had VDP2 to handle the backgrounds making those ports possible and very good too
@HammerGalladeBro Sega didn't own Puyo Puyo until 1998 so all those Puyo Puyo multiplatform games before 1998 were made and published by Compile. It's the same situation with WipEout, Sony didn't acquired Psygnosis until 1999 so WipEout games were still being ported to other systems like Sega Saturn and N64.
@carlos82 Same for N64 but keep in mind, Bernie Stolar wants to bring the based Virtua Fighter 3 game to N64, not Virtua Fighter 3tb which the Dreamcast had. Yeah there were two versions of VF3, a base version and one that featured team battle mode which is where the tb came from. The based Virtua Fighter 3 was originally going to be ported to the Sega Saturn with most of the character models already given their VF3 movesets, if you play Fighters Megamix on Sega Saturn you will get a taste of some of those but Sega cancelled it at the last minute when Dreamcast got announced.
Put them on Switch.
Let's make some Craaazy money!
How about putting some Daytona USA on the Switch as well?
I am very curious as to how Crazy Taxi would have ran on N64, I bet there would have had to be many sacrifices to get it on there, I enjoy hearing about what could have been when it comes to my favorite systems.
That’s pretty interesting. Could have had a Virtua Fighter 64.
cries in what could have been
The N64 would have butchered those games. There are only a small handful of games on that console that look anything near decent. It was to polys what Atari was to pixels.
@Dpishere Well there's a Crazy Taxi for GBA so I'm sure N64 would had no problem with it.
Would have been perfect to release them on the N64 in 2001. Don't forget the N64 was the only 5th gen console that could hold its own graphically against the Dreamcast and PS2 thanks to its powerful 64-bit cpu and of course GPU.
@BulkSlash
I have an unfounded conspiracy theory that Stolar had a “Single White Female” type obsession with Kalinske and that he fully intended on taking over Tom’s former jobs in reverse chronological order.
Crazy Taxi shouldn't have gone to the N64. It would've looked like $#!+.
Both of those games would have had to be seriously compromised to run on the N64.
Put simply the N64 was nowhere near on par power wise with either of Sega's Model 3 or NAOMI boards.
Even the Dreamcast had to omit some of the fundamentals from their conversion of VF3 so the N64 had zero chance of running them
@noobish_hat That's just nostalgia talking. I'm not going to defend what EA or Activision are doing right now, but I would certainly put both the 6th and 7th generations up there with the 4th and 5th, and Sega was barely part of the 6th as a platform and only part of the 7th as a developer.
@BanjoPickles grab Skies of Arcadia while you're at it!
Removed - inappropriate
@robr That’s a good one! 😆
@Specter_of-the_OLED I'm well aware of the two versions and the updated move set in Fighters Megamix, another great game. I mean yeah I'll concede VF3 would work on N64, backgrounds might look a bit rough to to its texture limitations and I wouldn't want to play it with that controller, as much as I like it for platformers and fps games though. As for Crazy Taxi, I don't see that being a good time at all and pretty foggy to boot
@wizzgamer no it couldn't at all, even the Dreamcast was a huge step up from the N64
@Orpheus79V Can't forget Space Harrier, Fantasy Zone 1 & 2, After Burner, Alien Syndrome and Shinobi. Adventure Island was basically a reskinned Wonder Boy and Puyo Puyo had their IP transferred to SEGA. Anything published by Sammy and Atlus back then is currently owned by SEGA.
Even with all the furfore of Sega's money spending , Stolar is probably the reason Sega went third party, This man , a former Sony employee ( Was he a sabotuer for Sony) at E3 stated on a public showcase that Saturn was not Sega's future, He then refused to greenlight any 2d games for the Saturn from Japan for Wetsern release., Games which the Saturn blew the Playstation out the water on.
He then bought the 2K studio for sports games , pisiing of EA Sports , a Sega surporter for years. He then Dropped the price of Dreamcast at Launch to $199.00 In spite of Sega Japan wanting a $250.00 price so they could recoup some money .
He went behind their back.
At beginning of Dreamcast Sega where not losing money. But after a poor Japan launch due to shortage of chips, Stolar ballsed it up by taking away any saftey net for Sega by making them lose $50 a console. Had it sold at $50 more it would have sold still and Sega would not have the lossees they incured.
thats $50 nearly 10 Million times.
Bernie Stolar was the death nell to Sega and they should have fired him the moment he stood on stage to trash the Sega Saturn.
I for one would have gladly paid another £50.00 for my launch day Dreamcast and Im sure many others would have to.
Yes I know other factors happened as well but the damage that one man did was unbelievable, he must have been a Sony Spy.
@KITG_GROUP
Tom Kalinske didn't see the Saturn as Sega's future, either (nor their present at the time). I bought the Saturn day one...wait..pre-purchased the Saturn and got a Sub Pop records compilation (didn't the Brits get a Suburban Base compilation?). I loved it. It was awesome because of all of the 2D arcade ports. Mostly shmups that nobody was playing outside of Japan. That stuff was not coming over from Japan before Bernie Stolar. Saturn had zero mass appeal and was completely incapable of offering what the public, by and large, wanted. We still got the likes of Guardian Heroes and Legend of Oasis (which nobody bought). Not sure what titles Bernie naye-sayed by the time of his employement; other than later RAM cart games and all of them shmups...but that was third party stuff and....third parties didn't release Saturn titles outside of Japan. Customers wanted what the Playstation had to offer. Saturn was dead from the beginning. People have this weird mixed up fake nostalgia for the Dreamcast. It in no way shape or form had as many good titles as Saturn. It in no way shape or form was going to survive. Everyone wanted PS2.....and then they wanted XBOX. I'm impressed that Nintendo survived with handhelds to thank.
@robr Oh yes I know Kalinske wanted Sega to go third party, but Stolar just made it worse. And yes I know Saturn had many more great games then Dreamcast, bit that was due to Saturn actually being on the market longer and in the West we got a lot more good Dreamcast games then we got Saturn Games, due to them all being left in Japan. Its just a shame many are lost to Western gamers who can not read or Understand Japanese.
Though I have a few Import Saturn games.
In the end the gaming world lost part of its soul the day Sega went software only.With Nintendo really the only surviving Video game hardware manafacturer who are not a just a a sideline to to a big electronics consumer company.
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