Unlike with the Beep! Mega Drive reader ranking charts, which end abruptly in the September 1995 issue of Beep! Mega Drive's successor magazine "Sega Saturn Magazine," SoftBank decided to publish a special small magazine to wrap up all the reader rankings that had been done for Saturn games in Sega Saturn Magazine (which was now "Dreamcast Magazine" at this point). "Saturn no Game wa Sekai Ichi~i~i~i!: Satamaga Dokusha Race Zen Kiroku" is what it goes by. I actualy keep forgetting about this magazine and keep thinking that the 22nd extra issue of Dreamcast Magazine was where the final reader ranking charts for the Saturn were at.
In addition to the final rankings, the magazine also features a lot of infographics and statistics regarding things like a list of all the games that have reached the number one position in the charts and how frequently some games hit that number one spot. And just for fun, they also decided to do the same for the worst-ranked games.
In the included image above, you can see three charts. The ones we care about for the purposes of this post are the left and middle (the right chart is I believe a breakdown of the genres of the worst ranked games). Even if you don't read Japanese, you may have noticed on the two charts that a certain game is the "first place" of worst ranked games, and that same game shows up four times on the other chart. That game is "Death Crimson," an infamously bad light gun game with a really good soundtrack.
So what do the charts actually mean? Well, I'll give a rough translation for what's on there. I'm not going to bother localizing games that weren't given a proper English title because you might be interested in actually looking up the rest of the games and it'd be easier to hunt those down with the original-ish name.
The left-most chart is basically a "top 5" of games that ranked at the bottom of the charts:
- Death Crimson (69 times)
- Mahjong Kaigan Monogatari: Mahjong Kyou Jidai Sexy Idol Hen (12 times)
- Gakkou no Kaidan (8 times)
- Mahjong Gokuu Tenjiku (7 times)
- PLANET JOKER (6 times)
The middle chart ranks longest bottom ranked streaks. I use "charts" rather than "months" or "weeks" because Sega Saturn Magazines started as a monthly publication, but then shifted to a fortnightly release, then a weekly release, and each issue had an updated reader ranking chart. "RACE" is what the magazine calls each issue's chart (so RACE 1 would be the very first ranking chart for Saturn games, RACE 2 would be the chart from the following issue, etc).
Top 5 longest consecutive worst ranking streaks:
- Death Crimson (RACE 128-145) - 18 charts
- Death Crimson (RACE 99-115) - 17 charts
- Death Crimson (RACE 33-41) - 9 charts
- Death Crimson (RACE 52-58) - 7 charts 4 (tie). Mahjong Kaigan Monogatari: Mahjong Kyou Jidai Sexy Idol Hen (RACE 26-32) - 7 charts 4 (tie). Mahjong Gokuu Tenjiku (RACE 1-7) - 7 charts
Coincidentally, RACE 145 is the second to last chart before this special issue's "FINAL" chart (from the July 23, 1999 extra issue of Dreamcast Magazine), so technically, Death Crimson's longest streak would be 19 charts long.
Anyhow, Death Crimson's infamous legacy transcended seems to transcend being an odd meme.