M. Neko

Someone on Reddit asked the question, "Why did the Sega Saturn fail so catastrophically?" And boy, did I have some answers. Answers which I feel are worth repeating here on Cohost, for those interested in that ancient gaming history.

(Previously, I had done a post-mortem of the Saturn in one of my old fanzines, back when people read their news from paper rather than LCD displays. Many of the same points I made in 1998 will be echoed here.)

• Tom Kalinske (arguably the only reason Sega got big in America) left after Sega of Japan started to ignore him. He said, "why don't we go with this SGI-based console instead of the crappy Saturn?" and they said, "Nope, we're doing the Saturn." Nintendo wound up with that SGI-based console, eventually called the Nintendo 64.

• Sony, eager to spite Nintendo after it dropped their CD add-on for the Super NES, offered Sega a chance to get in on the ground floor with the Playstation. Sega said, "Nope, we're doing the Saturn." It's well documented how that turned out.

• Sony, eager to spite SEGA after it spurned the Playstation, waited for the right moment to release its system and offered it for a hundred dollars less.

• The Sega Saturn arrived way too early, with way too high a price. If it tells you anything, there were no third party games for the Saturn at its launch; they just weren't available yet.

• Sega's advertising went from hip and edgy to embarrassingly desperate and weirdly conceptual. One early ad had Devo members and Ku Klux Klansmen as "rods and cones" getting blown away by what they were seeing on the Saturn. Someone thought this was a good idea. They were very, very wrong.

• The Sega Saturn was the wrong console for the wrong time. Any 3D abilities it had were thrown in at the last minute, resulting in a system that was great for 2D gaming but a nightmare to develop for when it came to polygonal games... the games that were fast becoming the industry standard.

• No Sonic games of note. Sonic X-Treme was planned, but ultimately killed by Yuji Naka. The only thing Saturn owners wound up getting are Sonic X-Treme ice pops from ice cream trucks.

• Fans of Sega were becoming former fans, thanks to the fickleness of the company. The average lifespan of a Sega console at the time (be it Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, or Dreamcast) was three years. Gamers knew that Sega consoles were destined to become a dead end and purchased accordingly. If Microsoft ran its gaming division the way Sega did, the Xbox Series S and X would be dead NOW. How would you feel about that as an Xbox owner?

• Bernie Stolar was a moron, and was eager to drive the Saturn into a ditch the moment he took over as CEO of Sega of America. Did it matter that the Saturn was doing reasonably well in Japan? Nah, because SoA and SoJ were at each other's throats and constantly undermined each other at every opportunity.

• Big games came to the Sega Saturn, but their SEQUELS didn't. Saturn owners had Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, but didn't get any of the follow-ups to those two franchises. The writing was already on the wall... the Saturn was already branded a failure, and it made no sense to develop RE2 or TR2 for a system that would fight the development team every step of the way.

• The gaming media of the time had already placed their bets on the Playstation, praising it at every opportunity in early press footage. Famously, Nick "Rox" DesBarres complained that the Saturn version of Street Fighter Alpha was worse than its Playstation counterpart. Why? Because the super move shadows were the wrong color (although the game had an option to change them to more arcade-faithful colors in the options screen, a fact DesBarres either didn't know or cared to divulge with his readers).

Back in the early days of gaming, before the extinction event that wiped out the industry and led to the subsequent age of Nintendo, there was one clearly dominant console... the Atari 2600. Competing game systems rose to challenge this industry giant with little success, from the Fairchild Channel F (actually released first) to the Astrocade and Odyssey2. Only one of these machines managed to survive a protracted battle with the 2600, being snuffed out in 1983 only to be reborn to resume its feud with Atari's most popular system in the latter half of the decade.

That system was the Intellivision. Its manufacturer, toy company Mattel, took an odd marketing angle with this system. It wasn't advertised as bigger or badder or more powerful than the Atari 2600, but rather more sophisticated... a smarter console for adults and anyone else who had grown tired of the mindless munching and blasting that dominated arcades. Rather than a single button joystick, the Intellivision controller had a 16-way disc with a context-sensitive numeric keypad and three action keys along the side. Instead of the latest twitchy arcade hits, the Intellivision took a more cerebral approach, with original titles like the flight simulator B-17 Bomber and Utopia, where the player took charge of a country and helped it flourish through not only wars, but land development and trade. Sports were also a highlight, with Mattel snapping up the rights to national leagues like the NFL many years before Electronic Arts' John Madden series. They even had their own fittingly stuffy spokesman, George Plimpton, who lectured viewers in a lofty British accent about the superiority of the Intellivision in a series of divisive television commercials.

(All this high-minded pomposity came from Mattel, the makers of Barbie and He-Man dolls.)

After the video game crash of 1983, the rights to the Intellivision were sold to its team of designers, operating as an independent company known as INTV Corporation. Years later, the Intellivision was revived as competition for both its arch rival the Atari 2600, and a budget alternative to the massively popular Nintendo Entertainment System. While the 2600 struggled to keep pace with the more resource hungry trends of the late 1980s, the Intellivision, with its generous amount of RAM (a whopping 1KB, versus the 2600's anemic 128 bytes) and a more accommodating fifteen button controller, was better suited to the more complex design tropes of the NES. Witness Hover Force, a late Intellivision release that sent players on combat missions throughout a sprawling city while minding their dwindling fuel reserves, or Thunder Castle, which brought a soundtrack, power ups, and stage intermissions to an otherwise straightforward maze title.

Atari managed to sop up most of the gamers Nintendo and Sega missed with its 2600, but the Intellivision made a more graceful transition to the game design language of the late 1980s. While the games didn't look all that great next to the ones on the NES, held back by color limitations and coarse resolutions, they offered more complete expressions of complex ideas than the Atari 2600. Onscreen text kept the confusion in adventures to a minimum, arcade ports like Commando kept more of the nuance of the originals, and sports titles more faithfully recreated the rules of football, wrestling, basketball, and golf. It led to a more advanced and less frustrating gaming experience... one might even say a smarter one.

Hey, there might have been something to that "intelligent television" marketing pitch after all.