Sega's Saturn teaches us how to not manage a console

Proof positive that great software doesn't always move hardware

Amazing game, period.

What I am about to do is going to pain me some.  The Sega Saturn actually holds a dear place in my heart, because it was the first, real, console launch of my adult life.  Growing up, I was at the mercy of what my parents bought for me.  Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I grew up a Nintendo kid.  If you look at the Sega Master System vs. the NES, the NES is by far the winner in a no contest.  Sega Genesis vs. SNES, I had a SNES, and I do believe it was the better console (although the sports games were better on the Genesis).  However, that doesn't mean that I hated the opposing console.  In fact, I really didn't know they existed until I was in the 8th grade, and my friend Tommy invited me over to his place to play his Phantasy Star on the Master System.  Being a Final Fantasy/Dragon Warrior fan, I loved the game immediately.   In fact, years later, when I purchased a Master System in college (which I still have) the first game I set out to get for it was the original Phantasy Star (which I found).  

Not pictured, 32X.  You're welcome.

In college, my first flirtation with Sega is when I bought the kid across the street's Genesis and Sega CD for $100.  Pretty good investment.  My first real job was working at an old Mom & Pop game store in Arkansas.  I got it when I was a freshman in college, and I worked there part time.  It was right at the end of the life cycle of the SNES and Genesis, and we had some new players on the scene, as well as the two heavy hitters loading up their cannons for a go in a new generation.

Fact:  3DO's mascot was Gex.  This was also $600.

Nintendo was still readying the, then Ultra 64, while Sega was prepping the Saturn right after crapping the bed with the 32X on epic proportions.  We also had three other players in the race at that time, Atari's Jaguar, which I never really...understood...that's a good word, the Panasonic 3DO, which retailed at $600 bucks (in 1994, kids, take that Sony!), and a brand new player was coming to market, Sony with it's Playstation.  To make a long story short, I decided to stick with what I knew and sided with Sega, and purchased a Saturn over the other three units.

That's right, while I will certainly tell everyone when I am right, I certainly will also admit it when I was wrong, and backing the Saturn over the Playstation was my first of many wrong predictions.  At the time I obviously thought I would be right.  Sega wasn't a terrible company.  The Genesis was a great system, and in a lot of ways Sega was nearly as good as Nintendo was at 1st party games.  Sony had their hands in a lot of things, and games were new to them.  I figured the steady hand of a professional game company would always beat the dollars of an electronics giant.  I was wrong, obviously.

Let's get one thing straight right now though, the Saturn is a fantastic system.  There are games on that console that are simply irreplaceable.  I don't mean that lightly either.  Sega was neck in neck with Nintendo at the time, and there are some gamers who thought that they surpassed the Big N with a lot of their releases.  I'm dead series here guys.  That being said, the Saturn suffered the equivalent of Rocky IV's Ivan Drago mercilessly beating the daylights out of it, but with no final round to make the Rocky comeback.  Yes, the truth is that the games are not the reason why the console failed, which goes against what I said in my 3DS post, yes.  The Saturn failed because it was, easily, the most mismanaged console every launched, and it's going to take something extremely barbaric to replace it.

Firstly, the Saturn had the worst launch ever.  That's right.  A mismanaged system had to have a mismanaged launch right?  It launched at $399.99, which was high when compared to the Playstation's original asking price of $299.99 (which launched a week later).  Strike one.  Secondly, it only had six games at launch.  Six.  One came with the console, the original Virtua Fighter.  To be fair, this was the first real 3D fighter, and an excellent game.  Otherwise, you had 5 other choices.  Then lastly, and this is the clincher right here kids on how not to release a console.  They only let 4 select retailers sell the Saturn for three months.  Toys R Us, and 3 specialty retailers that would eventually go on to form that company I don't talk about here.  So the only place to get your Saturn was at those retailers. 

Now you're going to ask me, "What's the big freaking deal? Game companies do company exclusives all the time, XenoBlade was only available at one store."  Correct.  However, there's a difference between selling a console, and selling game.  Attach rates are a really big deal for gaming retailers, and when a console launches, your attach rates go through the roof, making them extremely lucrative for these stores.  They don't many anything off of the console, no.  At that time though, many people would buy a few games, an extra controller, an RF connector, etc etc.  So this act kinda pissed off a few sleeping giants; Target and Wal-Mart.  So when the time came for the exclusiveness to end, and Sega went to these stores and told them, "Now you can sell our stuff," they pulled their hands back and said, "We don't need your stuff, we're selling way too much Playstation stuff."  The stupidity is the stuff of legends guys, seriously.  There are people out there making stuff right now, not just games, but products in general, that dream of getting into Wal-Mart.  For Sega to basically give Wal-Mart the middle finger with the Saturn...yeah, that didn't end well.

Japan only, period.

On the flip side, the Japanese market was booming for the Saturn, which did managed to compete with the Playstation on equal footing for quite a while.  (In fact, if I'm not mistaken, it wasn't until Final Fantasy VII launched for the Playstation in Japan that Sony overtook Sega by a large number and never looked back)  Furthermore, for those of us who knew on the import mark, the Saturn was an absolutely breeze to mod to play import games.  The Playstation had a zillion different models, making modding increasingly difficult (I used to be able to "disc swap" which was a bitch to do, but it's all I knew how to do), but the Saturn just required a mod cart that plugged directly into the unit.  This gave us, to this day, the only arcade perfect versions of Capcom's X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs, Street Fighter, and the amazing Dungeons and Dragons arcade series.  (The first two games alone make the Saturn worth it's weight in gold guys, those were wonderful games)  

Things weren't all amazing on the 3rd party front though, while Sega had a very rosy relationship with Capcom (mostly due to Sony's bungling), they did manage to miss out on a lot of 3rd party games.  They did have a fair shot though, to be fair.  Lara Croft made her debut on both the Saturn and Playstation, but by the time the second game came out, Sony had tied up Miss Croft as a console exclusive.  When you also factor in that Sega was getting lots of good stuff in Japan

According to reports, after the launch of the Nintendo 64, Sega was in such a bad position that they openly began talking about the next generation of gaming a mere two years after the Saturn's launch.  While I'm no technical expert, and I won't claim to be, I do know that the Saturn was also very expensive to produce, and was nearly impossible to slim down and make cheaper (which is something most consoles still do to this day..after a while they make a slimmer and sleeker version of their unit, sometimes fixing design flaws *cough*Microsoft*cough*, but most of the time it's done in order to squeeze the last bit of juice from the orange, and make the units cheaper to produce).  Here in the west, Sega managed to ignore practically every fan they had and decided against the release of several Japanese role playing games that were destroying the sale charts in the Land of the Rising Sun.  Sakura Taisen (Sakura Wars) was the only IP I've ever seen that you could buy t-shirts, mugs, posters, DVDs, etc. based off of the series but not the bloody game that everything was based off of.  Astounding on levels that I can't even begin to explain to you (oh, and this was in the teeth of Final Fantasy VII's mega popularity too, which Sega had no answer for).

At the end of the  console's lifespan, Sega bottomed out the price of the unit at $99.99, and included a slew of free games with it.  That holiday actually saw a huge in crease in t the Saturn install base.  Of course, to further show how not to manage a console, Sega released around 4 or 5 games  (I honestly don't remember, I think it's 4) that next calendar year.  Then to really show how little faith they had in their own products, these games were massively under produced.  These games, to this day, remain extraordinarily rare and expensive on the second hand market.  The plug was finally pulled in 1998, making way for the eventual release of the Sega Dreamcast in 1999.

Overall, you could do a lot worse than the Saturn.  The console does have a library of impressive titles.  Sega's games were great, and they did have support  from one or two 3rd parties that managed to put out some amazing titles as well.  The problem with the console was that the hardware was mismanaged from the second it hit the shelves.