I was in my mid-teens and a big gamer when Sony entered the ring with the PlayStation and I still cannot to this day get over the fact that they actually did it and became the dominant force in gaming.
I remember thinking it was just another fad like the Minidisc and because they had no clear mascot like Mario or Sonic it was bound to fail.
Next thing I knew the Saturn was a joke and everyone I knew had a PlayStation. The ads were EVERYWHERE and people I knew who had never even owned a games console were buying the PS1.
When the PS2 was announced I was also blindly convinced the Dreamcast would compete but the PS2 just DOMINATED. Literally everyone I knew had one (not me sadly) it was a stunning thing to behold. When games like GTA3 hit I knew Sega were done for.
I personally only connected with the Sony handheld unit owning a PSP and I also eventually got a Vita. Other than UMD they were (still are) awesome little devices to play with.
I can believe Sony did it. The PlayStation hit a lot of the right buttons at the right time.
Sega was dead by the time the Saturn landed. Sega burnt too many fans when they launched the Sega CD and 32X just to abandon them nearly immediately. Parents didn't want to hear that Sega was launching yet another system. Sega launched 3 consoles in 2.5 years in North America. Sega burnt all their goodwill.
Video games can be an industry of momentum and trust. If you keep launching and abandoning products, you lost the trust and momentum. Developers don't want to commit to a system you'll abandon. Gamers don't want to buy a system you're going to abandon. Sega had shown that it would abandon systems at the first hiccup - and try to get you to buy junk.
Sega's Saturn was also a weird system. It decided to use quadrilaterals instead of triangles and was complex which makes it harder to use effectively.
Nintendo's N64 would be launching a year after the PlayStation. While the N64 might have had more 3D capabilities, many of the games on the system didn't look as good and the 3D gameplay wasn't as compelling as the PlayStation's.
Not only that, PlayStation games were so much cheaper! At $50/game, it was just a ton more affordable than the $70 that N64 games were going for. By the time that the N64 came out, the PlayStation had a huge library of excellent games that were cheap. You even started to see older games for $25.
Sony's brand at the time was like gold. Everyone wanted anything with the Sony label on it. It can be hard to remember what a dominant force Sony was in consumer electronics. They were like Apple back then. When people heard that Sony was coming out with a video game system, everyone would think that it would be the best just based on the brand. Parents would hear the Sony name and think quality and reliability. Especially if they had been burned by Sega, the PlayStation from Sony seemed like buying the best product that would last.
Nintendo still did well. They have their niche. Sega had destroyed their reputation while Sony was the most admired electronics company out there. The PlayStation offered people a non-Nintendo system that they didn't feel would be abandoned and by the time the N64 came out it was established with an amazing game library that the N64 couldn't match.
My parents bought a PS1 shortly after they were available. We very much enjoyed it, but I _distinctly_ remember each time my friend brought over his N64 and copy of Goldeneye. The PS1 may have been the superior console, but Goldeneye was the superior game.
Oh, Goldeneye was amazing. I think that the N64 just didn't have as many great games as the PS1. But Goldeneye was such a truly amazing game.
I wouldn't even totally argue that the PS1 was the superior console. It came out first and the fact that it used CDs meant cheaper, larger games. That gave it big advantages. The N64 did tend to have more immersive worlds. Mario 64 was a totally different game from Crash Bandicoot. Crash was great, but didn't have the open-world feeling of Mario 64.
They were very different feeling consoles. I think that's where Nintendo has carved its niche: making something different. Sega was still trying to make the same system and they were no match for Sony. Nintendo has kept trying to do things a tad different from the Wii and motion control to the Switch and its portability. I think Nintendo knows that it succeeds when it can find something unique and different and fails when it produces the same thing others can make.
But the PS1's game library was just so extensive and cheap.
Similar experience, I nearly bought a ps1 but they were sold out everywhere. Then I went to a friend's house and played goldeneye. It was on a completely different level to anything I'd ever played before. Bought an n64 instead. Wave race and 1080 still haven't been matched by anything. Those and GoldenEye are my 3 fav games.
Sony also made the right choice in the PS1 design by basically asking developers what they wanted WRT to hardware. Developers didn't want the wacky-ass designs of the Saturn or Jaguar. They didn't want to have to orchestrate multiple CPUs or a bunch of proprietary peripheral chips to get optimal performance. Developers wanted a sane hardware design and good developer tools.
Totally! Too often console makers went with wacky things that developers didn't know how to get performance out of. Though that sanity was short-lived for Sony. The PlayStation 2 was a complex design that was a pain for developers.
As much of a success as the PS2 was, it probably left the door open for Microsoft. The Xbox had a normal x86 processor and normal Nvidia GPU (and the GameCube had a normal PowerPC/ATI GPU combo). The PS2 was a huge success, but I think a lot of it was built off the momentum of the PS1, the fact that it was backward compatible, and its DVD player. If the PS2 had been Sony's first console, they probably would have lost. Developers would have considered it a pain to develop for and Microsoft would have had a more powerful Xbox with an easier development platform.
I think the PS2 does show that developers will accommodate (if hate) wacky-ass designs if there's momentum. However, Sega had killed their momentum with the Sega CD and 32X with both developers and gamers so the Saturn's wacky design was the final nail in the coffin. Atari had been out of the console game for nearly a decade when they launched the Jaguar so they also did't have the momentum.
The PS2 was a bit pushed by momentum. Developers knew that gamers would buy it because Sony's brand in gaming was amazing at the time and it offered a DVD player so they put up with it.
> If the PS2 had been Sony's first console, they probably would have lost
I disagree. The PS2 had a year head start, a solid early lineup, and a built-in DVD player (this was huge). The XBox also had little traction in Japan, not just from a consumer perspective but a developer perspective as well. It certainly would have been a closer race had the two consoles released at the same time though.
What the GP is saying is if the PS2, with its weird architecture, was Sony's first console it may not have been successful. By the release of the PS2 the PS1 had a number of successful second and third party franchises. Third party devs were willing to invest in making PS2 games because they had five years of profits on the PS1 and a good relationship with Sony.
It took several years for third party devs to get maximum performance out of the PS2. Not that early PS2 games were bad but there's a marked difference between the early games and ones made after devs figured out how to better use the PS2's SIMD units and take better advantage of the GPU.
If Sony didn't have six years of history with the PS1 I don't think they could have gotten the level of third party support the PS2 actually had. Devs would have looked at the PS2 and had no confidence Sony would execute on dev support.
PS2 also being a DVD player sealed the deal. For a while there it was one of the cheaper options for a DVD player, and if you bought a PS2 to play DVDs, might as well buy some games too.
Someone took a hard look at the numbers and determined that even with piracy there was no uptick in units sold which means people were just not interested in the Dreamcasts unfortunately and it was piracy that killed it.
But then again people who knows Segas history wouldn't draw this conclusion anyway. The Dreamcasts didn't have a chance with Segas past and Sony Playstation 2 hype and money
The load times bro, I could not get on the CD based bandwagon. I played Sewer Shark on the Sega CD and the load times where miserable. I even thought the resolution was abysmal (compared to my PC at the time). No way it would win, I thought. By christmas of 97 I had a PS1 and spent all day playing Tomb Raider. The hardware was beyond any other console and the design was slick and new. And while Sony won, and my Saturn sat in the corner collecting dust, the N64 was the only system that came out when my friends came over. Nothing could compete with 4 player mario kart or starfox. Sega was dead before the dreamcast even came out.
six - six - niner - six ugh, that game kinda sucked. Never hit that million pounds of tube steak high score.
What a weird time for gaming. FMV games were something that looked like the future to a little kid but once you played them they were awful. The video padded out boring interactive game play like shooting the rats in Sewer Shark or the shooting galleries of Ground Zero: Texas. I remember Night Trap being highly controversial at the time for sexual an violence themes and I only knew one kid who had it and his mother threw the game out so I never got to play it.
> FMV games were something that looked like the future to a little kid but once you played them they were awful.
I still have a certain amount of love for the genre and I'm secretly hoping they make a comeback someday without many of the limitations they had at the time.
Phantasmagoria was a gem if you've never tried it. Night Trap is just awkward to play, and didn't deserve the moral panic, but at least those kids can emulate it now. You'd be better off just watching it on youtube though.
“When we saw the first commercials for the Playstation — glitzy, MTV style affairs that spoke to the sort of people we weren't — we began to worry. They were selling our heritage to the same fucking guys who used to beat us up in P.E.!”
I'm so glad this phoney baloney marketing concept called "nerd culture" finally died during the covid years. It was the basis for a lot of silly crap on the internet that should long be dead by now.
> "equity has been damaged by 32x and Sega CD," and that Sony has "effectively leveraged their considerable equity from consumer electronics."
The second part is exactly it.
Sony was, and still is, in the best position to license 3rd party games for their consoles because of their extensive partnerships across several industries.
Even today Nintendo is left to survive off their own 1st party games.
I don't agree the 32x or Sega CD were ever the problem. Sure they lost money on those products, but they still had a very strong brand. I think they knew at the time that wasn't going to be enough to continue in this space and they just weren't going to beat Sony on 3rd party and Nintendo on 1st party on their home consoles which is why they started cutting costs. Today they are very far from a failed business and made a good call.
The SegaCD and 32x were most assuredly problems for Sega. They were both problematic with third party developers because their low sales made for a small addressable market. The 32x especially burned third party devs because the Saturn was announced right as the 32x was released.
If you were mid-development of a 32x game in November of 1994 you just found out a lot of the money you'd spend had been wasted. You'll either be releasing a game in a few months on a system with no future (32x) or have to spend extra money to port and release it on the Saturn.
The Saturn never got the sort of third party support that the PlayStation did. Square and Konami released system-selling games with Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid. That was in addition to second party games like Gran Tourismo which was a system seller as well.
> The SegaCD and 32x were most assuredly problems for Sega.
Yeah for Sega of America. Sega HQ back in Japan saw the writing on the wall when Sony started working on the PlayStation. Sony has always been massive compared to Sega or Nintendo at any point in time. Even Microsoft has had a tough time competing. This was not the hill Sega wanted to die on even if it meant not making consoles anymore. They're still worth billions, just not tens or hundreds of billions. They made the right choice to move on. The fact that fully grown adults still cling to childhood memories of what could have been instead of recognizing clear business decisions for what they were is a testament to their once genius marketing.
Both then and now Sony owns tons of intellectual property, can do whatever it dreams up hardware-wise, sell that hardware at very competitive prices, and has deep connections with just about every major publisher in the entertainment business. Just like how Sega pulled out of consoles, Sony made a similarly smart move by not bothering with its own streaming service. I don't believe they own their little experiment called Crackle anymore. Why bother when you still own the rights to a ton of stuff? Rights that they probably can't even sell if they tried because it would be illegal under anti-monopoly law. That's a better position than even Disney is currently in.
Sony is only as good as their third-party licenses. I'm can't think of a signature exclusive title for the Playstation franchise with a brand value anywhere near that of Halo, Sonic, Mario, or Zelda. I guess Horizon maybe, and the various JRPG franchises that tend to skip Xbox, but you hardly see them running a huge media blitz for the next Dragon Quest (at least in the US)
OTOH, Nintendo always has solid cards to play. They know they can bring out a Zelda or Mario game and a significant percentage of their buyers will grab it day 1.
Without a killer, propriatery IP, they're not only vulnerable to a weak patch of new titles, but they're also at risk of losing the "port war" -- if you can get the same games on PS and Xbox, or PS and PC, you'll get whichever one is better experience, cheaper, etc.
Are you kidding? Sony has a ton of major first party IPs. Uncharted, The Last of US, God of War, Gran Turismo, MLB, Ratchet & Clank are just a few that come to mind.
The Vita was a great handheld, my only two complaints about it is they went with a expansive Sony memory format instead of SD card, and they did not include the ability to output to TV like the PSP Go had. Incidentally I was not surprised at the success Nintendo had when they released their own take on the Vita with those two issues fixed.
It did without a doubt, but that same game was also available for the Wii U, which was easier to find and costed significantly less than the Switch. Having a killer app helped generate interest, but people actually liking the gimmick is ultimately why the Switch succeeded.
It was! The graphical leap from the PS1 to the Dreamcast still appears to me to be the starkest of the 3d era. And it had online connectivity, out of the box, from day one. Very impressive for the (very late) 1990's.
I bought a DC on launch day, and still have one (my original died). I honestly think ridge Racer 5 looked like something the DC couldn't do. Even more so gran turismo 3, which still looks great.
That said the DC is contender for my favourite console of all time, the PS2 isn't. Oh and the DC still looks great on modern displays, the PS2 looks pretty awful (I'm play on an oled through an ossc).
The Dreamcast as a console was fine. The Dreamcast as a console made by Sega was problematic. Sega had been burning bridges with third party developers for a majority of the decade by the time the Dreamcast was released. There was nobody left to make software for it.
My understanding is that Microsoft built a lot of tech in the Dreamcast in the first place, didn't even need to ask Sega to reuse a lot of it. (I've heard it suggested that the Dreamcast can be considered the first Xbox because of how deeply Microsoft was involved from very early in its development.)
What I thought was amusing was when the wii came out. All the publicity was about the playstation 3 and xbox 360, and the wii didn't get much notice because it didn't have the amazing system specs.
But it was fun with the accelerometer controller and less pixels and mips didn't get in the way of that.
I got the NES for Super Mario Bros. I got the Playstation for Tekken. Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII.
If the only game the Playstation had was Tekken I still would have bought it. Sega just never had a hit game that I wanted. Marketing and the hardware didn't matter to me. It was the games.
Sega had plenty of great games. In fact, despite being a Nintendo household growing up, I'm actually quite impressed in hindsight by the degree to which Sega as a 1st party made games to scratch every conceivable itch you might have as a gamer.
32/64-bit Nintendo really didn't make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn't always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?).
In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There's something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, "Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we're gonna buy a PlayStation.'
Yeah, N64 was weirdly devoid of memorable RPGs. Surprising considering that both before and after that generation the RPGs rained from the sky. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Chronotrigger... the greats.
Playstation became the RPG console back then. Square was the king of the genre, and they wanted to create cinematic experiences with pre-rendered graphics. Only the CD format was large enough to support that.
The N64 also suffered from a margin problem. Game cartridges were sometimes $10-$20 wholesale for producers, while CDs were probably about 10-25 cents. And then they had to pay a hefty licensing fee to Nintendo on top of that.
What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
> What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
I'm pretty sure the hardware would have given developers a real run for their money to create a SNES-level JRPG experience with smooth, good quality sprite-based graphics. As far as I know it has no 2D acceleration like the SNES, and a very small texture buffer, which leaves slow software rendering directly to the framebuffer, or low quality texture-based sprites. The hardware was really not designed for this type of game, so few were made.
Not providing any hardware to handle those types of games was a function of 3D being all the rage, and the hardware being very clearly targeted at that, but it also meant that creating 2D games was not just out of fashion, but impractical.
You could easily just treat it like Unity does, where the 3d ness is an illusion and everything is actually in 3d space.... Super easy, barely an inconvenience...
The real impediment I believe was Nintendo themselves... Think about it for a moment. What was the process for publishing to N64? That's right, you had to work directly with Nintendo and effectively get thier stamp of approval (good luck getting enough carts otherwise).
Nintendo didn't want 2d games on thier precious 3d focused console. That simple.
This may be partly true, but they themselves did publish Yoshi's Story, a 2D game, in 1997, the second year of N64's existence. More likely explanation is that 3D was so novel and new in the mid 90s that it was difficult to argue for 2D games then from a business and marketing standpoint, even though 3D games usually required larger teams and the lack of mature tooling (a lot of devs would have to make their own physics engines from scratch back then) made it riskier. Today Nintendo puts a heavier focus on 2D gaming, with the New Super Mario Bros series and Mario Maker, etc.
Yoshi's Story is prob best example. 2D platformer by Nintendo with gorgeous graphics. However, it was a lackluster, forgettable game. Still it proves the 64 was more than capable of exceeding 2D experiences from SNES.
Other examples are StarCraft 64, Bust-a-Move 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, SimCity 2000, Killer Instinct Gold (character models 2D), Magical Tetris Challenge, Rampage 2, Ogre Battle 64, MK Mythologies: Sub Zero, Clay Fighter 63 1/2 (2D character models), South Park: Chef's Love Shack, Mischief Makers, etc etc
It was more than capable of exceeding SNES quality graphics on every metric. The RDP on the N64 already had to render 2D rasters that were pre-transformed from 3D projections by the signal processor chip.
Remove that 3D transformation step and allocate some RAM for buffer and you had a perfectly capable 2D platform.
There's no question it was possible, but the previous generation consoles provided powerful hardware sprite/tile-based engines with layers, smooth parallax scrolling, '2.5D' transformations and more. N64 has none of that, and as far as I know the SDK didn't include anything like a software 2D engine either. If you wanted to make a 2D game, you'd have to implement your own 2D rendering pipeline more or less from scratch. I also think the N64's relatively low memory bandwidth and low amount of RAM would have been an issue to get past for a software compositor.
So yeah, it does provide access to the framebuffer, and has a reasonably capable CPU - more or less like PCs of the time did, so of course it's a 'perfectly capable 2D platform' but in this era I don't think we were quite at the point where brute-forcing the graphics pipeline in software was 'easy', and the 2D hardware capabilities were... let's say 'not exploited' by Nintendo's SDK.
It wasn't preventing anyone from producing 2D games, obviously good games could be made, it was just definitely not optimized for that, and that just put more pressure towards 3D, that already had a lot of cultural pressure towards it. If the culture was there, I'm sure developers would have hacked away at it and developed it into a strong 2D platform, but without that it was a barrier.
A 2D rendering pipeline is trivial. There are numerous hobbysist 2D rendering frameworks for every computer architecture in the past 40 years. It was far more difficult to program N64 in 3D than in 2D. The CPU was more than capable to exceed SNES in every dimension. It was not hard at all. 3D already requires 2D rendering.
> What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
I think that's something that's easy to say in hindsight, but hard to justify at the time.
The switch to 3d gaming was probably the biggest technological leap games ever had. 3d allowed a huge amount of experiences not possible with 2d games. And while early 3d games look incredibly dated now, at the time they were mind blowing and cutting edge. The SNES and Genesis were also too recent to really have any nostalgia, so and thus no real desire for throwback or "retro" titles. Any 2d game on the N64 would probably have felt cheap and dated at the time.
Finally, for Nintendo specifically, they did release 2d titles during the N64 generation. They just released them for the Game Boy (and later, Game Boy Color). There wasn't much sense devoting resources to make a 2d game on the N64 when your 2d-only console is still selling really well.
I'm not talking about Nintendo themselves, per se. They did a phenomenal job with the titles they did make for N64, including of course Ocarina of Time (a masterpiece) and I'll also never forget how revolutionary Super Mario 64 was.
I'm mainly talking about 3rd party publishers and specifically the JRPG genre. The N64 suffered from a lack of games compared to PS1. It was difficult to do 3D development back then, developers were just getting the hang of it.
In fact that you bring up Game Boy dev as a thriving platform for 2D content is an important point. Pokemon came out during this era. And a 2D N64 based Pokemon would have sold like hotcakes. Instead they built these half baked 3D Pokemon experiences like Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium, which featured no storyline and no overworld.
Even something resembling Super Mario RPG with prerendered graphics on a isometric view would have been fine. It just wasn't generally done on N64. Everyone wanted to mimic Mario 64. The few RPGs N64 did get, like Quest 64, felt so empty, that it would have been much better to just ship it in 2D.
You’re right that Pokémon on consoles would have been great, but you’re conflating some stuff that easily explains why it didn’t happen. First is the idea that Pokémon is a Nintendo franchise. It’s convoluted, but let’s say Nintendo has a stake that allows them some control but they cannot control Game Freak, the developer of Pokémon, directly.
Second is Game Freak proper. They have always valued a small headcount. This has been a problem consistently. They never had the staff to make a console game. They always had the same difficulty with building new ideas. And when they were forced to move to consoles with the Switch, they released their worst games yet, absolutely dispiriting games that probably soured millions of kids on the franchise.
What percentage of The Pokemon Company does Nintendo own? They must have some exclusive arrangement in writing or a 50% or more ownership because it's never been hosted on a non Nintendo platform.
They certainly had the staff to make Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Snap. Most 2D games in the SNES era only needed like 4 to 7 developers. It would have been fine and trivial even to pair Nintendo game artists with Pokemon developers for a true console Pokemon game. It just wasn't done. It took until the Switch to see a true console Pokemon game.
Pokémon Snap and Stadium were made by other companies, not Game Freak.
We don’t know everything about the Pokémon corporate structure in the English-speaking world. Presumably Florent Gorges is researching this as we speak. But the common theory is that when Nintendo invested in Game Freak in the early 90s to bail them out, there must have been a requirement of exclusivity for the franchise in the contract. Game Freak made games for other consoles after Pokémon, and the Pokémon cards had Windows games, but the main RPG series that’s been both only on Nintendo and only done by GF. Last year was the first time another company touched the mainline RPGs: another company did the remake of Pearl and Diamond.
I always assumed it was the memory problem. There is more memory for 2D sprite maps on the CD than the cartridge, and it is easier to cull the landscape to fit in the small RAM of PS1 than to optimize the texture packing for N64. There is Ogre Battle 64, but noticeably the textures look much worse than Final Fantasy Tactics. I thought maybe it is too difficult to get nice textures on the N64, even Paper Mario looks nice, but the textures are not that complex.
The N64 had almost 40 times more RAM than the SNES. Plus you could create custom ROMs with more memory if needed in the cartridge itself.
If textures looked better in FF Tactics vs Ogre Battle 64, it is purely due to storage on CD vs cartridge, a notable 10x plus advantage.
Square used a ton of prerendered graphics in their PS1 games. That is to say, they'd farm out the graphics to super computers and then store them as rasters on disc.
From a YouTube video I watched, the bigger advantage of disks was the manufacturing lead time.
With carts, you had to know how many you needed weeks in advance, and were stuck with excess units if the game flopped. Whereas you could have a run of ps1 disks pressed and in your warehouse in two days.
Square and Enix (before they became one) both jumped ship to PlayStation because they deemed the N64 cartridge's memory capacity far too small for the kind of games they wanted to make. And to that extent, they're probably right--Final Fantasy VII took three CDs as it was. A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them. The RE2 N64 port is the only game that got close, and that was with a ton of clever compression and massive downsizing of audio and video. More likely it would've taken 5-10 carts.
A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them
The problem is worse than that:
1. The largest NES cartridge is 64MB, a PS1 CD is 10x that, so imagine 30 carts
2. A lot of the data across the 3 discs is actually the same data. Think character models and attack animations for your party members, locations you can revisit at any time, the base world map, common soundtracks, etc. The disk to disk differences were mostly things like FMVs and event soundtracks as a result. So the minimum data for the game to run would exceed 1 cartridge. So not only would you have to swap discs at certain points in the story, you'd have to swap them at other points, e.g. because you were backtracking. Trying to gather a spell from a starter dungeon for Beta? Please remove Vincent from your party and insert cartridge 2.
I'm very thankful that a basic statement from myself like, "N64 was surprisingly devoid of memorable RPGs" would be met with input by people who were actually there, and provide first hand accounts. You are the folks who make Hacker News an absolute treat.
I'm convinced that if Falcom had reworked Popful Mail for the Nintendo 64 (with Working Design's 90's anime dub) it could have been a surprise hit with the preteens that only had Ocarina of Time and Ogre Battle on the system.
Super Mario RPG was a collab between Nintendo and Square. Square famously jumped ship after Nintendo ditched the CD format. As another mentioned, Paper Mario was supposed to be the spiritual successor to SMRPG. Even though Paper Mario was a modest success, I still consider it a miss on matching SMRPG's quality bar for an RPG.
In addition, Square still held a bunch of specific legal rights around it, which is why Paper Mario was branded as being distinct, even if it had a lot of obvious commonalities.
Great game (and sequels) but it wasn't released in Europe for example. Nintendo always did these strange business moves that made no sense yet they always prevailed. For example they had everything needed to connect DS and Wii - never did. Online shop? Dead for years, etc.
Historically, people have been reticent for some reason to call it an Action/RPG, preferring to call it Action/Adventure instead, and IIRC the crux of the argument was usually "Link does not gain experience points or level-up, ergo it's not a full RPG."
It's a silly argument, IMO, but at the time "RPG" in everyone's minds meant either JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) or PC RPG (Baldur's Gate, etc).
The demo discs were clutch. I didn't have much money and would play the heck out of demo discs until I could save enough money to buy a game. Saturn didn't seem to have enough titles and PS was spitting them out like crazy.
Yeah hard to describe probably to anyone growing up in a post-YouTube, post-Steam, post-Playstation store era, but getting a video or playable demo of like 20 or 30 games on a demo disc that was sometimes packaged in with a magazine you'd buy in the store was incredible.
Man, that is hooey, if we're talking launch (day one) titles. The US Dreamcast launch lineup was spectacular.
Leading the way was Soul Calibur, one of a handful of games to earn a perfect score from Famitsu[1] and it actually blew away the arcade version (!)
NFL2K was also a launch title and while I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd is allergic to sports titles, it was far superior to contemporary versions of Madden... got correspondingly high reviews as well
Sonic Adventure was pretty spectacular too I thought, I would call that an 8.5 or 9/10 (like a lot of 3D platformers it maybe hasn't "aged well" but at the time, I thought it was spectacular and it was well reviewed)
Power Stone was a blast too.... Hydro Thunder.... bunch of other solid ones. Day one.
Here was the PS1 launch lineup. Ridge Racer is the only really good title here, excluding previous-gen ports like NBA Jam and Rayman. Toshinden was obviously mindblowing as the first polygon fighter many played but it's sort of a notoriously bad game.
But in some ways that just shows Dreamcast had already lost the war before it launched. Sega did everything right and hit the ground running with what many consider the greatest launch title lineup in history, but their rep was too tarnished.
Almost every single game during the PS1 launch was a killer app because every single one was a novel new experience in a 3D rendered space. Dreamcast showed up way too late to compare.
The PS1 also launched several novel IPs.
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable where Tekken and Rayman are not.
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a
dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's
why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable
where Tekken and Rayman are not.
I mean, you could make this same argument to claim that the Atari VCS was better than the NES because the idea of "playing games on your TV" was no longer a novel new experience by the time the NES rolled around.
For everything about to say, please note that I'm not arguing one system was better than the other. Just talking about how they fit in historically. I owned and enjoyed all of these consoles.
For me, the Dreamcast was the first "modern" 3D console where everything came together.
PS1 3D games were largely pretty ugly. Jaggy warping textures and the hardware was not really powerful enough for big worlds. Perhaps even more importantly, the lack of analog controls was a very very serious impediment.
Obviously despite this there were a lot of classic PS1 titles. A few games like Gran Turismo even seemed to pull off miracles graphically while other titles like Metal Gear Solid just leaned into the grimy pixelated look.
The N64 was largely a joke to me. You had a standard analog control, but the hardware was clearly a mess. Specifically there was far too little texture memory so every game had these giant low-res smoothed out blurry textures. Again obviously a few games transcended that but in general, man, yikes.
The Dreamcast was the first modern 3D console. The one where things came together. Enough horsepower and texture memory to render actually good looking worlds and the flexibility to do things like cel-shading. You play DOA2 or Soul Calibur and those models still look pretty good today. Lots of games were locked in at 60fps. Etc. Even had the first console MMO.
The Dreamcast really was a wonder and it has a huge place in gaming history.
The Dreamcast wasn't competing against the Playstation 1, the Sega Saturn was. And price and game library aside it had the hardware to back it up. You can see this in gameplay videos of, say, Nights into Dreams or Tomb Raider.
If anything the Dreamcast was competing against the PS2 and Gamecube (despite coming out at an awkward time significantly earlier than the competition)
Dreamcast had terrible timing, in my opinion. That, and the controller was obnoxious. But wrt timing, the Dreamcast launched in between generations. Console generations tend to last at least 5 years. It was harder for people to afford multiple consoles back then, and if you had purchased an N64 or a PS1 in '96-'98, it was probably too soon to buy a second or third console in 1999, when Dreamcast launched. It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2 and Xbox both launched in the following year and a half with better graphics and DVD support, leapfrogging it in the process.
It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2
It didn't matter because Sony had already won the hype war, EA forsook the DC, and the built in DVD player was something of a killer app itself.
BUT If you go back and look at the first year or two of PS2 titles, they were not technically superior to the Dreamcast.
IMO the Dreamcast had 1-2 years as the best hardware on the market, and another 1-2 years on par with the PS2.
PS2 was far superior "on paper" but in reality, the difference was not as large as the numbers suggested at a glance. The Dreamcast did two things the PS2 didn't:
- Hidden face removal, making it vastly more efficient than the PS2 (most polygons in a scene are actually hidden by other polygons, so if you avoid rendering them that's an enormous win [1]
- Free hardware texture decompression, so it needed much less video memory [2]
Those points were subtle, though. The gaming press and internet chatter at the time was largely (and understandably) oblivious to tech subtleties like that.
In the end, obviously, the PS2 actually was superior once developers (and particularly middleware developers) mastered its tricky CPU. But I didn't consider it to really surpass the DC for a while.
That, and the controller was obnoxious.
I liked the controller unlike many, but the failure to include a second analog stick was a real miss. The sad thing is, the DC's controller protocol had support for dual analog inputs. They just didn't forsee the need.
The PS2 was backwards compatible with the PS1, so virtually all PS1 games from their huge library continued to be playable on PS2. And PS1 games were still shipping in 2000, 2001, and 2002.
Meanwhile, PS2 may have had a poor launch lineup but by 2001 it was rapidly improved with Gran Turismo 3, Grand Theft Auto 3 (by itself a killer app), Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Jak and Daxter, every sports franchise you could want, other smaller hits like Devil May Cry, Max Payne, etc. Meanwhile the Dreamcast was discontinued by March of 2001, just 5 months after PS2's North American debut.
I remember the launch being as attractive as you described (I was always lukewarm on Sonic, though). A few years later when the parents finally agreed to buy me that gen's console, I still went for the PS2 because of the catalog and DVD player, after a long streak of only buying Nintendo consoles. I borrowed a few other the years, but never the DC.
Competition was fierce. I like the arcade-Sega style of games and enjoyed the DC titles when I got my hands on them, but that was as far as I went.
The PS5 is a good example, it was announced over a year before it came out and I'm confident first-party developers could already work on games for the platform, but... exclusives were lackluster at best, and for the first year or two it was pretty much all cross-platform titles.
Probably for the best since production couldn't keep up with demand, so the PS5 was a slow burner that didn't yet need exclusives to sell the console.
PS4 wasn't too different. Many people held off on getting one until Bloodborne came out 16 months later.
I think Microsoft is the one in a really weird position ever since they started releasing PC versions of basically all their platform exclusives. Not that I'm complaining, but they've pretty much made it so there's zero reason for PC gamers to buy an Xbox, whereas there's still reasons to buy a Switch or PlayStation for the exclusives.
I wonder if Microsoft does this because gaming has been one of the biggest differentiators for their OS. That's an advantage that is rapidly fading and they want to hold onto it as long as possible.
Not sure if that stance is going to be relevant much longer. I recall Apple releasing a new framework that actually had some substance during their last keynote. I think Linus did a segment, they were running cyberpunk on Mac at 30FPS, not ideal sure, but it's a big step up.
I kind of totally missed the PS1 launch, but it would have had the advantage that most of the titles being worked on didn't have anywhere else to go, really.
It you're working on a maybe PS5 launch title, you can relatively easily decide to release it for PS4 instead.
Most PS1 titles are tied to a cd-rom, and maybe some of the other hardware, and would have been tough to release elsewhere. Sega CD and 3DO didn't have much traction, TG16-CD and Jag-CD even less, Saturn vs PS1 vs PC was the relevant choice, and I think Sony was better at attracting developers at the time.
Although, it should be pointed out Road Rash was widely ported, launching on 3DO, later releasing on Sega CD, PlayStation, Saturn and PC.
As a lifelong fan of turn-based JRPG titles, this rings true. The Saturn (and the SegaCD before it) had some great titles there, but the PS1 had a while lot more to choose from, while the N64 was very light. By the time the PS2 and DC rolled around, “what the kids want” was clearly moving away from what I wanted. Every indie or retro title in the genre was and is a gift since.
While the turn-based aspect had definitely become more niche by the time of the PS2, JRPGs were still abounding on it and (lesser so, but still) the DreamCast. It wasn't until PS3 that they started to wane; and now they're all but dead (outside of Japan).
lol why is this being downvoted? This is the truth.
Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales darling.
Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D games that were becoming less popular.
The result is that they had a system that had lots of good games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars the market was looking for.
If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things would have been different, but that didn't happen.
> Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
One of the best selling games of that generation was a JRPG (FF7), and it was most definitely a popular genre. Interest in it didn't begin waning until the next generation.
> The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
There were hundreds of "tent-pole 3D" games released for the N64 and PS1; yet people only remember a dozen or so. By your previous logic on JRPGs (which, again, were very popular in the "32-bit era"), this is not a mainstream..."genre".
Your memory of the whole era feels super anachronistic. The Saturn didn't fail because of it's games, it failed because it didn't have enough of them (by chasing third party developers away) and (as you touched on), the majority of the best ones never left Japan.
I was a gamer from Atari 2600 to Saturn. My experience was exactly that once I was bored with Virtua Fighter it felt like nothing good was coming out for it. Even Virtua Fighter while fun didn't stay that fun for very long.
I know I had just got it at New Years 1995/96. It was $399, $790 adjusted for inflation.
It is really one of the worst purchases of my life in terms of the excitement of coming home with it to not playing it a few months after. I had no other games but Virtua Fighter for it and it pretty much ruined my interest in gaming.
Why the downvotes? It definitely was a huge reason.
The Dreamcast had great games, most people agree with that. Most notoriously arcade games. But they were all somewhat niche, and Sega struggled to get the big licences necessary to achieve popular success. In particular: no EA, no Square-Enix, and way behind Nintendo when it comes to first party titles.
Optics, price point, word of mouth. Coming from the SNES as a kid, I only wanted the N64 and that's what I got. Very quickly the PSX got popular and games were stocked everywhere. No one talked about the Saturn.
I did get to play it when it was new (the Saturn), and the catalog I encountered was shitty FMV games and a shmup. I was not enamored.
The Dreamcast though, I remember being very attractive. The demos of Sonic Adventure looked absolutely astounding to me. I was late hopping on to that gen of consoles (parents strapped for cash), and still given the choice I went for the PS2, because it had the more attractive catalog and a DVD player. Years went by and I borrowed a GC to play Prime, an XBOX to play Ninja Gaiden and Halo, but I was not that motivated to try the DC.
This is a bad take. Sega actually had incredible advertising campaigns in the 90s. That iconic "SEGA!" yell was addictive and memeable. Advertising/marketing was never a problem for Sega.
Sega also had tons of mindshare. They fumbled the ball and Sony ran with it for a touchdown. End of story.
Very few autuers agree with you. They make blockbuster movies to finance the goodwill and pocketbooks of the films they want to make. This is why the critically "best" movies every year always go under the radar with relatively few ticket sales.
This is all to say, your opinion clearly isn't the universal one.
That’s not really what I was getting at (although it is generally true, and it is the original meaning of the phrase “the customer is always right”). My point was that advertising steers people’s opinions all the time. Better advertising would have ensured that the kids wanted the games that Sega would actually have.
Although I will also say that they must have known that a lot of kids would already want another Sonic game, so not having one at launch was a mistake. No need to steer people’s opinions if they are already in a convenient place.
Sometimes I think about how weird it was that a JRPG was somehow the most important game launch of its era in America. Everyone bought that game and I'm not sure why. It's a fine game if you're a JRPG fan, and they did a great job moving it away from the usual themes, but it's so weird that it caught on with so many people that had never even heard of the genre or wouldn't have wanted to play a JRPG before.
Was it the FMVs during summons? Why was that particular FF game so culturally relevant unlike any before or after? It was so successful that there was a bubble of JRPGs put into the mainstream for awhile there in the late 90's.
Final Fantasy was already a guaranteed hit in Japan, but the success in the west can be greatly attributed to a successful marketing campaign by Sony.
Additionally, the non-medieval theme really helped setting it apart. There were guns, cars, televisions, and motorcycles!
It's fascinating to recall the TV commercial in North America featuring the motorcycle cinematic scene, which, ironically, constituted only 2 minutes of the game 50+ hours of gameplay.
Regardless, FF7 was an exceptional game that truly showcased the remarkable progress in video game development, appealing to a wider audience.
I still have goosebumps thinking about the first chapter of the game. It really was something when it came out.
Because FF7 looked like a cool american game.
You had a blonde hero with a giant sword, a cool black guy (Mr. T knockoff) with a gun arm, and beautiful women in a cyberpunk dystopia.
It really nailed the zeitgeist at the time.
That's weird. I always had the exact opposite impression.
Early JRPGs felt comfortably Western to me because they just lifted the Tolkien-esque medieval fantasy vibe whole cloth.
But FF7 felt like a totally random pastiche of genres that were jammed together in such an unusual combination that I could only imagine someone from another culture thinking to combine them.
Like making an apple pie with hotdogs in it. Yes, nominally it would be super American, but no American would ever think to put those together in that way.
Or rented it, or borrowed the first disc from someone who's on the second one. Don't have any numbers on the latter, but games including a 'demo disc' seem like they'd get free advertising.
Do you remember what games were part of that "bubble" after ff7?
I was a huge fan of JRPGs at the time and a few years prior on the SNES... FF2 and FF3, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Secret of Mana..
FF7 took it to the next level graphically but kept everything good about the gameplay.. I didn't play it until it was ported to PC, and the 3d accelerated video cards made it look much nicer than it even did on the PSX. It was a masterpiece of a game, the character development was extremely engaging and memorable. And the cinematics of Aerith dying, or Sephiroth walking through the flames... I had never seen anything like that up to that point.
FF7 and Zelda64 (ocarina of time) were the last games I really got into before I shifted to wasting all of my time on the internet instead of video games. I feel like games haven't been as good since that era, but it's probably mostly me that has changed.
So many that would have been published in Japan but probably not the USA. Star Ocean, Xenogears, Suikoden, Vagrant Story, Breath of Fire, Dragon Warrior 7 or something, Brave Fencer, and adjacent ones like Parasite Even and even Bushido Blade. These are just off the top of my head.
> FF7 took it to the next level graphically but kept everything good about the gameplay
Respectfully disagree. FF7 is not an S-tier JRPG by any means. It was a regression from FF6 in that it was linear, had very 2D characters, inferior story and boss, and the fighting system was really basic and lame. But it turned a generation onto the genre and I played it recently and it has aged well in some ways. The Chocobo stuff was great and Golden Saucer for its time was amazing. So a good game but not a great one. Even in the list above quite a few are better. Xenogears in particular.
FF7 is iconic though and easily the most important game in the fanchise. Cloud is iconic even if he's sort of lame IMO.
> I feel like games haven't been as good since that era, but it's probably mostly me that has changed.
I'd agree that Ocarina of Time was probably the most anticipated game I've ever had. But modern games are amazing. They're just better in every way. I don't play nearly as much as I used to but games are just so refined and built on so many years of knowledge now.
Obviously tastes vary but it does stand out to me more now just how much 7 is an iteration on 6, despite the big change to 3D.
The menus and ATB are obviously basically a straight port over, materia are pretty much an adjustment of the similar re-slottable espers from 6 that taught magic, characters' limit breaks from 7 are sometimes clearly based on the unique abilities from 6 (Tifa's for example basically combining Setzer's slots with references to Sabin's martial arts), limit breaks themselves being an evolution of 6's desperation attacks..., even some really specific stuff like the opera house rafters vs. Aerith's chapel.
Indeed regarding the iterative nature. In addition FF6 had the veldt system with Garr and many more character classes that were interesting. I can’t iterate enough how the non-linear nature after Kafka scorches the land was so amazing for its time.
And then even items like the Atma Weapon or choices like using some thing like Ragnarok to create a weapon or a spell. Totally up to the players style.
Everyone has a different story on how they got through FF6. FF7 was linear.
And yes the Opera House - quite possibly the peak of 16-bit RPG gaming. Absolutely beautifully done.
From what I recall the marketing for the saturn tried to make the knights game 'the new sonic' and it looked dumb.
I also remember wanting to know what a 'panzer dragoon' was but a lot of the commercials made it seem like you should already be aware and they may have just misspelled dragon.
Virtua fighter was a fine game in the arcade but none of my friends were going to buy a saturn for one game they could play at the arcade or some weird flying sonic game.
When playstation came out, battle arena toshinden felt fast and the characters looked cooler. Ridge Racer felt Way faster than Daytona the music was great and the textures blew my mind.
So even though saturn had a earlier launch the Playstation came to the party with more to offer.
It took me a while to understand what you meant - it's not "knights", the title is Nights Into Dreams.
But yeah, having that as a launch title was a big mistake. The gameplay is a weird and unapproachable genre, and the characters flopped as mascots. It was actually made to show off the then-new analog 360º control stick (the "3d control pad"), but nobody cared about that.
The Saturn needed Sonic and didn't have it, and everything else from there was deck chairs on the Titanic.
Nights into dreams was my favorite game as a kid. The graphics were just mind-blowingly pretty at the time to the point where I had dreams about visiting dreamland.
Though the whimsical fantasy setting of Spyro the Dragon on Playstation was up there too. And I do agree that the Saturn was missing a killer Sonic game. Sonic 3D Blast was a bit too quirky, not 3D enough, and not exclusive enough to be a system seller.
Also I'm a die-hard Sega super fan so totally biased.
I always thought Sega had the better games and hardware. I had all of these consoles. Playstation always felt like an imposter back then, but I was a Sega fan and Nintendo secondarily.
The n64 having better games I do not think was a most people. There are some circles and bubbles, namely Nintendo fans that might think that. But outside of a few stand outs like Mario 64, Zelda, starfox and party games PlayStation crushed them in pure quantity. Psx has dozens of Jrpgs still worth playing today. Then you include games like metal gear solid, twisted metal, tony hawk. There were probably more great games on psx than there were n64 games.
I’m experiencing this feeling right now, I’ve been considering a PS5 just for Final Fantasy XVI. But the smart move would be to wait until it’s no longer exclusive to that console
Tastes vary, but power stone and soul calibur are great (and still look great today). Though you are right in a way, it didn't really have a recognisable brand game like gran turismo or Tekken. (Or goldeneye)
> Hindsight suggests none of those really worked and that Sega's other primary obsession, lowering hardware costs after its launch, both for competition and margins, backfired. The retail margin on a core $250 Saturn system, without pack-in games, was 6 percent, or $15, while Sony seemed to be offering 10 percent core, 15 percent pack-in.
> "How Did Sony Do it?" one slide rhetorically asks. The answer, according to Sega, is that it was perceived to be cheaper, its software "looks better than ours," that Sega "equity has been damaged by 32x and Sega CD," and that Sony has "effectively leveraged their considerable equity from consumer electronics." All Sega had to do, according to the next slide, was improve its software, get pricing advantage, improve its advertising, spend better on TV advertising, and "dramatically improve" its game timing. Simple enough.
I highly recommend the movie/documentary “Console Wars” as it touches on this subject.
The success of the Genesis especially in the United States, at least according to this movie, came from a “dream team” when it came to marketing and promotion. This team included Tom Kalinske, former CEO of Mattel.
For a time, this team at Sega of America held the parent company’s ear, and it led to the Genesis breaking Nintendo’s monopolistic stranglehold on the game industry. The Genesis succeeded because of some pretty amazing marketing and the success of Sonic the Hedgehog.
By the time the Sega Saturn came along, this team was gone, and I think it shows.
I'm always dubious of these claims. For some reason the marketing guys are always the key to the success, and nothing else barely matters. In these "documentaries" the hardware could have been terrible, hell they could have been selling bananas, but if the marketing would have just been tweaked a bit, it would all have worked out.
It's not surprising that the marketing guys market themselves the best and therefore end up with the more compelling story. It's just boring and trite. Tell me the story of their hardware. The ups and downs of developing games for a platform that wasn't done. The stories of turmoil, as the executives started demanding more features to match the competition.
You're not wrong. The Genesis shipped with fairly 'boring' but powerful hardware for the time - an M68K, a Yamaha synth, and a PPU-style video scanout chip. In contrast the Saturn was a kitchen sink of novel ideas that developers struggled to work with. Two CPUs, a polygon rasterizer[0], a sound system with an M68K inside, AND a DSP with a VLIW instruction set.
At the same time I'm not convinced that these failures are entirely orthogonal. Developer marketing is still marketing. At some point during the Saturn's development someone should have said "hey, maybe we shouldn't make developers juggle five CPUs to get decent performance." Letting the system engineers go wild with power is how you wind up shipping a system that looks really powerful on paper but nobody can actually develop games for. See also: the PlayStation 3.
[0] Which itself wasn't even as functional as the PlayStation's. If I remember correctly, rendering to a texture was either impossible or merely very difficult. SEGA also stuck a PPU in there as well which you could use for some effects but it didn't make up for those missing features.
The Saturn hardware was a mess because of last-minute additions welded on in response to their “Oh Crap!” moment of seeing what the PS1 could do.
The Saturn was made to be the ultimate 2D games machine. It had incredibly powerful 2D sprite hardware. But, then the PS1 announced it was all about 3D! Suddenly the hardware engineers were ordered to retrofit 3D into their 2D beast. So, they tacked on a second CPU and some other chips as fast as they could. If you open one up, you’ll see wires haphazardly stretched across the boards connecting the extra hardware to the original design.
The Saturn’s “3D rendering” was a clever desperation move. Turns out, with powerful enough 2D sprite rendering hardware, you can scale, rotate and shear a square 2D sprite into the distorted configuration that is equivalent to an 3D transformed rectangle viewed in perspective…. So, just tell the game developers to build their 3D scenes out of sprites instead of triangles!
Indeed. The Saturn didn't REALLY render "quads", but just transformed and translated sprites. That lead to all sorts of strange concepts. You didn't have UVs; a "quad" "texture" covered the entire quad from corner to corner and you couldn't change that. That lead to situations like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDJgeuoaSvQ where the programmer wanted a simple environment mapping effect, but it was impossible with the Saturn hardware so he ended up writing a 3D rasterizer in software to enable the effect on the start screen.
As far as I know no Saturns have "wires stretched haphazardly across the board", at least mine don't. Perhaps really early Japanese models, but random bodge wires tend to get fixed pretty quickly for later revisions of PCBs, and like most games consoles the Saturn has quite a few variants through its production run.
For example very first revision of the Mega Drive in Japan did have an extra PCB and wires to fix a bug though. But only the first revision, it went away by the second.
I worked with the DreamCast dev hardware for a time back then. The rendering hardware was definitely rather different than typical triangle-based approaches. IIRC, polygonal shapes were defined by means of multiple intersecting planes. I also seem to recall that it was capable of unusually high frame rates (for the time).
This was in 1999, and definitely the DreamCast. I was using one of the Katana dev kits. But I may be misremembering about the the plane-based rendering; I can't seem to find any references to that now.
Yes, the Saturn was a different beast. The Saturn also suffered from the PS2 problem, not having a decent developer toolkit. I think the PS2 was floundering hard but the hype was unreal and the dreamcast could not match the PS2 hardware. The dreamcast did offer Windows CE and as such, Microsoft's DirectX APIs.. but at the time PC gaming wasn't as big and console-only developers did not see value in porting between the two. IIRC only a handful of third party games relied on CE. There's probably a lot more I'm glossing over.
If you want to succeed in consumer electronics (or consumer anything), you need a great product AND great marketing. There are plenty of examples of failed consoles that lacked one or both.
For example: The Turbografx-16 was a pretty nice system with awesome games that did well in Japan but had next to no presence in the US. Very few people owned one as their only system, so it was mostly bought by video game aficionados who had to have every system. (And I guess reviewers for video game magazines.)
The 3DO by contrast had great marketing (lots of commercials, ads in every magazine) but had expensive, lackluster hardware and only a few decent titles. Although to be fair it had higher ambitions than just being a video game console, so that identity crisis was one of its major struggles.
Success needs great vision of what can be in the near future, and carefully pushing that as far as possible but not letting "feature bloat" push it too far out. You can find this vision in both marketing and in engineering teams. If you are great at engineering (likely if you are reading this here), then you can hire people in marketing to sell whatever you create; while if you are great in marketing you can hire engineers to create your vision. Either works.
That the vision seems to have been in marketing in Sega's case shouldn't take away from all the engineering effort that went in as well, but the vision, and thus credit, is on marketing making the right decisions. There are plenty of other engineering companies that likewise have a good vision.
The argument is that Sega's global success with the Genesis came from its products - not the marketing (despite what the marketers say). One piece of support for that is that the console succeeded against Nintendo in most territories, despite all being under different marketing leadership and following different strategies.
When the Sega of America marketers were put in charge of product development and stopped relying on Japanese products, they were unable to replicate their success. They followed questionable practices derived from the toy industry (from where CEO Tom Kalinske emerged), such as a heavy emphasis on expensive licensed titles over original franchises.
>For some reason the marketing guys are always the key to the success,
I think this has a lot to do with the personality types that are attracted to sales/marketing vs hardware/software developers. One group is typically outgoing, bombastic, in your face, talk your ear off, no problems bending the truth to fit the narrative while the other group is not. (care to guess my sentiments on marketing/sales types ;-)
The number of passionate developers that can talk about their project in compelling way to make the average person interested is pretty small compared to the number sales people that will make you absolutely want to buy something while at the same time have little to no actual understanding of what they are selling or care to.
> I'm always dubious of these claims. For some reason the marketing guys are always the key to the success, and nothing else barely matters. In these "documentaries" the hardware could have been terrible, hell they could have been selling bananas, but if the marketing would have just been tweaked a bit, it would all have worked out.
IMHO, there can be multiple "keys" to success. The hardware has to be at least adequate (and IIRC, the Genesis beat the SNES to market by a couple years), and so does the marketing.
I've never seen that documentary, but it's possible Sega's marketing for the Genesis was relatively better than average, compared to the hardware.
Console Wars leaves a lot out. For one, Sega of America was in financial trouble as early as the 2nd half of 1993 when revenues nosedived. The company ended up laying off 70% of its 900-member workforce by the end of 1995. Despite having one of the largest game development divisions in the world, it utterly failed to consistently release hit titles (its internal studio, STI, was infamous for having more unreleased than released games).
The CEO of Sega of America, Tom Kalinske, was strongly against marketing the Saturn in North America due to its expected high price tag. He persuaded the parent company to develop and release the ill-fated 32X, and then he put most of the company's resources into supporting it. When the 32X bombed upon release, the decision was quickly made to bump up the release of the Saturn, but Sega of America had almost no software in the pipeline. Ironically, in the end, the Saturn matched the PlayStation in price for most of its life.
A few articles on the topic for anyone who's interested:
Unsurprisingly when ex-Sega America employees are one's only sources, the story ends up with Sega America marketing people as the heroes of the story :)
The success of the Genesis in the west had a lot more to do with the fact that Mortal Kombat on the Genesis had blood.
Slick marketing and Sonic made the Genny a contender. Lax content restrictions at a time when gamers were thirsty for more mature content put it over the top.
While I think that was a cool factor, the Genesis became the sports console and really dominated with annual sports titles (especially from EA). That also targeted a demographic willing to spend money on games: 16-30yo guys. Those are the same people who would buy Mortal Kombat (especially since it was the edgier version).
Mortal Kombat made a lot of headlines and sold a lot of copies, but I’ve never seen stats that suggested it drove console sales one way or another.
That 3d bar chart is something special. The half-assed 3D effect serves only to make it harder to read. I appreciate this is often the case with diagrams, but this is an amazing example.
The early 90's were awash with terrible examples of charts. Honestly, I think business folk for the first time got the tools to create high-quality graphical charts and they went nuts without understanding what they were doing -- no doubt, trying to out do one another and impress their boss.
I graduated in 1997 and at my first job we had an engineer that loved making Powerpoint presentations. I hated that stuff but he used every 3D option, different color palettes on every page, etc. We had someone else print up fake business cards for him that changed his title to "3D Pie Chart Engineer"
I think the greatest offenders are 3D pie charts. The application of perspective skews the apparent size of each section, completely defeating the purpose of pie charts.
Sega had Sonic Adventure, Soul Caliber, Phantasy Star, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi. On the gaming front they had everything they needed.
On the pricing front though... oh boy. You are not gonna survive as a hardware company when Sony jams a DVD player into their gaming console and sells at a $100+ dollar loss just to pump up the DVD standard
They had all those games after the Sega CD, 32x, and Saturn failed. The Dreamcast was great but because of prior failures they tried to beat Sony to market with in-between specs and were therefore easily out-marketed when Sony started hyping their PS2 like crazy.
I've always wondered how much of the success of the PS1 could be attributed to the fact that games could be basically free because of the CD/DVD medium instead of cartridges, which required more dedicated hardware to make "backups".
It was huge. Even without piracy, manufacturing cartridges was expensive. Nintendo made them all and made you pay for the privilege above base costs. The lead time was long and you could be screwed due parts shortages. Got a great game you want to sell? Sorry, Goldeneye is too popular so we’ll make more of those first. Good luck waiting.
CDs cost basically nothing. Sony would make them (because of the copyright protection) but Sony was a music company. They could easily churn out millions of the things a week, or maybe a day. So it was possible for them to just make more physical product to sell the Nintendo ever could. Far cheaper.
Storage size was also a big issue. Full motion video, CD quality audio, more levels… The PlayStation could do things that the N64 just couldn’t do to storage size.
Do you remember the “magazine“ PlayStation Underground? You would sign up and Sony would send you a disc once a month with videos and demos and such.
Something like that is 100% impossible (financially) with cartridges.
PlayStation was actually under Sony music in their corporate hierarchy due to internal politics. A YouTube channel called lowspecgamer has a pretty good video about the system's development.
Most those are first-party Sega games - certainly not available in PlayStation until Sega threw in the console towel and became a third-party developer.
All of those games were Sega exclusives (I think even first-party Sega IP) until Sega threw in the hardware towel and began making games for other platforms.
Edit: Soul Caliber isn’t Sega IP, but the rest are
Lets be fair, Microsoft entered this industry by innovating their way in.
The original XBOX having built in Ethernet and a HDD meant that they were first to establish a proper online service and then they built out the whole infrastructure to enable voice chat and social. Reminder that this was before Skype, Facebook, and even Myspace! They essentially built the first real online voice communication and social network.
Contrast this with the PS2 which was a bolted on online experience. You had to buy separate equipment to connect it, the support was limited to a handful of games and each game had their own custom infrastructure. It was a legacy console in this regard.
They followed it up with the 360 adding a whole layer to the gameplay with things like achievements, expanding the console to include things like Netflix while further solidifying their online offerings. The 360 helped make online video streaming into what it is today. It allowed people to spend more time doing things with their "box" when they didn't want to play video games. Then came the massive support for indie titles and the app store. Wanted to play a classic? You can in minutes with the app store. (Sony eventually copied this but MSFT was first out of the gate).
Sure Microsoft fumbled multiple times, which company hasn't? You can list numerous examples where Sony, Nintendo, and Sega have messed up. But Microsoft has definitely innovated and helped move the industry forward.
You can make the same argument with Sony then. Dreamcast didn't have DVD because they started development after the Saturn which was an era where DVD wasn't available in a mass market and Sony having "innovated" by relying on their patent portfolio and that they just happen to be partners in the DVD consortium.
That era of gaming so many people fail to see why marketing was super important because the games all were pretty good. It's important to remember that before the cd/dvd era console manufacturers made money off the cartridge sales, so the commission was high. When sony was using CD's they took way less I think 15-20% vs 50 or something compared to nintendo. And even still nintendo/sega couldn't make the medium as fast as sony. Sony could mint cds for a fraction of the cost of making cartridges. As well if Namco wanted to order 1,000,000 cds for a special launch date, sony could. Nintendo/Sega couldn't.
I stopped buying console games after ~1993 until sometime in the 2010s, so my experience with the Playstation and such was visiting friends who had them. It was pretty cool, but I think Sega was doomed in North America before that.
Sega released the (backwards compatible) Genesis two years before Nintendo released the Super NES -- anecdotally, I knew far more folks with SNES than the Genesis, and my impression was that was true all over NA.
Again, Sega released the (backwards compatible) Saturn two years before Nintendo released the N64, but I didn't know anyone at the time who had a Saturn and a few who had the N64.
My recollection was that Nintendo kept promising their console "tomorrow tomorrow" so that folks wouldn't buy the Sega consoles. And I think it worked.
I don't know if this played out in Japan and Europe, but in NA I think Sega was doomed long before the original PS.
In North America, the Genesis was actually more popular than the SNES until near the tail end of the 16-bit era - 1994 or so. By that point the Genny's paltry colour palette (64 on-screen 9-bit colours) was starting to look really dated - not just next to the new 32-bit consoles but even next to the SNES, as devs started to learn how to make it sing (see: Donkey Kong Country). And the bungling of the Sega CD and especially the 32X really did a number on their brand. When all is said and done they ended up pretty much neck-and-neck, with Nintendo pulling ahead a little bit, but any way you slice it, with 18M units sold in NA, the Genesis was an enormously successful product.
The late arrival of the N64 did little to hurt the Playstation, so you can't pin Sega's failure on Nintendo's delays.
In Europe, the Genesis (and Master System!) were even bigger than they were in North America, but the Saturn still bombed and Sony still ruled the next gen.
In Japan, the Saturn was actually quite successful - more popular than the N64 actually - whereas Sega's previous systems never really caught on. But, again, it still lived in the shadow of the mighty Playstation.
And, as a nit: the Saturn wasn't backwards compatible. The Genesis was, but no one outside of Europe and Brazil cared about the Master System.
> In North America, the Genesis was actually more popular than the SNES until near the tail end of the 16-bit era
I've heard this but IME "everyone" had an SNES while only a few people had a Sega Genesis -- and many of them also had an SNES. Maybe it was just folks I knew, but I went to college in a different state and SNES was much more popular among them.
So I know what I've read but it's so far off from my (pretty broad) experience that I wonder if the stats are misleading.
> The late arrival of the N64 did little to hurt the Playstation, so you can't pin Sega's failure on Nintendo's delays.
I think Sega got caught in the middle between Sony and Nintendo (they're completely different markets now) and many folks who would have bought a Saturn instead held out for Tomorrow Tomorrow on the N64, which was what I anecdotally saw with the Genesis vs SNES.
> And, as a nit: the Saturn wasn't backwards compatible.
The NA Saturn could play Genesis games. I didn't own one so I couldn't test if it played Master System games.
> The Genesis was, but no one outside of Europe and Brazil cared about the Master System.
I feel personally attacked. ;) I don't remember why I got the Sega Master System over an NES, but it may have been for Phantasy Star.
To the original post, I agree the Sony Playstation hurt Sega significantly, but I think Sega was in trouble before the PS hit the shelves (in part because of the issues w/ the SegaCD and 32x, as you said).
"La Zona Blanca" ad [1] mentioned in the article is funny. But I do agree with the note "When did we decide on Hare Krishna cult members?" There must be better ways to spend the ad money OR may be Sega marketing was using Hare Krishna members as purple cows [2]
Hard disagree. Without the cult members the ad would have lost a lot of comedic flair. It would have landed in an uncanny valley between serious and not-serious. Kalinske was out of line trying to micromanage at that level.
For those who don’t know what this refers to, Sega showed off the Saturn at CES (?), announced it was launching that same day, and would cost $399. That’s $800 converted to todays dollars.
Sony had their presentation later that day. The Sony gentleman got on stage, said ‘299’, and walked off. That was it.
Sony got ALL the news. The Saturn immediately seemed overpriced and had to prove it was worth the extra money, which they were unable to do enough to succeed.
Additionally, because Sega bumped their launch up by months WITHOUT telling many partners, they pissed a bunch of them off. Huge important retailers like KB Toys who didn’t get early stock not only refused to carry the console, they pulled all existing Sega stuff off the shelves too. Game developers were caught flat-footed too and didn’t have their games ready.
Sega basically botched the entire launch in the US thing. And it came back to bite them when the Dreamcast came out.
> Additionally, because Sega bumped their launch up by months WITHOUT telling many partners, they pissed a bunch of them off. Huge important retailers like KB Toys who didn’t get early stock not only refused to carry the console, they pulled all existing Sega stuff off the shelves too. Game developers were caught flat-footed too and didn’t have their games ready.
This vaguely reminds me of the Nintendo Switch, which launched without really having any games going for it. Mario Kart 8 and Breath of the Wild were both available on release, ported from the Wii U. You could also get Rayman Legends (ported from the Wii U, four years old) or Disgaea 5 (two years old, but ported from PS4, so new to a Nintendo console). Super Mario Odyssey (original to the Switch!) didn't come out until 8 months after the Switch released. They never have done a Mario Kart for the Switch. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (ported from the Wii U) released for the Switch 15 months after the Switch released.
But everyone loved the Switch anyway; the fact that on release there were zero new games (and maybe up to two old games that were to your taste) available didn't seem to hurt anything.
What's the ethics of a third party publishing alleged leaked documents like this?
There's an arguable public interest, if the documents are genuine (less if genuine but cherry-picked), but does that override respect for the IP of the company and privacy of named people?
It varies by country but here in the US, we have a long and proud tradition of publishing newsworthy leaks in the media.
> does that override respect for the IP of the company
There are no issues here since US copyright explicitly allows for fair use of copyrighted materials for the purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting in particular.
> and privacy of named people?
Work-related creations and communications are not personal private information as health records are. Without getting into the espionage and hacking tangents, by and large, if the company can't safeguard its internal output, that's on the company.
Major rightsholders don't respect our rights with regards to copyright (eroding/harming fair use, copyright extensions, etc) so fuck 'em. This is historical sales data. This isn't anything current or sensitive to today. Why are you defending a company that couldn't give two shits less about you, me, or our legal rights?
Journalistic standard. Typically, anything over 15-20 years is considered fair game; even earlier than that, eminent public interest can trump everything else (depending on state legislation and circumstance), but when it's so old there is basically zero chance that anyone will contest reporting on the basis of commercial sensitivity and win in court.
Note this applies to news organizations. Individuals under private agreements (NDA) are a different matter.
IIUC, declassification concerns checks&balances upon powers given to a government that is responsible to citizens.
Sega documents, on the other hand, seem more like fodder for an MBA student's case study, and anecdotes to drop in popular business books. Which seems much lower public interest, to plug into whatever cost:benefit calculation.
I don't have a good sense of what should be done about the Sega documents. (Hypothetically, were I a journalist but knowing only what I do now, and the documents had been leaked to me only, I'd probably try to authenticate them and determine the motives of the leaker, and then I'd have to get advice from others.)
Not specific to the Sega documents, I'm frequently concerned when I see some kind of information leaked/stolen, and the appearance is that everyone automatically considers it free-game for all purposes.
That appearance might only come from a vocal minority, but when no one questions or objects, it looks universal, and like a sociopathic culture.
I'm sad this was downvoted. It's a good question and worthy of discussion. It might be interesting to hear how other similar leaks have been received & treated by journalists in the past. Is there some pattern based on the age of the documents?
Sega was vicious in how they approached hardware. They low-level took down 3dfx with false promises to include a 3dfx voodoo chip in the Sega Dreamcast, then reneging on the deal, contributing to 3dfx's ultimate bankruptcy and the rise of Nvidia today.
Incidentally, Playstation is primarily an American endeavor now. Sony Interactive Entertainment and Playstation Studios are now based out of California. Most of the first and second party developers are American or European. Playstation owns just one Japanese developer. Some claim that this western shift has compromised the "quirky" aspect of the Playstation brand. Look at the PS1 lineup and you will find so many oddball games that became classics, or at least cult classics. I would not disagree. Playstation has an amazing track record of releasing games, but from a wider view the games do look homogenous.
The chairman of Sega Enterprises was Isao Okawa (founder and president of CSK, majority owner of Sega). The president of Sega Enterprises was Hayao Nakayama.
Sega Enterprises is a Japanese company that founded the subsidiary Sega of America to market its products in North America. Sega Enterprises can trace its origins to Americans such as David Rosen who were in Japan after the war.
Sega went through a number of buyouts and merges and renames and spinoffs over the decades so it's a pretty complex history to follow as it alternated between American and Japanese ownership.
By the mid 80s, CSK, a Japanese software firm, purchased the company from Gulf and Western, the American owners at the time. They then established Sega of America, so I say "of Japan" to distinguish the Japanese office.
The name Sega, is derived from Service Games of Japan, the name in the 1950s.
It boggles my mind that Microsoft of all companies cannot seem to understand that building a software ecosystem requires first attracting developers to a platform. Make that platform attractive and remove friction.
They manage to screw it up more often than not, and then wonder why nobody buys a Zune or a WMR headset or a Windows phone or an Xbox...
or in the case of the zune, only making it available for sale in 1 country when the ipod was being sold in most major countries. i had to buy my zune hd off of ebay. its not really surprising it didn't do as well as the ipod
That's an unusual way to put it. That a platform succeeds by attracting developers wouldn't be new information for Microsoft. They are famous for being extremely outspoken about that very viewpoint. Steve Ballmer gave a famous speech with the line "Developers, developers, developers, developers!".
It kind of does, because with turning XBox into a brand for games that can be played anywhere, PC or via streaming, it kind of devalues the console itself.
Why bother buying the games console, if the same game is available by other mechanisms, the exact same game not a port.
Xbox One was a big mismanagement as they tried to pivot into a multimedia device, with lower focus on gaming and they angered the gamer community responsible for the XBox 360's success.
They had to back pedal from that, brought in Phil Spencer, highly acknowledge in the game industry, he rebooted the whole XBox One approach, re-introduced the indie development support (yet another thing dropped in the meantime) as ID@Xbox program.
The pandemic delivery issues with the Xbox Series X and Series S, and the fact that dev teams have to consider two different hardware models when targeting the XBox made it less atractive than targeting the Playstation or Switch.
So even though they managed to recover from the mess with the XBox community, the efforts to recover from it have left it on a third place in regards to overall sales.
It's doing fine, but Sony is (again) doing a bit beter. Although it's a bit of a loaded question here, since Microsoft integrated Xbox and Windows gaming ecosystem.
The current situation is actually pretty nice - there are three big players with big market shares from which neither has a clear monopoly.
Microsoft is seriously thretening to break that by buying themself a monopoly in game publishing though.
Which resonates more than surface level of that statement you made. Xbox is pretty much next gen SEGA hardware and SEGA was ultimately driven to the ground by a guy that kickstarted Xbox (nasty people would say as a prize)
Xbox One (2013) sold 50 million Units compared with PS4 (2013) selling 113 million units.
Xbox X/S, their 4th gen Xbox, has sold less than 21 million units since 2020, when it was released, compared with PS5's 38 million units in the same timeframe.
Tbh, the latest gen of consoles is pretty underwhelming for me, I don't know how others feel.
The console gaming industry has stopped growing. And as a result both Microsoft and Sony seem to be now trying to cannibalise each other to grow, and it has become a very tribal and bitter rivalry.
To be fair I had been searching for a non-scalped Series X since release until finally finding one a couple months ago. Stores are continuously sold out, so demand is outpacing supply.
The S is pretty readily available but is less powerful than the previous mid generation upgrade, the Xbox One X. Given that until very recently most games supported both generations there was basically no reason to upgrade from a One X to a Series S
I still have not seen a PS5 in real life, ever. These shortages are absurd. Sure I am in my late 30s but I am the ONLY person in my friend group that has managed to pick up a current-gen system.
>Tbh, the latest gen of consoles is pretty underwhelming for me, I don't know how others feel.
Practical computing performance plateaued like 10 years ago, which is why you're feeling unsatisfied. This applies to all markets of computing besides enterprise: Desktops/laptops, consoles, phones/tablets, all of it.
Plenty of people refuse to upgrade from their Sandy Bridges and Skylakes for Windows 11 because they still run everything fine. Plenty of people find smartphone upgrade cycles unjustifiably short because upgrades bring so little in practice.
As I mentioned earlier, the only computing segment still seeing significant leaps in performance to warrant constant and frequent upgrades is the enterprise, most obvious of which is the current "AI" fad.
We are at a level of fidelity where huge graphical improvements are not visually that much better than their predeccesors. Diminishing returns because of the limits of human cognition.
I don't think this is the case. The primary limitation for games is cost of development. Creating content with an order of magnitude more detail is too expensive.
The power of the last two generations of console have allowed developers to make high quality games cheaper. But they are also lazier. We aren't seeing the hyper optimized experiences that fully utilize the hardware like late generation PS2 and PS3. Consider that a PS3 has only 256 Mb of main RAM and 256 on the video card.
As an example, the PSP's UMD format. So much time/effort went into that, while at the same time allowing content to be read from an SD card. Of course I can only assume this was meant as some lame IP protection, and possibly an attempt to bring back a format similar to the once popular minidisc. Also funny to me was that Blu-ray was knock knock knocking already with their Java based programming, while the UMD was programmed much more similarly to HD-DVDs.
What specs? AFAIK the PS2 was superior in almost every way, plus it had dual analogue sticks, the lack of which just makes certain games impossible on the Dreamcast.
I remember thinking it was just another fad like the Minidisc and because they had no clear mascot like Mario or Sonic it was bound to fail.
Next thing I knew the Saturn was a joke and everyone I knew had a PlayStation. The ads were EVERYWHERE and people I knew who had never even owned a games console were buying the PS1.
When the PS2 was announced I was also blindly convinced the Dreamcast would compete but the PS2 just DOMINATED. Literally everyone I knew had one (not me sadly) it was a stunning thing to behold. When games like GTA3 hit I knew Sega were done for.
I personally only connected with the Sony handheld unit owning a PSP and I also eventually got a Vita. Other than UMD they were (still are) awesome little devices to play with.