SegaStillbirth Revisited, or How Sega Finally Blew It and I Totally Called It
by chris kohler
05052003

From the SegaStillbirth to the Reamcast: The Story of How Sega Blew It, Is Blowing It, and Will Always Blow It

In an interview with Games Business magazine, then-president and COO of Sega of America Bernie Stolar called the Sega Saturn “the stillbirth.” This proved what years of circumstantial evidence and speculation on the part of US fans had pointed to: Bernie, and thus Sega of America, never thought that the Saturn would succeed in the US. They assumed that the system would be forever mediocre and followed that plan through spectacularly. Apparently, Bernie preferred to focus on the eventual arrival of the Dreamcast, pulling the perennial Sega tactic of “Oh, forget about that other Sega system you just bought… this one’s much better.” ^[1] Bernie hoped to fix the problems of the Saturn with the Dreamcast, at least until Sega of Japan fixed what was the Saturn’s biggest problem by throwing Bernie out on his ass. ^[2] The Dreamcast is doing much better than the Saturn was, but it’s still having problems… and it doesn’t look like Sega is going to fix them any time soon.

¹ This has always been Sega’s modus operandi. “Hey, that’s a nice Master System! But have you bought the Genesis? Too bad, we’re converting our cartridge games to Sega CD! Too bad you don’t have the 32X or they’d look really nice! 32X? Thanks for your $150, kid, but what you really need is the Saturn! Sorry, did we say Saturn? We meant Dreamcast! Why, the Dreamcast is going to be the greatest system ever! Oh, by the way, we’re not supporting the DC anymore, and if you want to play all your favorite Sega series now, you’re going to need to buy a Gamecube, a Playstation2, and an Xbox! Sucker!”
² Bernie may have been surprised by this, but nobody else was. Sega Japan loves to play Musical Chairs with the presidency of SOA, changing COOs like some people change their socks. Tom Kalinske! Bernie Stolar! Peter Moore! Some Japanese guy! Round and round they go! To the reader: if you are ever named president of Sega America, save up your salary because you will be fired in two years no matter what you do.

Ten Reasons The Saturn Failed

In his 1998 article “Ten Reasons The Saturn Failed (And Why The Playstation Should Have),” ^[3] Jess Ragan implicated the media as well as Sega in the premature demise of the Saturn, noting such obvious examples of anti-Saturn bias as the scandalous VideoGames spread “Why The Playstation Is The System To Beat” ^[4] as well as the EGM reviews which “implied that [Street Fighter] Alpha was innovative on the Playstation but old and tired on the Saturn.” It’s obvious that Sega was fighting an uphill battle, but they made it worse for themselves with a terrible (i.e. non-existent) launch strategy, questionable ads, no Sonic games, poor customer support, poor third-party support, and the inexplicable “strategy” of releasing nearly every Saturn “exclusive” on the PC, thereby giving consumers even fewer reasons to own its system. ^[5]

³ This article appeared in Jess Ragan’s print fanzine The Gameroom Blitz, which has been reborn from its ashes as a popular website at http://grblitz.overclocked.org.
⁴ In an interview with former VideoGames editor and now Tips and Tricks editor Chris Bieniek that appeared in one of the final issues of The Gameroom Blitz, Jess asked Chris about this article. Chris actually apologized for how bad and how outrageously biased it was, and said that he had to do last-minute editing on it so it wasn’t so horrible. Even post-edits, it was still an example of exactly how unprofessional VideoGames was. Pitiful, considering the mag was a tragicomic repurposing of the intelligent and entertaining Video Games and Computer Entertainment.
⁵ This is important. Sega didn’t become a “platform agnostic” publisher in 2001 – they’d always been platform agnostic, even when they had their own damn systems! Altered Beast on the Famicom? Panzer Dragoon on the PC? Crazy Taxi on the PS2? Yes, yes, yes – and an excellent reason why their own hardware sales faltered.

Besides those reasons which Jess noted two years ago, there are more: first of all, whether you’re a fan of Working Designs or not, you’ve got to admit that, with the release of LUNAR, they’ve established themselves as a major Playstation third party, furthermore, they’ve got the most loyal and dedicated fan base in the country. They accomplished these things by being loyal and dedicated to their customers, actually listening to what they want even when it conflicts with their own best interests, for instance, their release of Magic Knight Rayearth for the Saturn after Sega had killed the system. They were everything that Sega was not, which was probably why they had a falling out. ^[6] Just think… LUNAR: Silver Star Story Complete could very well have been a Saturn exclusive. ^[7]

Sega also completely ignored Capcom’s four-megabyte-enhanced games, which, too, were Saturn exclusives. Japanese Capcom fans were so rabid about their Saturn fighting games that they demanded that games like Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Final Fight Revenge be released after Sega of Japan had killed the system in its homeland. ^[8] For the most part, Sega even ignored its own games, releasing only the titles that could be translated with minimal effort, which meant that most of the best Japanese games stayed in Japan. While it is true that Shining Force 3, Burning Rangers, House of the Dead, and Panzer Dragoon Saga did make it to the US, they were released in such limited quantities as to immediately become collector’s items. Furthermore, their translation was obviously rushed: Panzer Dragoon’s credits sequence was left in Japanese, and only one out of Shining Force 3’s three discs was released here. These games were not released for any reason other than to shut up shafted Saturn owners, since the system, by this time, had already been counted out.

[ Next: Could Have, Should Have ]

⁶ The specifics of how Sega mistreated Working Designs are not the stuff of speculation; WD prez Victor Ireland has made them quite clear in numerous interviews and on the company’s web page. Suffice it to say that his grievances were substantial.
⁷ It was common knowledge at the time of this writing, or at least I thought it was, that Lunar SSSC was originally a Saturn-exclusive title. Only when it was clear that the PS was going to be the viable CD system in Japan did it get ported. What I wasn’t aware of when I wrote this was just how much of a shot the Saturn really had in Japan. I learned later that it was pretty popular thanks to Virtua Fighter and other titles. But when Final Fantasy and a few other major series went PS-exclusive, well, Sega couldn’t deal with that apparently. This is an article about the screwups of Sega of America, but remember that they are just the product of a screw-up Japanese company. What’s worse, whenever Sega of America did something right, Sega of Japan tended to urinate on it – the big one was forcing the Saturn into the US market too soon, killing the somewhat healthy Genesis business.
⁸ Quality, or lack thereof, of Final Fight Revenge notwithstanding.