I point so much blame at the 32X, or at least the debacle with trying to launch it and the Saturn around the same time. I think that really sent confusing marketing and destroyed a lot of confidence when 32X was abandoned almost immediately. I think if they either did one or the other between 32X and Saturn and either committed fully to either offering a 32-bit Genesis upgrade or to moving on to the Saturn, things might have worked out better. I also think they should have just embraced Saturn being the ultimate 2D powerhouse instead of panicking to try to compete with Sony because even though I feel like it wouldnât have changed the general attitude towards 2D in the media at the time, I feel like if they had really given it that identity it could at least be sort of what Nintendo consoles have been since the Wii where theyâre serving their own audience that isnât necessarily directly trying to be the same thing as the competitors and I think it was viewed by a lot of people (including myself when I was a kid) as just being a bad PlayStation competitor because in NA at least, Sega pushed the wrong games to try to compete directly with PlayStationâs 3D. Nights is such a weird game to be pitted against Crash and Mario 64 because it is nothing like those games (itâs not even a platformer) and is instead one of the most unique games Iâve ever played that is a great example of why sometimes lumping games into genres doesn't work.
Better games might've helped.
One idea that has come up in Gamecube discussion is that Nintendo was REALLY off their game software wise at the time. Even as a Saturn defender I think Sega's home output from Sonic and Knuckles (1994) to Sonic Adventure (1998) was their weakest era. They were killing it in the arcades, and those games did make their way to Saturn, but arcade ports were the early years of the Genesis, not what kept it afloat.
I think the specific issue during that era is they tried to let SOJ handle games for the Japanese market and SOA for the US market, but SOAâs studios all sucked and never made anything particularly good that wasnât being handheld by Japanese transplants, and by the end studios like STI were struggling just to ship anything at all.
And then after STI their American second parties were pretty rough. Appaloosa, Visual Concepts, Realtime Associates. Lobodomy and Tantalus did their best though.
>
@âShapeyFiendâ#p122914 âif Sega were sensible and fiscally responsible would they still be Sega? Not really. Theyâd just be Nintendo.â
agreed, and a sega without suzuki's shenmue is an even more boring timeline for me
we got such magic in such a short life from the dreamcast & teams firing on all cyclinders, i hate what led to them exiting the hardware game but i'd not trade the classics we got out of that time for the safer route here
@ârobinhoodieâ#p122921 It really sucks because Sega blew Namco out of the water in the arcade IMO but ports of stuff like Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA on Saturn were poor, while Namco had basically arcade perfect ports of Ridge Racer and Tekken because the arcade versions ran on similar hardware to make porting easy IIRC.
@âHeavenlyHalberdâ#p123129 When it comes to Arcade racing games Sega is the greatest but Tekken 2/3 & Soul Edge/Calibur start to really compete with VF2/3 and Sega's other 3D fighters. I would also say Namco had the better light gun games with the Time Crisis and Point Blank series.
Kind of going in a different direction recently I have thinking about what if Microsoft DID buy Sega, like right now, as was discussed in the Activision hearings, and then the next console they released was the Sega Xbox. I donât know what exactly that would do, and itâs not a scenario that'd ever happen, but it IS interesting for me to think about at least.
I always felt a big way to fix Sega was for them to unite as a company globally and work as a team, instead of competing against each other in different regions. Itâs only after it all went wrong we really learned what it was like at that time, but watching it first hand and seeing an add on for the Mega Drive (32X) coming out when a new console was due to be released really made people upset. Then the lack of support for that, combined with the same problem for the Saturn with third parties that even with the amazing stuff Sega did it wasnât enough.
There were some classic games both first and third party, but it's at that point I really started to see where it was going downhill - they stopped innovating and started copying. Instead of focusing on what they were really good at, they were trying to mimic what was out there and not take as many chances as they did before.
If I could fix their time line:
I would have not released the 32X
Focused on the Saturn and what it could do better than anyone else
Not rushed the Dreamcast to release and launch with more games either ready or in development as confirmed exclusives
And.. This is a true dream.. Released a Neo Geo type arcade home console that played perfect, almost no loading time releases and not looked at ever doing some of the bad ports they did because they didn't have to.
The Neo Genesis!!
@âtomjonjonâ#p123253 100% agree with this, I meant in the context of the window the PlayStation and Saturn were coming out because Namco fighters really hitting their stride came a bit later. I definitley agree about light gun games because I quite enjoy House of the Dead but Time Crisis is the GOAT for me. With Virtua Fighter vs. Tekken, itâs subjective, because they are two very different feeling games and I think itâs kinda like when people compare Street Fighter vs. Fatal Fury or KoF because they're quite different despite both being 2D fighters.
I feel like in an alternate timeline Virtua Fighter could have been as popular as Tekken is globablly, but when you combine the difference in the US arcade scene and the fact that Saturn was a complete flop outside of Japan while it had decent sales in Japan and the Dreamcast died because of the PS2, it never really got the chance to have an attachment rate like Tekken did for every PlayStation and PS2 owner.
>
@âTomoftheFogâ#p123295 they stopped innovating and started copying
I can't agree with this part unless you specifically mean SOA and specifically the marketing team, because Sega as a whole continued to innovate, maybe more than at any time in their history - the netlink, twinstick, and analog pad for saturn, the lightgun you could personally change the weight on with batteries, then of course the ridiculous cavalcade of dreamcast innovations from the vmu to the accelerometer fishing controller to the dreamcast-adjacent arcade hardware (saturn had this too), PSO, a built-in internet connection years before xbox live, the cross-connection with the neo geo pocket. Shenmue is nothing if not innovative across all vectors (including budget lol). The keyboard! Seaman with a mic! samba de amigo!! Also, the dreamcast is widly discussed as having one of the best launch lineups (in the us) of all time!? So I don't think that was the problem.
I do agree that it would've been better if the regions had come together though.
@âexodusâ#p124145 I think the quote you mentioned may not have been the best way to phrase my thoughts at the time of writing and even now with your reply taken into account. You mentioned some very valid aspects of the innovation such as the VMU, online play and the Shenmue budget - all which did lead the way to new things we have as a standard today in video games.
Mentioning the marketing team really made me think. A year or so after the global launch of the DC, I put that at the point where Sega changed and instead of the phrase I used, on reflection I'd say that there was when they started copying because they weren't being the Sega I grew up with, which was really going all out to make it known how good they were (maybe it's more a UK games market I know better that makes me think it). I loved the promotions they did for the Mega Drive although I never got a cyber razor cut, but I felt that Sega were copying other games companies and not being as Sega as before.
I guess I'd fix Sega by being the Sega I grew up with and kept doing that! Which is different to your Sega and everyone else's Sega. And that's cool. Thanks for reminding me of why they're a company I would actually want to spend time to want to fix and other people do as well.
@âTomoftheFogâ#p124243 Ah yeah, I think if itâs the marketing angle that kind of makes more sense for me, because I think of their greatest years of gameplay and hardware innovation coming toward the end. I sure wouldâve liked to see what folks un the UK experienced with Sega in the 90s! Seems like it was quite a time.
man, that SOA financials postâŚthereâs a part of me thatâs always gonna love & respect the shooting for the stars way that they always threw money at interesting stuff before the tech/market was ready
like, i had sega channel as a kid for a bit, i can't imagine they made a dime off that
@"exodus"#p123277 oh man, nostalgia alone would get me for the marketing, no doubt
but what would we wanna see from this hypothetical? for me, the dream would be MS funding sega so more things don't have to operate on shoestring budgets - not just sonic (though that could use some $ too clearly), but more franchise relaunches and attempts at new things, without having to minimize them or chase dumb NFT trends/etc
the obvious parallel in my head is the dumb scenario where nintendo went third party: would mario, zelda, pokemon be okay? of course - but the weird intelligent systems & internal team stuff would dry up, i think. no more bizarre wario microgames, very few chances being taken (or given time & effort to take root, like splatoon/animal crossing/etc)
this sega-sammy timeline killed not just so many classic series, but anything we could've gotten from smilebit (in its form back then) and the like. so yeah, my best-case scenario would be some magical world where MS threw enough at them to make space for that, and while we're at it, bring suzuki back to the fold if he's so interested in his twilight years
@âexodusâ#p124261 I think they did have some amazing things hear the end of their hardware days, but I look at their period in the 80s and early 90s when they really did innovate. They had 3D glasses on the Master System, G-LOC R360, the âVirtuaâ series of games, Sonic & Knuckles (first DLC!) which really were firsts in gaming which are still in place today.
I forget sometimes how different the UK and EU markets were to the rest of the world for the games we had available without importing even down to the way Sega sold itself. The 90s was quite something - we had Sega World in London (oh so many weekends and so much money spent), countless magazines showing us games being developed we'd never see localised but hoped and of course:
[]https://youtu.be/E36JA1meigk
I almost dropped my tea seeing that again!
Hmm, looks like weâre gonna have to disagree on this innovation thing! I feel like doing motion controls before the Wii (maracas), two screens before the DS (VMU), the first console MMO (PSO), first quicktime events in shenmue, and goofy stuff like two vs player light gun games with 2spicy (predating gunslinger stratos by like 15 years), the trance vibrator, and even making the Dreamcast an open platform after its demise (no other major console manufacturer has done that, still!) is all much more impactful than 3D glasses that didnât really do much more than movies did in the 50s, and the virtua series which frankly was just the addition of polygons, which was inevitable and already had legs in the US with I, Robot, Race Drivinâ, and others. ALL of it was cool stuff but I just donât see that the earlier stuff had more impact, or that Sega stopped innovating aggressively until several years AFTER the dreamcast. Even in recent years they allowed official modding and sale of Sega-developed genesis/MD roms by third parties! Imagine Nintendo or Sony doing that! yeah⌠I dunno, I just can't get there aside from the marketing angle!
for sure wish I could have gone to sega world though....
@âexodusâ#p124369 I think our opinions on what is innovation for Sega vary, agree to disagree on it makes sense! You mentioned a lot of DC and onwards innovations, some of which were new to me, and my perspective is their earlier stuff which they didnât continue to do in that way. If they hadnât have had that gap, and continued to keep doing new things which are now a standard AND developed them themselves. A few examples there were Nintendo doing a previous idea which I agree and disagree with too. A set of maracas that worked with a handful of games isnât a motion controller to the same level as the Wii remote which lead to some totatally new ways of playing a lot of different games - but Iâm not taking away their controller, just they didnât keep doing stuff with it.
Maybe somewhere in our differences thereâs a solution on how to fix Sega, we are looking at it from different angles which is great. I would love it have a new piece of Sega hardware on my shelf that isn't an emulation machine of past glories and who knows, may happen!
Sega World was amazing. Never got to see any in Japan which I assume you made it to on your travels at least once...