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[RAIDEN1]

Rayman was also riding the success that year especially in parts of Europe. While it was also on the Saturn, it was 2 months late in US and 1 month late in Europe. Sega in both Europe and US contrary to popular belief was trying to push 3D much harder early on than what people think they did. The problem was that they didn't have games that would get players to leave the Genesis, the PS1 had those. For the games they both had either the Saturn got late, or Sega never bothered to grab and Sony would eventually grab those games later.

UMK3 was a get but we are talking a few months gap between the release of UMK3 and MKT. MKT sold truckloads on the PS1, and was well marketed by Nintendo as a mature game you could get during the early days of the N64. UMK3 wasn't pulling anyone by then.

Worse 3D may have contributed to the Saturn not being able to salvage a profitable niche, but even if the 3D was the same as the PS1 I don't see any path away from failure a year after launch outside of Japan. The system systematically died everywhere in the west around the same time. Price tag is probably the only early factor that may have helped them a certain amount, but when you have the same games lineup, the same developers you are ignoring or letting your competitor grab, the same strategy that doesn't work to bring those Genesis players to your new product, and Sega already by end of 1995 laying the groundwork to port games to PC, expand beyond their consoles, funding various pet projects, then I can't honestly say anything would actually change.

Fall the next year, BEFORE Tomb Raider came out. Saturn was already selling peanuts and the PlayStation was way ahead, and in Japan was already widening the gap quickly for several months leading up to that same point. Sega did not have the time to have messed up for as long as they did. Saturn wasn't the only system that ended up taking the fall from that failure, the Genesis did too. Sega released some high-production genesis games but they weren't selling like the SNES later releases. I think people forget that Sega didn't have a war chest to make all these mistakes and afford to quickly reverse them, or if they chose the wrong path forward to easily be able to spend their way to a different lane. They were spending almost as much as they were bringing in or more since 1992 between arcades, consoles, development teams, and other projects. They were putting a lot of hope and dependence on the Model-3 thinking that machine would cause people to become so engaged that those games would make Sega bank coin after coin for years and it didn't go anywhere. Saturn not being able to capture even 1/5th of the Genesis footprint in the west was the other knockout to their finances.

You mention about Rayman, it was mentioned in the recent deep dive from DF Retro on the Jaguar that Rayman was built from the ground up with the Jag in mind.....and even after all these years it is one of the better looking titles on Atari's 64 bit flop...I never knew that before, I thought Rayman was just a port...

 

[SomeGit]

You mention about Rayman, it was mentioned in the recent deep dive from DF Retro on the Jaguar that Rayman was built from the ground up with the Jag in mind.....and even after all these years it is one of the better looking titles on Atari's 64 bit flop...I never knew that before, I thought Rayman was just a port...

It was rumored that Rayman was finished for Jaguar way before the PSX version, that it was delayed to be simultaneously released on both while they finished up the PSX port like what happened with Legends for Wii U. Maybe the Saturn port was made after.

 

[Draxon Gamer]

It did okay in Japan; the gap between it and N64 there wasn't that big and if Nintendo had officially manufactured N64 a bit longer, they probably would have overtaken Saturn's sales there. Sega also hurt Saturn late-life sales by rushing the Dreamcast to the Japanese market, mainly to beat PS2 by 16 months.

If Sega had held off on Dreamcast in Japan until at least early-mid 1999, stock would've been better and maybe more Saturn owners would have been ready to move on to 6th gen. They could've still kept the September 1999 release for NA they just would have worked in a more compressed time span.

The problem wasn't stock, because Sega ended up with a surplus of unsold consoles. That might have helped launch possibly giving Sega the ability to write down a larger number but if you still end up with the same problem, than is it worth it?

I think what they should have done if they were that convinced to launch early, was to release the Dreamcast for the US market in 1998 not Japan. Considering that Sega as you correctly summarized pushed out their own Saturn from the Japanese market by launching their first, the one market where the Saturn saw some success.

You mention about Rayman, it was mentioned in the recent deep dive from DF Retro on the Jaguar that Rayman was built from the ground up with the Jag in mind.....and even after all these years it is one of the better looking titles on Atari's 64 bit flop...I never knew that before, I thought Rayman was just a port...

Jaguar was in a similar spot as the Saturn but worse because it's tech was at max two years older. They had capable 3D for the time while it was being made, but it wasn't future proof and had better hardware for 2D games instead. The big difference is the Saturn was adapted to become more competitive in 3D to remedy that, while Atari and their contractors had built this impossible to modify without starting from scratch architecture you couldn't really do anything with except work around the bugs and restrictions it imposed.

As a result Jaguar has some good looking 2D games, but games like Alien Vs. Predator which were only half 3D ran at 5fps. Or you had faster games but they were all flat with featureless polygons. But when you look into other console makers of the time that are not often talked about at the time it looks like many companies were not sure how far ahead they were and ended up not going far enough with their hardware to be future proof for more than 6 months for 3D games. But most of them had great 2D.

I don't think that pattern was a coincidence because even Sega fell into it. I think 3DO was just forward thinking and Sony decided to leapfrog them. Nintendo had the benefit of watching for 3 years so didn't have to guess.

 

[Fatnick]

I don't think that pattern was a coincidence because even Sega fell into it. I think 3DO was just forward thinking and Sony decided to leapfrog them. Nintendo had the benefit of watching for 3 years so didn't have to guess.

On that note it's worth considering that, If it wasn't for Sega/Namco's outside partnerships, Ridge Racer and Daytona would have been released about a year AFTER the PS1/Saturn.

 

[Draxon Gamer]

On that note it's worth considering that, If it wasn't for Sega/Namco's outside partnerships, Ridge Racer and Daytona would have been released about a year AFTER the PS1/Saturn.

If you're talking about the arcade versions yes. Those partnerships allowed them to release those boards in 1993 and 1994.

 

[RAIDEN1]

The problem wasn't stock, because Sega ended up with a surplus of unsold consoles. That might have helped launch possibly giving Sega the ability to write down a larger number but if you still end up with the same problem, than is it worth it?

I think what they should have done if they were that convinced to launch early, was to release the Dreamcast for the US market in 1998 not Japan. Considering that Sega as you correctly summarized pushed out their own Saturn from the Japanese market by launching their first, the one market where the Saturn saw some success.

Jaguar was in a similar spot as the Saturn but worse because it's tech was at max two years older. They had capable 3D for the time while it was being made, but it wasn't future proof and had better hardware for 2D games instead. The big difference is the Saturn was adapted to become more competitive in 3D to remedy that, while Atari and their contractors had built this impossible to modify without starting from scratch architecture you couldn't really do anything with except work around the bugs and restrictions it imposed.

As a result Jaguar has some good looking 2D games, but games like Alien Vs. Predator which were only half 3D ran at 5fps. Or you had faster games but they were all flat with featureless polygons. But when you look into other console makers of the time that are not often talked about at the time it looks like many companies were not sure how far ahead they were and ended up not going far enough with their hardware to be future proof for more than 6 months for 3D games. But most of them had great 2D.

I don't think that pattern was a coincidence because even Sega fell into it. I think 3DO was just forward thinking and Sony decided to leapfrog them. Nintendo had the benefit of watching for 3 years so didn't have to guess.

Yeah but then there was also the fact that when the Sony staff saw Virtua Fighter for the first time that convinced them that the future really did lie in the world of 3d...which is when they decided to go for a more ambitious 3d agenda for the console as opposed to what it might have been instead....

 

[cinnamonandgravy]

Thanks. I forgot about that interview. It was, weirdly enough, more of a response to the output of the N64 chip.

then again, here are some quotes from hideki sato:

“The Saturn actually had just one CPU at the beginning. Then Sony appeared with its polygon-based PlayStation. When I was first designing the Saturn architecture, I was focused on sprite graphics, which had been the primary graphics up to that point.

“So I decided to go with polygons (due to the PlayStation). However, there weren’t any people at Sega who knew how to develop such software. Of course, we had Yu Suzuki in the arcade department, but I couldn’t just drag him off to the console department. He was developing titles like Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing. The expertise of all of the developers we had was in sprite graphics, so there seemed no choice but to go with sprites. Nevertheless, I knew we needed polygons. Using various tricks, adding a geometry engine and so on, I changed everything. In the end, just like the PlayStation, we had pseudo-polygons built on a sprite base. I felt no choice but to design a sprite-based architecture. Having said that, after some significant progress, pseudo-polygons did represent a “jump” in graphics in a certain way. There was a distinction of sorts. The processor was very powerful and could support 4,000, even 5,000 sprites, and I thought we could make the graphics work using a sprite engine after adding the Yamaha and such.

“It seemed like we were finally nearing completion. Then, the final PlayStation was revealed. It supported 300,000 polygons. Well, that was ultimately a bunch of lies, but… When you compared the Saturn with the PlayStation, we were completely missing something. The response that I chose was to add another SH processor, so we ended up with two SH-2s. By chance, the SH supported two-way cascaded data transfer. You could add a second processor and connect them in a cascade and get multi-CPU performance. When you get to about the PlayStation 3, multi-processors had become common, but the Saturn was the first home console to use multi-processors. So I added a second SH-2, but I felt that the ‘impact’ was still weak. Well, the SH-2 is a 32-bit processor, and we had two of them, so we could call the Saturn a 64-bit machine. It’s a dirty way of getting to 64-bits. But we revealed the CD-ROM-based Saturn using 64-bits as our sales point.”

 

[Draxon Gamer]

Yeah but then there was also the fact that when the Sony staff saw Virtua Fighter for the first time that convinced them that the future really did lie in the world of 3d...which is when they decided to go for a more ambitious 3d agenda for the console as opposed to what it might have been instead....

One recent interview had someone claim that Sony saw VF and that led to Sony choosing 3D but that doesn't align with the development timeline we know of the PlayStation. Sony was going around Japan asking developers to port their 3D games to the PlayStation way before launch late 1994. Namco released Ridge Racer in 1993, Namco partnered with Sony for Ridge Racer to be ported to their console at launch, and Namco was working on the first analog controller on the PS1 before launch called Negcon which released a short time after the japanese launch of the PlayStation. VF came out in Arcades in october 1993 near the end of the year. Sony had to have sent out Dev kits a few months after and the Namco partner ship for both RR and the controller has to have been signed in 1993. The technology Sony put in for 3D gaming also matched a lot of what the 3DO was doing. The VF1 arcade board was large featureless polygons and very basic.

The recent interview where the VF claim comes from contradicts that Kutaragi showed a prototype in 1992 showing off advanced 3D graphics at the time, and that work on began on creating tools for developers in 1993.

The Truth seems to be that Virtua Fighter only really caused some holdouts at Sony who didn't feel that entering the gaming industry was a good idea to temper their opposition. Former chairman of Sony Maruyama said in an interview that Sony employees when around to different studios to be convince because "only" Kutaragi understood the industry.

Then there is this account:

Shuji Utsumi
Former vice president of product acquisition, Sony Computer Entertainment America

One story I remember very clearly was when I went with Ken Kutaragi to see a presentation by [Electronic Arts and 3DO founder] Trip Hawkins, back when [Hawkins] was working on 3DO in 1991 or 1992.
Trip talked about the machine’s power, the marketing strategy and all the stuff you would typically say to try to make third-party developers want to develop games for a new system. And I thought he did a great job — his presentation was funny and entertaining.
So after it was over, I said to Ken, “Wow, his presentation was great.”
Ken got furious. He said, “Hey Shuji, you’re stupid. You don’t know anything.” He was yelling at me for three hours. I mean, it was crazy. He couldn’t see it from my point of view.
I said, “Hey Ken, hold on. I don’t know too much about the technology, but the presentation was good. I mean, can I say it was a good presentation?”
He said no. He thought the presentation was just a fake. He thought Trip could talk and talk, but there was nothing there behind it. [...]
[Kutaragi] was so passionate. He had so much energy and was so driven. He was one of a few engineers at Sony who were famous for having a big mouth. And Sony Computer Entertainment hadn’t even been greenlit yet.

Sony was going 3D no matter what. VF may have gotten some opposition to cool but Ohga already greenlit the project so that never really mattered. I think that the interview was from corporate staff perspective who has doubts about entering the gaming industry instead of really understanding it, which may be why one of the interviewed staff who claimed VF is why PS1 was 3D, is also the same one that said only Ken understood it. There's too many events happening before Virtua Fighters launch for the claim the system wasn't aiming for 3D to make sense.

 

[Celine]

One recent interview had someone claim that Sony saw VF and that led to Sony choosing 3D but that doesn't align with the development timeline we know of the PlayStation.

That's false.
The book "Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony Playstation and The Visionaries Who Conquered The World of Video Games" from 1998 contains the whole story.
Kutaragi was influnced by two things for his dream of a "PlayStation":
1) Nintendo's Famicom.
2) Having witnessed the visual 3D technology Sony was working in the early '80s (called System G, what later would be known commercially as DME-9000) for network broadcasting which was far ahead of anything in the consumer space at the time.

The anecdote about how Virtua Fighter helped Sony's project was related to the first broad presentation to japanese game developers in mid '93.
The developers were very impressed by the tech Sony demonstrated however, as Hideki Sato remarked a few posts above, almost all of them were working with sprite graphics and didn't have the grasp if 3D grapichs was really the future and what kind of hit software could be produced in 3D.
Any doubt was washed away a few months later when Virtua Fighter hit the japanese arcades and triggered a craze similar to Street Fighter 2 a few years earlier.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

The problem wasn't stock, because Sega ended up with a surplus of unsold consoles. That might have helped launch possibly giving Sega the ability to write down a larger number but if you still end up with the same problem, than is it worth it?

I think what they should have done if they were that convinced to launch early, was to release the Dreamcast for the US market in 1998 not Japan. Considering that Sega as you correctly summarized pushed out their own Saturn from the Japanese market by launching their first, the one market where the Saturn saw some success.

Jaguar was in a similar spot as the Saturn but worse because it's tech was at max two years older. They had capable 3D for the time while it was being made, but it wasn't future proof and had better hardware for 2D games instead. The big difference is the Saturn was adapted to become more competitive in 3D to remedy that, while Atari and their contractors had built this impossible to modify without starting from scratch architecture you couldn't really do anything with except work around the bugs and restrictions it imposed.

As a result Jaguar has some good looking 2D games, but games like Alien Vs. Predator which were only half 3D ran at 5fps. Or you had faster games but they were all flat with featureless polygons. But when you look into other console makers of the time that are not often talked about at the time it looks like many companies were not sure how far ahead they were and ended up not going far enough with their hardware to be future proof for more than 6 months for 3D games. But most of them had great 2D.

I don't think that pattern was a coincidence because even Sega fell into it. I think 3DO was just forward thinking and Sony decided to leapfrog them. Nintendo had the benefit of watching for 3 years so didn't have to guess.

This is a really good summation of that particular period IMO. I would say Sega did in fact know 3D was going to be the future, but had a development pipeline that reinforced (in their opinion) that 3D could not be affordably done on a home console at levels approaching the arcade that generation, and to some extent they were correct. However, what they got wrong was home gamers only being satisfied with arcade-level 3D on a console that era. Turns out they were perfectly fine with 3D that wasn't up to the spec of Model 2 for a mid-90s home console, as PlayStation proved.

However, Sega's hardware development pipeline didn't afford them to produce something like a PlayStation in-house at a price point they could put into retail for $299. Part of this was by intention, because they didn't want to cannibalize their arcade business at the time, so one could say they never wanted 3D "good enough" in Saturn to encroach on what they were doing in the arcades with Model 2. I'd say they were kind of a victim in being such an incumbent within the industry by that point, and like Nintendo, it prevented them from seeing things from an outside perspective.

While Sony were in the industry by that point as a software maker, they were removed enough from the hardware side to have a fresher perspective and, unlike 3DO, had enough working experience with current platform holders to understand why that business model would still very much be required going forward. 3DO strayed too far trying to push a wildly different business model when the current one was mostly perfectly fine, it just could've used some refinements (and the same can be said today, which it seems the larger gaming market agrees with given the slowing down of subscription rates).

And like you said, Nintendo just managed to sit back and watch everyone else take their shot before making their own move. Though that also bit them in the ass a bit; SG's tech was very good in some areas but pretty bad in others, and Nintendo didn't do it any favors by sticking with cartridges. They had their own hubris similar to Sega; they just also luckily had Pokemon and Gameboy around to negate most of the damage. Sega wasn't as fortunate in terms of other profitable sectors, particularly as the arcade market was slowing down during the late '90s (it still held up pretty well in Japan though).

Yeah but then there was also the fact that when the Sony staff saw Virtua Fighter for the first time that convinced them that the future really did lie in the world of 3d...which is when they decided to go for a more ambitious 3d agenda for the console as opposed to what it might have been instead....

One recent interview had someone claim that Sony saw VF and that led to Sony choosing 3D but that doesn't align with the development timeline we know of the PlayStation. Sony was going around Japan asking developers to port their 3D games to the PlayStation way before launch late 1994. Namco released Ridge Racer in 1993, Namco partnered with Sony for Ridge Racer to be ported to their console at launch, and Namco was working on the first analog controller on the PS1 before launch called Negcon which released a short time after the japanese launch of the PlayStation. VF came out in Arcades in october 1993 near the end of the year. Sony had to have sent out Dev kits a few months after and the Namco partner ship for both RR and the controller has to have been signed in 1993. The technology Sony put in for 3D gaming also matched a lot of what the 3DO was doing. The VF1 arcade board was large featureless polygons and very basic.

The recent interview where the VF claim comes from contradicts that Kutaragi showed a prototype in 1992 showing off advanced 3D graphics at the time, and that work on began on creating tools for developers in 1993.

The Truth seems to be that Virtua Fighter only really caused some holdouts at Sony who didn't feel that entering the gaming industry was a good idea to temper their opposition. Former chairman of Sony Maruyama said in an interview that Sony employees when around to different studios to be convince because "only" Kutaragi understood the industry.

Then there is this account:

Sony was going 3D no matter what. VF may have gotten some opposition to cool but Ohga already greenlit the project so that never really mattered. I think that the interview was from corporate staff perspective who has doubts about entering the gaming industry instead of really understanding it, which may be why one of the interviewed staff who claimed VF is why PS1 was 3D, is also the same one that said only Ken understood it. There's too many events happening before Virtua Fighters launch for the claim the system wasn't aiming for 3D to make sense.

That's false.
The book "Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony Playstation and The Visionaries Who Conquered The World of Video Games" from 1998 contains the whole story.
Kutaragi was influnced by two things for his dream of a "PlayStation":
1) Nintendo's Famicom.
2) Having witnessed the visual 3D technology Sony was working in the early '80s (called System G, what later would be known commercially as DME-9000) for network broadcasting which was far ahead of anything in the consumer space at the time.

The anecdote about how Virtua Fighter helped Sony's project was related to the first broad presentation to japanese game developers in mid '93.
The developers were very impressed by the tech Sony demonstrated however, as Hideki Sato remarked a few posts above, almost all of them were working with sprite graphics and didn't have the grasp if 3D grapichs was really the future and what kind of hit software could be produced in 3D.
Any doubt was washed away a few months later when Virtua Fighter hit the japanese arcades and triggered a craze similar to Street Fighter 2 a few years earlier.

I think you all are right on this, because a lot of times when people bring up the Sony/VF thing they make it sound like VF is what convinced Sony as a whole to go with 3D, as if at some point after the Play Station was scrapped, there was a PS1 in development that was closer to a 2D system than a 3D one. But that never made any sense, because Ken Kutaragi was ALWAYS adamant about 3D being the way to go, even from the onset.

However there was still trepidation from some Sony higher-ups, about if a 3D console was a good fit in the market, and I guess seeing how systems like the 3DO were performing gave them further pause, so any demonstration of Virtua Fighter that convinced them 3D was in fact the future, seems very plausible. Not just from a tech side but a money side as well; in Japan especially VF was a massive hit in arcades. It likely sold holdouts among Sony's board on the vision for PS1 Kutaragi was banking on them to buy.

 

[Celine]

I think 3DO was just forward thinking and Sony decided to leapfrog them. Nintendo had the benefit of watching for 3 years so didn't have to guess.

Nintendo collaboration with SGI announced in 1993 meant Nintendo was by then fully on the 3D train.
Nintendo commitment to full 3D and the complexity of developing for N64 hurt Nintendo software support in Japan (among other business practices existing from the Famicom days) because the japanese audience didn't show the same impulse to jump to 3D games and dump 2D games as the american audience and not all developers were skilled enough to succeed the transition from 2D to 3D therefore stick to 'mid step' consoles like PS1 and Saturn.

 

[Shift!]

I always wanted one but the price margin was too high for my parents.

 

[Draxon Gamer]

That's false.
The book "Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony Playstation and The Visionaries Who Conquered The World of Video Games" from 1998 contains the whole story.
Kutaragi was influnced by two things for his dream of a "PlayStation":
1) Nintendo's Famicom.
2) Having witnessed the visual 3D technology Sony was working in the early '80s (called System G, what later would be known commercially as DME-9000) for network broadcasting which was far ahead of anything in the consumer space at the time.

The anecdote about how Virtua Fighter helped Sony's project was related to the first broad presentation to japanese game developers in mid '93.
The developers were very impressed by the tech Sony demonstrated however, as Hideki Sato remarked a few posts above, almost all of them were working with sprite graphics and didn't have the grasp if 3D grapichs was really the future and what kind of hit software could be produced in 3D.
Any doubt was washed away a few months later when Virtua Fighter hit the japanese arcades and triggered a craze similar to Street Fighter 2 a few years earlier.

You practically repeated what I said in the post you quoted but yes this is true.

Nintendo collaboration with SGI announced in 1993 meant Nintendo was by then fully on the 3D train.
Nintendo commitment to full 3D and the complexity of developing for N64 hurt Nintendo software support in Japan (among other business practices existing from the Famicom days) because the japanese audience didn't show the same impulse to jump to 3D games and dump 2D games as the american audience and not all developers were skilled enough to succeed the transition from 2D to 3D therefore stick to 'mid step' consoles like PS1 and Saturn.

Yes, however Nintendo having 3 years was still advantageous in how they went about the development process was my point.

I guess seeing how systems like the 3DO were performing gave them further pause,

3DO and Virtua Fighter came out the same month, by the time we saw the bigger games on the 3DO 1994 a few months later, PlayStation was already locked-in. Sony probably didn't know anything about the 3DO until they started launching ads ahead of the Japanese launch. Sony was already in the last stages of hardware by October 1993, they were preparing for a huge marketing campaign for Japan, and hiring ahead of time to launch in other countries, while signing up as many developers they could and laying the groundwork.

I think it was too late for VF or 3DO to have any influence on the PS1 hardware itself except possibly Sony increasing texture hardware to go further than the 3DO ever did. VF was a game one could argue was the antithesis to what Sony was trying to do with the PS1.

This is a really good summation of that particular period IMO. I would say Sega did in fact know 3D was going to be the future, but had a development pipeline that reinforced (in their opinion) that 3D could not be affordably done on a home console at levels approaching the arcade that generation, and to some extent they were correct.

This is obvious because Sega made the mistake of looking at arcades and not PC for where you could bring affordable 3D graphics with console hardware. Sega had partnered to create an arcade board that was worth a pretty sum of cash, at the time it was tested it had no pear whatsoever. They probably didn't think you could bring half the power of that to the home at an affordable price then, but it just so happened that the 3DO ended up launching the same month as VF when it was finished on another continent. The Jaguar was soft-launched the next month.

It was definitely a time where everyone was expecting one thing and the opposite ended up happening. If you look at all of the hardware that came out at the time:

• Vis
• Marty
• Laseractive
• CD32
• 3DO
• Jaguar
• NeogeoCD
• Playdia
• PCFX
• 32X
• Saturn
• PlayStation
• Loopy
• Etech
• A Can
• N64
• Pippin
• Pico
• Relaunched CD-i.

Only 7 of the companies on this list saw 3D being the path at the time and created their consoles with it in mind, and only 5 went further than featureless polygons. If you look at the 7 companies that even tried 3D hardware it makes sense those were the only ones in the position to do so.

 

[Jubenhimer]

* It was built as a 2D machine with 3D hardware slapped on it at the last minute. Resulting a difficult to develop for system
* A disasterous surprise launch that killed any hype the console had, and was more expensive than the PlayStation to boot.
* SEL and SoA basically hated each other, and fought constantly over what exactly to do with the Saturn.
* Severe lack of third party support outside Japan.
* Many of it's best games being Japan only due to Bernie Stolar hating the Saturn and wanting to get it over with as fast as possible.
* The above leading to the infamous "Saturn is not our future" quote at E3 1998.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

3DO and Virtua Fighter came out the same month, by the time we saw the bigger games on the 3DO 1994 a few months later, PlayStation was already locked-in. Sony probably didn't know anything about the 3DO until they started launching ads ahead of the Japanese launch. Sony was already in the last stages of hardware by October 1993, they were preparing for a huge marketing campaign for Japan, and hiring ahead of time to launch in other countries, while signing up as many developers they could and laying the groundwork.

I think it was too late for VF or 3DO to have any influence on the PS1 hardware itself except possibly Sony increasing texture hardware to go further than the 3DO ever did. VF was a game one could argue was the antithesis to what Sony was trying to do with the PS1.

Good point, and I think further solidifies the likelihood that VF and even 3DO were not the things that convinced Sony to go with 3D. Kutaragi was all-in on 3D from the jump; maybe Sony marketing planned a smaller push outside of Japan and VF's success in arcades made them increase that, but given VF's success was mainly in Japan, I don't see how its performance in a foreign market would have correlated to a boost in marketing for PS1 in the Americas and Europe.

IMO if Sony were basically locked in hardware-wise by October '93, and knowing how time-consuming and costly it would've been (especially back then) to redesign an ASIC or part of an ASIC for a console launching at mass volumes little over a year from then, even if Sony did their chip design & manufacturing in-house (or at least the design, vs. say Sega buying chips from Hitachi or NEC), that setback would've probably been not worth it just to improve part of the texture hardware, since the systems have to begin manufacture months ahead of launch.

I'm guessing they maybe increased the amount of VRAM if it were anything related to adjusting graphical performance side of things.

This is obvious because Sega made the mistake of looking at arcades and not PC for where you could bring affordable 3D graphics with console hardware. Sega had partnered to create an arcade board that was worth a pretty sum of cash, at the time it was tested it had no pear whatsoever. They probably didn't think you could bring half the power of that to the home at an affordable price then, but it just so happened that the 3DO ended up launching the same month as VF when it was finished on another continent. The Jaguar was soft-launched the next month.

It was definitely a time where everyone was expecting one thing and the opposite ended up happening. If you look at all of the hardware that came out at the time:

• Vis
• Marty
• Laseractive
• CD32
• 3DO
• Jaguar
• NeogeoCD
• Playdia
• PCFX
• 32X
• Saturn
• PlayStation
• Loopy
• Etech
• A Can
• N64
• Pippin
• Pico
• Relaunched CD-i.

Only 7 of the companies on this list saw 3D being the path at the time and created their consoles with it in mind, and only 5 went further than featureless polygons. If you look at the 7 companies that even tried 3D hardware it makes sense those were the only ones in the position to do so.

Yeah, Sega were quite blindsided in that regard, they only saw the potential market from a narrow slice as that was the field they had their experience in. Also a reason why they felt to address Saturn's performance issues they'd just throw a 2nd SH2 in there, since their arcade studios had plenty of experience programming for dual processor architectures. But most of the 3P industry didn't, outside of some of whom made some Sega CD and 32X games, and that was a different type of dual-processor programming compared to what the Saturn would bring, essentially.

It's weird though because at times you wonder if Sega of Japan brass even bothered to see a real demonstration of PS1 hardware, as we know Sony did approach them at some point for a partnership, so they must've had PS1 hardware somewhere fairly along enough to give a demonstration. Maybe that was earlier in '93, though.

 

[cireza]

It was built as a 2D machine with 3D hardware slapped on it at the last minute.

Exclusive footage of SEGA CEO adding himself 3D on each console 1 minute before launch :

 

[Draxon Gamer]

Good point, and I think further solidifies the likelihood that VF and even 3DO were not the things that convinced Sony to go with 3D. Kutaragi was all-in on 3D from the jump; maybe Sony marketing planned a smaller push outside of Japan and VF's success in arcades made them increase that, but given VF's success was mainly in Japan, I don't see how its performance in a foreign market would have correlated to a boost in marketing for PS1 in the Americas and Europe.

Kuta was paying attention to the market. He also went exploring as described by one of his right hand men:

One story I remember very clearly was when I went with Ken Kutaragi to see a presentation by [Electronic Arts and 3DO founder] Trip Hawkins, back when [Hawkins] was working on 3DO in 1991 or 1992.

Trip talked about the machine’s power, the marketing strategy and all the stuff you would typically say to try to make third-party developers want to develop games for a new system. And I thought he did a great job — his presentation was funny and entertaining.

So after it was over, I said to Ken, “Wow, his presentation was great.”

Ken got furious. He said, “Hey Shuji, you’re stupid. You don’t know anything.” He was yelling at me for three hours. I mean, it was crazy. He couldn’t see it from my point of view.

I said, “Hey Ken, hold on. I don’t know too much about the technology, but the presentation was good. I mean, can I say it was a good presentation?”

He said no. He thought the presentation was just a fake. He thought Trip could talk and talk, but there was nothing there behind it. [...]

[Kutaragi] was so passionate. He had so much energy and was so driven. He was one of a few engineers at Sony who were famous for having a big mouth. And Sony Computer Entertainment hadn’t even been greenlit yet.

There does seem to have been some influence from 3DO onto Sony. Much of their marketing strategy, how they dealt with third parties, and their flexibility working with partners and providing tool for developers to succeed with low fees were very similar. The mature this isn't a toy this is electronic equipment presentation was also similar between the two, and 3DO was the first example outside PC to move on from featureless polygons and low-fidelity effects so it's very that Kutaragi knew what was up.

Kutaragi also saw what was happening on PC and 3D Arcades, and authorized two controllers to take advantage of these games to convince developers from both to support their home console.

IMO if Sony were basically locked in hardware-wise by October '93, and knowing how time-consuming and costly it would've been (especially back then) to redesign an ASIC or part of an ASIC for a console launching at mass volumes little over a year from then, even if Sony did their chip design & manufacturing in-house (or at least the design, vs. say Sega buying chips from Hitachi or NEC), that setback would've probably been not worth it just to improve part of the texture hardware, since the systems have to begin manufacture months ahead of launch.

I'm guessing they maybe increased the amount of VRAM if it were anything related to adjusting graphical performance side of things.

As already stated Kutaragi was taking notes and studying, any advantage the 3DO had over the PS1 was not relevant to professionals and gamers at the time. The biggest improvements PS1 had were more polygons pushed, larger polygons pushed with changing sizes, better texture performance, and higher frame rate. These were the only areas that Sony needed to be competitive and control the mindset of gamers to abandon their 2D consoles and leap to 3D while having the competition fall behind.

Yeah, Sega were quite blindsided in that regard, they only saw the potential market from a narrow slice as that was the field they had their experience in. Also a reason why they felt to address Saturn's performance issues they'd just throw a 2nd SH2 in there, since their arcade studios had plenty of experience programming for dual processor architectures. But most of the 3P industry didn't, outside of some of whom made some Sega CD and 32X games, and that was a different type of dual-processor programming compared to what the Saturn would bring, essentially.

It's weird though because at times you wonder if Sega of Japan brass even bothered to see a real demonstration of PS1 hardware, as we know Sony did approach them at some point for a partnership, so they must've had PS1 hardware somewhere fairly along enough to give a demonstration. Maybe that was earlier in '93, though.

I doubt it. I think Sega of Japan was looking at the model 1 and said going halfway would be enough for a console, and thought some staff could learn from Yu who had experience in 3D. They changed this later but I can imagine that during early development they probably though VF was much further ahead than it was.

I actually believe that Sega didn't really do any reconnaissance outside of whatever news was reported in whatever industry press newletter they were subscribed to. None of their actions suggested they ever took time to take notes across the industry until the Saturn was falling out of favor. The games I listed earlier comparing the Saturn and PS1 early releases may look good to Sega fans in retrospect, but at the time Sega wasn't connected with their base at all and lost almost all of it to Sony or elsewhere.

Sega was also desperately trying to replicate the Japanese success of VF in the west that they ended up soiling the brand with 4 VF games released back to back, 3 of them launching the same year.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Anyone know why the Sega Sports on Saturn were so bad? The Genesis games were great, but you could tell in the last year or two, it fizzled out. Their 92-94 games were rock solid. But 95 versions were crap. You'd think perhaps they transitioned to making Saturn sport games, but they were all dogshit except their last basbeall game (I think World Series 98) got great reviews.

 

[Draxon Gamer]

Anyone know why the Sega Sports on Saturn were so bad? The Genesis games were great, but you could tell in the last year or two, it fizzled out. Their 92-94 games were rock solid. But 95 versions were crap. You'd think perhaps they transitioned to making Saturn sport games, but they were all dogshit except their last basbeall game (I think World Series 98) got great reviews.

Several of the Saturn entries were made by Sega themselves or co-developed outside of Visual Concepts who had quality releases. Many of the Genesis sports releases were made by guys such as Blueskysoftware, and Farsight technologies. Many Saturn games were by Sega, Genki, or Sims.

 

[Alexios]

Anyone know why the Sega Sports on Saturn were so bad? The Genesis games were great, but you could tell in the last year or two, it fizzled out. Their 92-94 games were rock solid. But 95 versions were crap. You'd think perhaps they transitioned to making Saturn sport games, but they were all dogshit except their last basbeall game (I think World Series 98) got great reviews.

Worldwide Soccer 97 was quite acclaimed and 98's main criticism was just that it was too similar to 97 (duh). Athete Kings/DecAthlete and Winter Heat were great. Sega Rally was great. Steep Slope Sliders was nice. WS 98 too as you say. I liked some lesser ports like STCC too. Not too bad output.