I remember the disappointment. I had a Genesis at the time, I loved it, and I was primed to be a continued customer for Sega. From my perspective, all they needed to do was to release a decent next-gen console with games support.
It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
21–30 of 119 posts
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#22I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake. "Hey let's release a weird upgrade pod for our successful last-gen console almost completely simultaneously with our next-gen console, I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines! Especially if both of them have really weird architecture that's hard to program on."
now its just "lets do a mid-life separate SKU with the same name and everything is compatible, but at least the airflow is better, maybe cheaper to manufacture, and maybe it outputs higher resolution" its a better outcome, reminds me thats what happens when we allow companies to fail
There was a Genesis 2 and a corresponding Sega CD2 which were smaller than the originals
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company was deeply involved with Sega Saturn development at that time. One of the problems was a serious rift between Sega of America and Sega Japan. SOA was committed to the idea that the Sega Genesis had a few more years of life in it, and that the American audience was not as interested in new technology for its own sake. They were, rightly in my opinion, concerned that a change in platform would benefit the co…
>I don't have any real evidence of this but my intuition is that Sony allowed their American arm more latitude and gave them more credibility with regard to designing the market strategy. In reality, the exact opposite happened. Ken Kutaragi (creator of the PlayStation) and Norio Ohga (then-president of Sony) were outraged that the Sony executives in America were not following their instructions, and they fired the v…
How ironic given that the Net Yaroze, N64, and then PS2 were all black.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#24Hindsight is always 20/20, but I wonder why Sega made decisions like using quads instead of triangles, and dual CPU's.
Their arcade boards used quadrangles too, not that that really answers the question
3D chips at that time made some compromises that caused things to pop in a weird way when they were used to render rectangles such as walls.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#25I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake. "Hey let's release a weird upgrade pod for our successful last-gen console almost completely simultaneously with our next-gen console, I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines! Especially if both of them have really weird architecture that's hard to program on."
Not to argue with your point because it is certainly valid, but the N64 had that expansion module for DK 64 and a few other games, yet managed to survive that.
The expansion module was just more RAM, not a whole new system. I think the 32x is more comparable to the N64DD, which failed and never actually made it to the US.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#26I’m been doing some Nintendo 64 development lately, and sometimes all ask the CEO at my workplace for advice or insights as he worked on Nintendo 64 games when he was younger. It’s not uncommon for him to finish the conversation with noting that he worked on Sega Saturn before the Nintendo 64, and the former was difficult to work with due to its particular architecture.
Out of curiosity, what kind of tools do you use to do N64 development?
The last version of the SDK and the GCC-based toolchain were leaked a long time ago, which runs on Windows computers pre-Vista. I'll program in C with Sublime Text, and then run the compiler/toolchain in a VM running Windows XP. The VM can see my source code via a shared folder.
I'm waiting on the mail for a flash cartridge to run ROMs on retail hardware, so for now I use the mupen64plus emulator on Mac OS X, but also a more accurate (but slower) one called CEN64 from time to time. Nintendo 64 emulators are kind of odd; the popular ones don't really "emulate" a game console the way I would have expected.
Sometimes I post pictures of my progress on Twitter if you're interested: https://twitter.com/danielsavface/status/1258896460604555264
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#27For me as a kid, there was this sense of confusion and whiplash when it came to post-genesis hardware. The CD came out in 92, with no real notable games at launch: Sonic CD came out a year later, and Snatcher + Lunar at the end of its life in 95. The 32x came out shortly after in 94, and only saw a handful of games before being buried by the more powerful Saturn in 95.
With two major peripherals and a new console in a short period of time, each with its own library of games, it was hard to understand all that as a kid without internet access, much less afford it, so I stayed clear and sold my genesis for a SNES, then got an N64.
The short hardware life probably spurned a lot of 3rd party developers too.
Nintendo was much smarter, with longer cycles between major consoles, and no expensive enhancement add-ons to segment its games. When you bought a Nintendo console, you knew it would have a 5+ year road map and was a good investment (okay, ignoring the virtual boy). Every gameboy has had backwards compatibility with at least the previous generation, so it always felt "safe" to buy the newest model.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company was deeply involved with Sega Saturn development at that time. One of the problems was a serious rift between Sega of America and Sega Japan. SOA was committed to the idea that the Sega Genesis had a few more years of life in it, and that the American audience was not as interested in new technology for its own sake. They were, rightly in my opinion, concerned that a change in platform would benefit the co…
>I don't have any real evidence of this but my intuition is that Sony allowed their American arm more latitude and gave them more credibility with regard to designing the market strategy. In reality, the exact opposite happened. Ken Kutaragi (creator of the PlayStation) and Norio Ohga (then-president of Sony) were outraged that the Sony executives in America were not following their instructions, and they fired the v…
That's interesting. As I said I work with Sega so I didn't have any first-hand experience with Sony at that time.
So given what you're saying here I'll amend my perspectives to say that Sony Japan just understood the American Market better than Sega Japan.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#29I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake. "Hey let's release a weird upgrade pod for our successful last-gen console almost completely simultaneously with our next-gen console, I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines! Especially if both of them have really weird architecture that's hard to program on."
All the Sega stuff after the Genesis/Megadrive seemed really tied to their arcade efforts, in a way that Nintendo (and, toward the end of Sega's time in the market, Sony and Microsoft) didn't. AFAIK the 32x, Saturn, and Dreamcast were all only a little more different from their arcade counterparts than the NeoGeo was, which is why there were so many very faithful arcade "ports" on them (Star Wars Arcade and NBA Jam o…
AFAIK the 32x, Saturn, and Dreamcast were all only a little more different from their arcade counterparts than the NeoGeo was
I think this is less true for the older hardware and even the DreamCast is somewhat more limited than its arcade board cousin.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#30It's hard to say what the biggest mistake was exactly. The Sega CD and 32x were bad ideas, compared to just creating a new console. The Sega Saturn would have been a great 2D console, but they delayed it to add a really strange (quads versus triangles) underperforming 3D capability to their design. I think the Saturn should have been released earlier in 2D only form, so they could move on to making a 3D capable conso…
A CD based Sega system was a great idea but not as an add on, the reality is the cost of hardware back then and the nature of the console market being technology illiterate was the issue. I was one of the few who got the original Sega CD, the early version one that mounted underneath the genesis. It had cool games like Darkwizard. The real issue was the cost of add on peripherals were too high to get any kind of mark…
Anecdotally, I knew a bunch of people with PS1, maybe one of them knew how to pirate games.