It is undeniable that the dreamcast was a solid machine that had good games and a sleek look, but was ultimately overshadowed by the goliath that is the PS2.
What do you guys think, how could the Dreamcast kept surviving? Should SEGA thought reeling back the Saturn?
It certainly was praised, but didn’t get the chance it needed, personally I considered it to be a part of the prior gen (N64, PS1)
Let me know your thoughts!
I’m pretty sure I read or saw a documentary that basically said the downfall of Sega started with Sega of Japan starting to take more control and override Sega of America. I think that’s how we ended up with the Sega Saturn and the failure of that console really didn’t help the Dreamcast at all.
My neighbor had a Saturn, and like literally no one else I knew did. Having said that, it was bad ass, and the graphics were unreal for the time period. Iirc it was out before N64, and had proper 3d graphics. It’s weird that it never succeeded. Was it just super expensive or what?
Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn’t access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.
Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.
PlayStation’s killer app was likely Crash Bandicoot as that game paved the way for Sony (games like Wipeout, Ridge Racer and Tekken helped too) and gave them some real momentum, it just got better from there. I still remember playing the Demo of Crash and being absolutely blown away.
By the time FF7 released, the Nintendo 64 had launched so that probably contributed to the Saturn’s downfall as well.
Funny, I thought of mentioning Crash Bandicoot, but when I put myself into the shoes of 12-year-old me, the single game that came to mind when I thought PlayStation was Final Fantasy 7 more than anything else.
Oh I definitely don’t disagree, FF7, Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid all cemented PlayStation as a force to be reckoned with for suren and can be considered killer apps. I just remember for me getting a PlayStation personally being just wowed by the likes of Crash Bandicoot and Tekken. Fond memories for sure!
Don’t forget Twisted Metal. I believe it released before Crash.
The weirdest part about this to me, as a mathematician with limited programming experience, is the idea of using quadrilaterals instead of triangles. You can make any polygon out of triangles, but the same absolutely cannot be said of quadrilaterals. Why would anyone do that?
I’m no game designer or coder so I’m just going off what I read on Wikipedia, but… Apparently the Saturn was a mostly 2D focused system, so it had a processor that could do warping and manipulation of sprites. So when it drew a “polygon” it was really drawing together a bunch of sprites and manipulating them.
…yeah.