Sega Saturn

The Sega Saturn (Japanese: セガサターン, Sega Saturn), is a video game console of the 32-bit era. It was released on November 22, 1994 in Japan, and May 1995 in North America. Approximately 170,000 machines were sold the first day of the Japanese launch. more...

At one time, the Sega Saturn had obtained second place in the console wars, placing it above Nintendo's Super Famicom in Japan and Nintendo's Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in North America and Europe, but the Saturn was losing power because of some newcomers: Sony's PlayStation and, outside Japan, the cartridge-based Nintendo 64.

The Japanese Saturn was rushed to the market, just a few weeks ahead of its rival, Sony's PlayStation, which led to very few games being available when the Saturn launched.

Development

Sega's Away Team worked for an entire two years exclusively to make certain that the Sega Saturn was launched with some of the world's best hardware and software. The 27-member Away Team comprises Sega employees from every aspect of hardware engineering, product development, and marketing. Their sole mission was to ensure that Sega Saturn's hardware and design met the precise needs of both the U.S. and Japanese markets.

The Saturn was a powerful machine for the time. However, the Saturn design, with two CPUs and 6 other processors, made it difficult to get the maximum performance out of the console. Rumours had it that the original plan called for a single processor, but a second one was added in late development when the designers realized they had underestimated the PlayStation's 3D capabilities. The parallel design was too complex for many game developers. Yu Suzuki is reported to have said:

One very fast central processor would be preferable. I don't think that all programmers have the ability to program two CPUs - most can only get about one-and-a-half times the speed you can get from one SH-2. I think only one out of 100 programmers is good enough to get that kind of speed out of the Saturn.

Third-party development was also hindered by the lack of a useful software development kit. Because of this, many Saturn games needed to be written in assembly language to achieve decent performance on the hardware. Programmers would frequently only utilize one CPU to avoid some of the trouble in programming for the Saturn. If games are compared side-by-side between the Saturn and PlayStation, the differences on average are clear. Given that the Saturn was only utilizing around 1/2 of its potential power in most games, it is impossible to draw conclusions.

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