Sega Saturn

The Sega Saturn was a 32-bit video game console first released on in Japan on 22 November 1994; 11 May 1995 in North America; and 8 July, 1995 in Europe.

In Japan, the Saturn was rushed to the market in order to launch a few weeks ahead of its rival, the Sony PlayStation. However, this early release meant that few games were available at launch, and despite selling approximately 170,000 units on the first day, the Saturn was soon outsold by the PlayStation.

In North America, the Saturn was released several months ahead of the PlayStation. However, instead of using this time to maximise sales and achieve early adoption of the console, Sega set a relatively high price point of US$400 in order to maximise profits from gamers who were willing to pay a premium to have the first machines available. By the time the PlayStation was released in September, the Saturn had sold approximately 80,000 systems in the US. However, the PlayStation sold over 100,000 units upon release - a record at the time for a new system. Momentum behind the PlayStation continued to build and Sega's hopes of early domination were dashed.

Although the Sega Saturn was released in Europe a few months before the PlayStation, anticipation was already building for the Sony system and also for the release of the Nintendo 64, which was scheduled for a European launch in early 1997. Both of these factors caused the sales of the Saturn to trail the PlayStation from the start.

As the 32-bit era continued, other console makers reduced their prices to make them more attractive to buyers. However, the system board design of the Saturn was not easy to condense in a cost-saving manner, and Sega was forced to bundle more games with the console in order to make the more expensive Saturn compete with its rivals. However, gamers usually preferred to buy a less expensive system from the competition so that they could purchase game titles of their own choice instead.

Although the Sega Saturn managed to sell 10 million units worldwide, it was discontinued in both Europe and North America in late 1998, and in Japan at the end of 2000.

Hardware

Although the Saturn was a powerful machine for the time, its setup of two CPUs and 6 other processors made harnessing its power extremely difficult. One of the disadvantages of the chip's architecture was that both processors shared the same bus, and other than 4 K of on-chip memory, all program code and data for both CPUs were located in the same shared 2 MB of main memory. This often meant that the second CPU would have to wait whilst the first CPU was working, reducing its processing ability. Developers were further hindered by the lack of useful software libraries and development tools, and programmers often used only one CPU to simplify development. However, when used properly, the dual processors could achieve impressive results such as true transparency effects, as seen in games like Burning Rangers released in1998.

The architectural design problems meant that the Saturn lost third party support to consoles such as the PlayStation, which also used the industry standard design of triangles as its basic geometric primitive, rather than the Saturn's quadrilaterals.

Games

Some of the most highly rated games that were released for the Saturn included the following titles: