The Sega Saturn story in 1995 really is a tale of two cities… or rather regions. In Japan, buoyed by the success of Virtua Fighter, the Saturn was the bestselling 32-bit system in its homeland, though its rival, Sony’s PlayStation, was gaining ground. In the West, however, it was a different story.
The Saturn port of Virtua Fighter was picked apart and criticised for not being arcade perfect, while the visual aspect of the Daytona USA port was an unmitigated disaster in the face of a solid showing from Ridge Racer on PlayStation. The rushed launch didn’t help matters and it wasn’t long before the Saturn’s fortunes in the West were an inverse of Japan.
Sega needed something to turn opinion around, and they needed something big.
The thing was Sega didn’t have a big game, they had three.
Faced with doubters, critics and floundering sales, and no sign of Sonic X-treme on the horizon, Sega looked to the area of business that had been a blockbuster for them since the 80’s, their arcade arm. Just as Virtua Fighter had been a success in the consoles native Japan, arcade ports would once again form the basis of the Saturn’s counterattack.
Those three games were:
Virtua Cop – AM2’s pioneering light gun shooter, the first to render such an environment entirely in real time 3D, which featured unparalleled animation.
Sega Rally – AM3’s revolutionary racer, which was not only a visual showcase but a landmark in realistic handling models that had never before been seen in the genre.
Virtua Fighter 2 – The sequel to AM2’s seminal 3D fighting game, offering visuals, physics and AI that were unparalleled in any other fighter at the time.
Daytona USA had left a bad taste in the mouths of critics irrespective of how well it played, giving them all the evidence they needed that the Saturn wasn’t as powerful as its 32-bit rival. With that games July Western debut still fresh in the memory, and the Virtua Fighter port which was considered flawed, there were severe concerns about how Sega’s machine could replicate the outrageously advanced Model 2 arcade hardware that these games ran on.
The Saturn was coming up to its first birthday in Japan, and was barely half a year old in the West, yet even with AM2 performing double duty on two thirds of the trio, somehow all three games were lined up for a Christmas release in Japan, the US and Europe. With all three having less than a year of development time (Virtua Cop had just 7 months!), the likelihood of them all receiving high quality of ports seemed like a pipe dream.
But sometimes dreams come true.
Utilising the Sega Graphics Library (SGL) to make the infamously complex infrastructure of the Saturn more approachable, Virtua Cop managed to release earlier than anticipated. The refresh rate may have been reduced from 60 to 30 frames per second and there may have been some compromises in bringing the game from the bleeding edge Lockheed-Martin military focussed $15,000 Model 2 board to the $399 Saturn, but the result was simply incredible.
The game also shipped with the Sega Stunner, a light gun that was staggeringly close to its arcade counterpart. For the Saturn, the arcade had truly come home.
AM2’s SGL also played a part in their port of Virtua Fighter 2. Once again, with few compromises, the arcade titan had made its way home virtually intact. Sure, some of the 3D backdrops had been replaced by some very impressive parallax trickery, and Shun Di’s bridge was missing, but everything else was there. Most importantly of all that 60fps frame rate was present, correct and absolutely unwavering. Such performance hardly seemed possible on the Saturn, yet here was a game that not only hit that target without missing a step, but also ran in the systems hi-definition mode.
The result was the best-selling game on Saturn and a fighting game that still looks glorious today.
Somewhat ironically, Sega Rally didn’t hit that December checkpoint in time in any region exception America. There were mentions of delays in Sega Saturn Magazine of up to a month. Could the final game in the big three be in trouble?
Not a chance! After the disappointment of Daytona USA, Sega Rally Championship on the Sega Saturn was a revelation. The frame rate was halved again, yes, but the game still looked utterly incredible. Sega Rally played just like the arcade original, retained all of it’s content and even included its own additions, improved the soundtrack and came with a 2 player split screen mode. In the space of less than a year we had seen Saturn development had come on leaps and bounds.
What’s more, these three games were leaps and bounds beyond what the PS1 had in 1995. Its answer to sublime Virtua Fighter 2 was the clunky original Tekken, it had no follow up to Ridge Racer to counter Sega Rally and had absolutely nothing that compared to Virtua Cop.
Even in 2020 when console wars are fought over exclusives, we have seen nothing in the last quarter of a century that rivals these three games being launched in a two month window in all regions for any console. It truly was an extremely special triple salvo that Sega launched.
Ultimately, despite how incredible the three games and their ports were, they weren’t enough to turn the tide in the console war. It didn’t help that both Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally missed the crucial Christmas window in PAL territories, but even where all three were ready for the festive season in America, the momentum of the PlayStation could not be slowed.
It shows that sometimes perhaps it’s not about the games at all, or else these three would have made the Saturn a roaring success. As we continue to see today, marketing and influence are far greater weapons in a console war.
But I digress. Despite the Saturn’s misfortunes being tragic, the release of the big three was something I remember vividly, even though I was still saving up for the system. When I finally got my hands on them, I was transported to gaming Nirvana.
These are three arcade titans that must be experienced in Saturn form to be believed and are three games that play as well today as they did back then. It was an incredible achievement from a platform holder that was under fire then and received a lot of criticism, both warranted and unwarranted.
If you haven’t played them yet, then I can only urge you to do so. And if there are any doubts about their quality, just check out the review scores from Sega Saturn Magazine:
- Virtua Cop 96%
- Sega Rally 97%
- Virtua Fighter 2 98%
Don’t forget, you can tune into the SegaGuys podcast for deeper dives into the games mentioned, and many more besides.
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