There absolutely should have been a 3D Sonic by the time N64 launched. Again, most kids probably had no idea that any of these titles existed.Īgain, no Sonic, no mas. Unfortunately, it was far too late to make any difference and none of them ever sold worth a damn. Heck, they never created a football game of their own, eventually deciding to publish a third-rate Playstation title that nobody liked.įortunately, Sega had a fantastic lineup in '97 with WSB 98, WWS 98, NBA Action 98 and NHL All-Star Hockey 98.
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Sega of Japan provided the excellent Worldwide Soccer and World Series Baseball franchises, as well as Decathlete and Winter Heat, but Sega of America dropped the ball on American Football and Hockey. The lack of a proper Sonic the Hedgehog absolutely killed the system. As with Genesis, the most crucial genres for Saturn would be Sonic and Sports. A single million-seller might have been enough to sustain those first two years.Ģ. Unfortunately, for whatever reasons, Saturn never got that hit. I don't think most kids even knew the Sega version existed.Ī videogame system can get away with a lot if it only has the right breakout hit. And Saturn Tomb Raider was left in the dust by its PSX cousin, which became one of the iconic videogames of the era. Nights fared very poorly compared to Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot, both of which were multi-million sellers, and this is surely frustrating to fans. Daytona USA did very well for a racing game, but that was a minor genre at the time. In Japan, Virtua Fighter was a blockbuster success, but never achieved more than minor cult status in the States. Nothing released in 1997 or 1998 received any attention or made any dents in the charts. After that, Sega just fell off the radar. The console peaked very early, between Christmas 1995 and the arrival of Nintendo 64 the following September. This was all too obvious at the time, and these numbers reinforce the experience. Sega Saturn never had any breakout hits in the USA. We can infer a few points from this data:ġ. The two lists are nearly identical with a few differences, a couple sports titles here and there. Virtua Fighter 2 (All versions) - 200,000 Virtua Fighter (Bundled sales only) - 250,000Ĥ. Here are the top 10 best-selling Sega Saturn games:ġ. Here are the numbers he shared, presumably taken from NPD: This list is very similar to one that was posted by Afro Republican last year. I took great pride in building a site that would load almost instantly, while everybody else was still obsessed with Flash animations and popups and doodles and whatnot. Also, I had to severely optimize art assets for the website, as many users were still using dialup modems. The screenshot sizes are a bit small by today's standards, but they did look a lot larger on old VGA monitors.
In any case, I always took my own photos for my videogame reviews and put a lot of effort into creating dynamic shots. Of all the work I've created, of all my attempts at being a successful artist and writer, this is what got the most attention. If memory serves, some other magazine grabbed my screenshot for Super Bomberman 2, so this was apparently a thing.įunny enough, I just saw this screenshot again this morning on Twitter. Several years later, that same photo found its way onto the pages of Retro Gamer. I soon discovered that my main screenshot popping up everywhere online. My site was never hugely popular but it did see a fair amount of traffic. I posted these photos with my essay review of Nights in early 2003 to my arts website, part of a "videogame classics" series. Unfortunately, these were the very early days of Saturn emulation, so if you wanted to play, you needed a real console. The emulator was later discovered to be a pirated version of Sega of Japan's own (very incomplete) Saturn emulator, so it was shut down. It was an early build, but I could play this game very well.
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I created these back in 2003 or so using a PC emulator called Giri Giri. In honor of Sega Saturn's 25th birthday, I thought I would dig into the vaults and share some old screenshots of Nights: Into Dreams.