30 years of the Sega Saturn

On May 11, 2025, the Sega Saturn will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of May, I’ll be covering the console and its history, its games, and what made it the most successful Sega console in Japan but a disappointment outside of it. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

There are platforms that are considered failures because they didn’t have the games, and there are those that are deemed failures because they just didn’t sell enough to justify continuing on. The Atari Jaguar fits into the former category: poorly masquerading as a 64-bit system competing against 16-bit ones, its library of licensed games ended up totaling just 50 cartridges and 13 CD titles, only playable with an add-on. Sega’s 32X add-on for the Genesis might have been impressive from a technological standpoint, but it amassed just 40 titles. NEC’s PC-FX, the successor to the PC Engine/Turbografx-16, was nowhere near as popular in Japan, and wrapped its short lifespan with just 62 games, compared to the nearly 700 released for its predecessor and its CD add-ons.

Each of those systems has something (or some things) fascinating worth digging into, but ultimately there’s only so much to look at and look into, given you’re talking about game libraries that can be measured using the word “dozens.” Which is why it’s a bit of a shame that the latter category — those platforms that just didn’t sell in huge numbers — are lumped in alongside them as failures. Sure, the Wii U was a failure by Nintendo’s standards, but it still made it into over 13 million homes worldwide, and there were nearly 800 games released for the system between physical and digital releases despite the fact that the console was supported for less than five years before Nintendo moved on to the Switch. There’s a ton to dig into there, and the fact that it was often used a lot like a mutant DS where one screen was in your hands and one was your television gives it a level of separation from anything else out there. The 3DO had 246 official releases, and while it couldn’t withstand the release of the Playstation and Sony’s entry into the console market, there’s still so much early console 3D there worth checking out, and a hotbed of Japanese game development given the system did better there than elsewhere. Not good, mind you, but better.

Then there’s the Sega Saturn, which, while estimates vary, seems to have sold around 9.5 million consoles worldwide. With the Genesis and its various incarnations moving more like 35 million consoles, that was deemed a failure. Commercially, sure: the Saturn failed to live up to the highs of its predecessor as far as making it into homes went, but consider that there are people reading this with little or no experience with the Saturn who would defend the Dreamcast and its library and the potential of its hardware to their dying breath. The Saturn outsold the Dreamcast, you know, and had more games released for it as well. The problem is one of location: if you were in Japan, then the Saturn had much more of a presence than it did outside of it. The Saturn sold 5.75 million units in Japan, compared to 1.8 million in North America and just one million in Europe. For additional context there, know that the Turbgrafx-16 sold 2.6 million consoles in North America.

The Saturn received only moderate support in North America because of this, but in Japan? Of the 1,028 Saturn games released in its lifetime, 775 of them were Japan-exclusive titles. You might think that the Saturn had no games, and that’s why it didn’t sell, but that’s not exactly the case: 775 is one shy of twice as many games as the Nintendo 64 had worldwide. Maybe there’s a bit of a chicken-egg thing going on there, but the games were there: they just weren’t released outside of Japan, since Sega ceded the rest of the world’s territories to the Playstation. They focused on winning at home — an impossibility in the 16- and 8-bit eras given Nintendo’s stranglehold on the region that was part momentum and part contractual obligations keeping third parties from switching allegiances en masse — and did so, at least as far as challenging the Big N went. The Saturn actually outsold the Nintendo 64 in Japan… it’s just that both systems were eventually crushed by the Playstation.

That Sega bungled the Saturn launch and ruined their console business forever in the process is important as far as historical lessons go — it turns out that you shouldn’t do a surprise launch months before your initial planned launch in an attempt to undercut the forthcoming Playstation, angering your retail partners and putting a console without games that are ready for it on shelves for months, planting the idea in everyone’s head that there’s no reason to buy it even without getting into giving Sony the chance to go “ours is cheaper, actually, and also has Ridge Racer on it.”

This has all been covered in this space before, so let me just pull out a context-filled passage from my write-up on the Saturn’s first-party title, Astal:

The Saturn actually kept selling in Japan right up until the Dreamcast released and Sega completely cut off support for it. In 1996, it added another four million in sales worldwide, and then 1.8 million in 1997. In Japan, the Saturn had actually outsold the Playstation through 1996, with 2.3 million of those four million units sold for the year coming in Japan alone. The release of Final Fantasy VII helped forever shift the balance of power there, however, and the Saturn still did well enough to outperform the N64, but the Playstation left it way behind. How many more Saturns would have sold worldwide if Sega hadn’t irreparably damaged their relationship with retail vendors like KB Toys, which, by 1999, had over 1,300 locations in the United States across all 50 states? If they didn’t release the system with essentially no games for months and months on end? If the gap between the end of the support of the Saturn and the introduction of the Dreamcast didn’t create an entire year of no Sega releases at all in North America? Would they have taken the chance on something as sublime and important in Japan as Sakura Wars outside of that country if more Saturn consoles had been sold worldwide? How many of its killer Japan-only games like that one would have ended up localized and ported elsewhere if Sega of America hadn’t rushed to fire off a gun without a bullet in the chamber?

All fascinating hypotheticals to think about, sure — does Sega wait to unveil the Dreamcast for a longer period of time, and does so with more momentum behind it that allows them to stick in the console business? Or does none of this matter because, in the end, Sega also didn’t foresee the arcade crash that was a hugely significant and expensive part of their business model, anyway, which had just as much to do with their exiting the console space and moving to third-party publisher and developer as did the failure of their consoles?

All this talk of sales figures and hypotheticals is just some table setting, though. How many systems the Saturn sold, which platforms it outsold, is just some historical data that you don’t need to care about in 2025 beyond knowing it at all. The Sega Saturn had games. It had lots of games. It had lots of great games. Most of them did not release in North America, however, so, unless you are a certain kind of sicko residing there, you are not aware of these great games. They’re out there, though, and in great enough numbers that the Saturn is far more than some commercial failure curio important to the history of Sega and the shape of the industry that followed it for what it failed to achieve. The Saturn is its own system with plenty to offer, and myriad ways to experience those games in the present. Some of them — though not nearly enough — are commercially available in the present. Saturn emulation, long a troubled space given the complicated architecture of the hardware itself, is in the best place it’s ever been. And there are multiple ways to experience the games on actual hardware, too, without actually owning the extremely expensive games that are only available secondhand. There are enough competing optical drive emulators (ODE) out there to be installed in a Saturn that there are debates about which one is actually the best choice, and soft-mods in memory cartridges allow for bypassing the region locks and playing burned discs — the Saturn did release in the era before more rigorous protections against such practices, you know.

Which is a long way of saying that, 30 years in, it’s worth looking back at some of what the Saturn had on offer, if only as a way to get you to whet your appetite for a system that can keep you fed for some time. For the duration of May, we’ll look back at some of the key releases on the console that serve as an example of what you could experience if you had a Saturn, or if Sega (and third parties) had bothered to release some of these games outside of Japan. We’ll look at the system’s controller, it’s place as the arcade-focused platform of its day, the ways it was actually successfully marketed, and more. My hope is that, when this is over, you’ll look into finding a way to go through the Saturn’s library yourself, to find that there was so much more going on here than its troubles at retail implied. That it was a commercial failure, sure, but that this didn’t detract from the quality of its library, only so much as what parts of said library were available where. Three decades later, with emulation and hard- and soft-mods and unofficial translations all at our fingertips, none of what went wrong with the Saturn has to matter anymore. The games are there, waiting to be played. Let’s talk about some of them.

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