30 years of the Sega Saturn: Fighters Megamix

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.

Before the dawn of the Sega Saturn or the Playstation, there was Virtua Fighter. Just two-and-a-half years after Capcom’s Street Fighter II took the world by storm one arcade at a time and brought on the era of the fighting game, Sega introduced a 3D fighter — a fully 3D polygonal fighting game, the first of its kind. Remember this — as well as Virtua Racing, which released a full 14 months before Virtua Fighter — the next time that someone tries to tell you that Sega didn’t realize that 3D was the future and that’s why they inevitably lost to the Playstation in the Saturn era. They were fully onboard that train even before the 3DO hit the market, never mind their own 32-bit console. The speed at which this expensive technology left its nascent stage and became the central focus of the industry at the expense of the still-popular 2D development is all that Sega was surprised by, and they were far from alone in that.

Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing both ran on 1992’s Sega Model 1 board, which would be succeeded by the Sega Model 2 board in 1993. The Model 2 and its various tweaked, upgraded, and lettered (2A, 2B, etc.) variants played host to titles like Daytona USA — another fully polygonal early 3D marvel that preceded the Saturn by quite a bit — and was powerful enough to remain relevant into 1998, with games like House of the Dead (1997), Sega Rally Championship (1995), Psikyo’s Zero Gunner (1997), Tecmo’s Dead or Alive (1996), and Sega’s Fighting Vipers (1995) coming out on the hardware in that stretch. And this despite the fact that its successor, the Sega Model 3 board, came out in 1996.

Sega AM Research and Development No. 2, led by the already legendary Yu Suzuki, was behind the development of the boards and so many of the games released for them. Virtua Racing was AM2’s first game as an internal studio of Sega’s, and carried on the legacy of Sega’s time in the 80s when they were pushing boundaries in the arcades with titles like Suzuki’s Hang-on, OutRun, Space Harrier, and more. Now, though, rather than super scaler, faux 3D titles, AM2 was able to produce true polygonal 3D in the arcade. Also unlike in the 80s, Sega’s home console could actually handle ports of these games that ran maybe not quite as smoothly as they did in their original format, no, but the gap between the arcade and console quality was practically nonexistent compared to what, say, OutRun ran like on the Sega Genesis.

Which meant that ports of AM2’s fantastic Model 1 and Model 2 arcade games ended up on the Saturn, and were a blast to play there, too. While the original Virtua Fighter port to the Saturn had a troubled launch that required a later fixed re-release, Virtua Fighter 2 —which introduced texture-mapping to its polygonal characters, courtesy a deal with GE Aerospace, which then merged with Lockheed Martin in 1995, for their chip that was capable of producing this effect — was legit from the start. (Yes, sorry to say, but Sega dipped into a deal with the military-industrial complex to get their killer 3D working on the Model series. It’s cool and good how no one’s hands are clean, not even the makers of a simple joy like Daytona USA. Hey, at least Desert Tank never took off.) Virtua Racing got an expanded port with a championship mode, a number of other vehicle types, and more. Daytona USA might not have done for the Saturn what Namco’s Ridge Racer did for the Playstation, no, but you still can’t go wrong with its home variant.

Fighting Vipers, which used the same engine as Virtua Fighter 2, wasn’t quite as popular as Virtua Fighter, which is, thanks in large part to its arcade success, one of the three highest-grossing fighting game franchises out there along with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. But it was AM2’s attempt at making a fighting game geared more toward an American market, meaning, less emphasis on martial arts and characters designed with those kinds of fitting looks in mind, and more on things like wrestling moves, and skateboards, and roller skates, and… body armor. Now, this isn’t to say that AM2 was totally erasing the game’s Japanese roots by angling for more North American interest, or that wrestling is an American-specific thing — Candy is basically dressed like she’s getting ready to step into a Stardom ring for some joshi puroresu — but this is the mid-90s. And if you were there at that time period, then you don’t need me to tell you how much pro wrestling and skateboards and roller skates (and roller blades, naturally) were simply part of the fabric of American society at that moment.

Rather than Virtua Fighter’s large arenas, Fighting Vipers had cage matches where you could grapple opponents and Irish whip them right into the cages. Or, at the end of the match, even hit them so hard that they would go flying through the cage. Sure, it wasn’t as bloody as a fatality, but it was just as satisfying to finish off a match by dropkicking your opponent into orbit. Characters were all wearing body armor, and your goal was to hit it often enough and hard enough that it would break off. You could still cause as much damage sans armor, but you were about to take way more damage with every hit without it than you did with it on, and if that armor was knocked off in the first round of your bout? Bad news, it’s still off in round two. There were two separate pieces of armor, for the top of a character and the bottom, so concentrating attacks on a specific area of the body would give you a better chance of damaging their armor enough to eventually break it. Work that limb, basically — pro wrestling is about more than just throwing a suplex here and there. Though you can also do that in Fighting Vipers, depending on the character.

Grace wears roller skates, which it turns out can really hurt if you get kicked with them. Picky wields his skateboard as a melee weapon. Candy fights like she’s a cat, even holding her hands out like they’re cat paws, and “scratching” with her punches. These characters are weird, and it rules — they could not be more different than their more serious Virtua Fighter counterparts, which is not a knock on Virtua Fighter, but the vibe is just very different, never mind your approach in these one-on-one fights.

Sega AM2, despite being arcade-focused since they were also extremely hardware-focused, had an idea to boost the Saturn’s profile: combine Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers, as different as they were, into one game, and release it exclusively for the Saturn rather than in arcades. Instead of a port of Virtua Fighter 3 to the Saturn — that would instead go to the more powerful Dreamcast as one of its earliest releases — AM2 worked on creating Fighters Megamix, which would utilize some of the rules and move sets and and designs of Virtua Fighter 3 within it, such as the ability to dodge and setup a counter. There is no ring out here, making the Virtua Fighter stages a bit more open-ended than they are in their original form, and boss characters from Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers were available as playable characters from the start, without the need for codes like in those titles. This combination of characters from disparate games with differing styles wasn’t a Sega invention by any means — The King of Fighters kicked off in 1994, two years prior, with SNK combining characters from Fatal Fury and The Art of Fighting together in one place — but it was a fine idea to emulate.

Just in terms of pure gameplay, Fighters Megamix is a ton of fun. You have, by default, 45 seconds to win a round, but damage can be so high that it ends up feeling like a lot of time instead of very little — consider that you don’t just take damage from whatever attack caused you to go flying through the air, but you take additional damage from landing on the ground, too. That 45 seconds is itself probably a concession to the Virtua Fighter side of things, since the default from Fighting Vipers is just 30-second fights. Virtua Fighter characters don’t have armor or an armor gauge, and playing on their stages means no cages, but they can still target armor on a Fighting Vipers character or whip a dude into a cage all the same. Conversely, when using a Fighting Vipers character against a Virtua Fighter character in a Virtua Fighter stage, you have to think of using them differently than you normally would in order to achieve victory. There are combos to remember for each character, there are charge-up moves that let you take the risk of standing still for a second to deliver a powerful attack, you can block, you can dodge side-to-side in a way that reminds you that this arena you’re fighting in is presented head-on but actually exists in a 3D space… it’s somehow both, seamlessly, Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers at the same time.

And then, at the same time, it is neither of those things. It is simply Fighters Megamix. And that’s because, as goofy as Fighting Vipers can be sometimes compared to Virtua Fighter, it does not feature a playable car that stands upright and uses its tires to punch and kick. That can remove its armor by choice in order to vastly increase its speed in combat, allowing it to fly like a butterfly and sting like a… Hornet. That’s right, the car from Daytona USA is an unlockable fighter in Fighters Megamix, and while it doesn’t make literally any sense outside of “that game was also developed by AM2,” you don’t need it to make sense. You just need it to exist, even if you were not previously aware of this need until it was revealed to you.

It’s not just Hornet you unlock in-game, though. There are characters from Sonic the Fighters here — Bark the Polar Bear and Bean the Dynamite. Janet from Virtua Cop is here, and she has a gun. A gun she can use! There’s Deku, who is… a… plant? Of some kind? Wearing a sombrero with a bird under it, which you discover after knocking off the sombrero, which is armor because of course it is. There’s Kumachan the bear, who has his own physics and no points of articulation for some reason. Why does he move like that? Who decided that? Why? Rent-a-Hero is here, which is not a sentence you get to type very often! Siba, who was supposed to be in Virtua Fighter but was not, debuts in Fighters Megamix instead, with a sword that’s destructible if you attack it enough. There is a character named “Mr. Meat” who is a piece of meat with Rayman limbs that serves as an alternate costume for Kumachan, and Palm Tree is also that, and here because a palm tree is AM2’s logo. The Virtua Fighter Kids versions of Akira and Sarah are here, and they’re terrible!

That’s the secret for most of these unlockable characters, actually. They’re not very fun to use if your goal is to win. That only enhances the experience, though. Who cares if Hornet is any good? You get to fight as a car. Kumachan is inexplicable and overly large and completely absurd, do you need him to also have a good move set? The Virtua Fighter Kids have absolutely no range and can therefore be obliterated even by someone who isn’t an expert at fighting games. It genuinely rocks that AM2 made you play through the game a ton of times in a bunch of different configurations to unlock a series of escalating jokes rather than potential new mains. I knew what I was getting into, and I still did it, and I regret nothing. The fighting feels good enough to justify all of this — it leans way more Fighting Vipers than Virtua Fighter, in case you were wondering — and every 6-10 minutes I got to cackle at whatever monstrosity I’d unlocked.

This isn’t just some nearly 30-years-later ironic enjoyment of Fighters Megamix coming from me, either. It was widely considered at the time of its release to be one of the finest games on the Saturn, and that wasn’t a backhanded compliment, either. It’s truly excellent, being somehow both a standout fighter as well as a complete joke at the same time, and the only thing that’s wrong with it is that it was never seen again.

Sega would produce a Fighting Vipers sequel that landed on the Dreamcast, and there were more Virtua Fighters to be had, as well, but Fighters Megamix never happened again, and the original remains true to the word on its box, in that it’s still, to this day, a Sega Saturn exclusive. Sure, it received a release on the Tiger handheld, Game.com, but frankly saying that’s a proper port of Fighters Megamix is doing a disservice to not just the original game but the concept of ports. For all intents and purposes, there is one version of Fighters Megamix, in the sense that there is one version where you can experience what the game actually was.

A grave injustice, for sure, and one you can’t rely on Sega rectifying since they only just recently took the highly successful Virtua Fighter out of mothballs, but that just means you need to go out and experience Fighters Megamix for yourself somehow. Not convinced? Obviously it has not been emphasized enough just yet that you can fight as a car in this game. But you can. You really, for whatever reason, can.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.