30 years of the Sega Saturn: Segata Sanshirō

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.

You’ve probably heard a number of reasons why the Sega Saturn failed to catch on in North America. It was more expensive than the rival Playstation. Owing to its surprise early launch, it barely had any games to support it for months and months, and lost the support of retailers like KB Toys throughout its entire existence because of these decisions. Ridge Racer made everyone realize Sega wasn’t the only game in town when it came to at-home, arcade-quality racing games. Sonic Team produced creative new titles like NiGHTS and Burning Rangers, sure, but there wasn’t a mainline Sonic to attract new Saturn purchases. Sega failed to bring over games and series that it could have used to stand out from Playstation’s offerings, like Sakura Wars and the complete Shining Force III… the list goes on.

All of these pale in comparison to the one true, definitely not exaggerated for effect reason for the Sega Saturn just not thriving outside of Japan. That’s right: no Segata Sanshirō.

Do you know what drives people? Feeling supported, of course, feeling as if they’re being listened to, and having their needs met. Do you know what else drives people? Fear. Fear that a man in a gi who knows martial arts was going to suddenly appear behind them when they were doing things besides playing Sega Saturn games, and make them pay for this indiscretion with pain. And possibly explosions.

Segata Sanshirō was a character created for commercials promoting Sega Saturn games, portrayed by actor Hiroshi Fujioka, famous for playing the role of the hero of Kamen Rider, Takeshi Hongo. The character’s name was a play on a martial artist from Akira Kurosawa’s martial arts drama, Sanshiro Sugata. A bit ironically, the protagonist of Sanshiro Sugata turns away from aggression and the quest for raw strength he believes that Jujutsu will provide him, to instead focus on Judo and the art of self-defense; Segata Sanshirō, conversely, wants to crack the skulls of those who don’t spend their time playing Sega games. Segata Sanshirō may kill a lot of people, but he also helps a lot of people get into Sega Saturn games, so it’s impossible to say if he’s bad or not.

His catchphrase in Japanese was “Sega Satān, shiro!” which translates to “Play Sega Saturn!” In its untranslated form it’s a lot like his name, however, which, sure, it wouldn’t have worked 1:1 in North America like it did in Japan as far as cleverness goes. But again, fear was the primary driver here. You would have bought that copy of Panzer Dragoon II Zwei rather than risk being attacked in the middle of the street while doing something else like going to play baseball with your friends, or go out dancing on a date. There was simply too much at stake to do otherwise, as far as your physical wellbeing was concerned.

Segata Sanshirō aired in a number of commercials in support of games such as Sonic R, The House of the Dead, Burning Rangers, and Dragon Force II. He was first introduced in 1997, so Sega got two years of commercials out of him before the arrival of the Dreamcast (which came out in Japan nearly a full year before it arrived in North America and Europe). As you’ve probably gathered, the premise of the commercials would regularly revolve around the idea that people were trying to have fun with activities that had nothing to do with the Sega Saturn, a practice that Segata Sanshirō felt was wrong. Wrong enough for him to inflict violence, even on the youth. Violence that included judo throws that sometimes resulted in the recipients of them straight-up exploding in a dramatic fashion.

Saturn Memories uploaded the entire run of commercials, with English subtitles, onto YouTube. If you’ve never seen them before, you’re in for a treat.

The commercials would evolve over time, however, with the focus of them moving toward emulating whatever was going on in the game being promoted. Marketing for The House of the Dead? Time for zombies to show up. Winter Heat? Get that man a pair of ice skates. Burning Rangers? Segata Sanshirō can rescue someone trapped in a burning building, too, just like the Rangers! In the final commercial, Segata Sanshirō stops a missile from destroying Sega’s headquarters, presumably sacrificing himself in the process, which also allowed the Dreamcast to come to market. Who knows how he would have reacted to the replacement of his beloved Sega Saturn, you know?

It was a genuinely brilliant marketing campaign, and one that proved popular, too. To the point that Sega even ended up releasing a Segata Sanshirō game for the Saturn, titled Segata Sanshirō Shinken Yūgi. Now, this minigame collection is not the best game out there, by any means — Hardcore Gaming 101 went in-depth on it back in 2017 — but the fact that it exists at all is a testament to the strength of the campaign. And it’s also telling that the gameplay revolves around unlocking various commercials featuring Segata Sanshirō, so you’d be able to watch them whenever you wanted to. This was nearly 30 years ago now, society was still years away from the existence of YouTube, so something like this was the only way for normal folks to “preserve” these commercials for later viewing.

Segata Sanshirō has appeared in additional games in later years, and ones that received worldwide releases, too. One only available worldwide due to an unofficial translation is the Dreamcast and Xbox title Rent A Hero No. 1, in which he teaches martial arts moves to the main character. One of those was fairly mainstream — Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed — but Segata Sanshirō merely makes a cameo in there. Here he is, riding that missile he saved the Sega headquarters from in his final commercial, with an enormous Sega Saturn strapped to his back:

While you didn’t get the chance to drive a car as Segata Sanshirō in Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, you do get to use him as a playable character in Monolith Soft’s Project X Zone 2. Project X Zone is a successor series to Namco X Capcom, a tactical crossover RPG where characters from Namco and Capcom series partner up to face off against… well, characters from Namco and Capcom series, as well as new villains introduced specifically for the purpose of the game. Project X Zone is a continuation of that, on the Nintendo 3DS instead of the Playstation 2, and Project X Zone 2 is, of course, the sequel to that game.

This one involves not just Namco and Capcom characters, but Sega and Nintendo ones, as well — Monolith was a Nintendo subsidiary at this point, not Namco, so their involvement with a few characters makes a lot of sense in that regard, and Sega had ended up on board for the original Project X Zone because why not make it an even larger party, you know? Sega’s roster actually avoids many of its most famous worldwide characters and series like Sonic, and instead focuses on the likes of Sakura Wars, Resonance of Fate, Virtua Fighter (far more popular in arcades than at home), Like a Dragon (not yet a phenomenon at this point), Shinobi/Nightshade, Shenmue, and… Segata Sanshirō. Producer on the Project X Zone games, Kensuke Tsukanaka, said that it was Namco who wanted to include the marketing icon in the game, not Sega. Please enjoy a whole lot of unique battle dialogue that Segata Sanshirō shares with other characters from Project X Zone 2. Unless you don’t want to see him chatting with Morrigan from Darkstalkers or Jill Valentine from Resident Evil, for some reason. (The Sakura Wars interaction is a personal favorite.)

Sega hasn’t completely forgotten about Segata Sanshirō, even if it does feel like they’ve put the Sega Saturn era in the rear view to stay by ignoring so many of its games, its series, and skipping the opportunity to release a Mini Saturn like they did for the Genesis… twice. The son of Segata Sanshirō actor Hiroshi Fujioka, Maito Fujioka, has played the on-screen son and successor of Segata Sanshirō, an ambassador named Sega Shirō, for the company. (Maito Fujioka also plays a younger version of his father’s Kamen Rider character in modern incarnations of the series, so he’s made a habit of this sort of thing.)

The Sega Saturn had games. It had powerful hardware. It had developers who knew how to use it. What it didn’t have outside of Japan was marketing powerful enough to put a dent in the sales of the Playstation and Nintendo 64, but Segata Sanshirō provided that at home, helping to give Sega its lone victory in the “console wars” in that country with a second-place victory over Nintendo. The Saturn was the best-selling system Sega ever produced in Japan, and it had 775 games that released exclusively in that territory out of over 1,000 in total, but it also had a popular marketing campaign backing it that helped people realize as much, even in the shadow of games as singular in their popularity and influence as Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It’s not that Segata Sanshirō’s marketing campaign can take full credit for this, but there’s no denying that this was part of the equation. And it’s a shame that Sega never figured out how to translate this success elsewhere, or bothered to make the Segata Sanshirō character work outside of Japan. But hey, at least we can enjoy all of this now in the present. And without having to unlock all of the commercials in a minigame collection to do so.

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