Hacker News Reader

Comment by b15h0p | Hacker News Reader

The article states that the Dreamcast "fell out of the public eye as the Nintendo 64 was released". Am I missing something here? As far as I know the N64 was released more than two years before the Dreamcast's release. The Dreamcast always felt like it belonged to the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube console generation more than the PS1/N64 generation, although it was released in between generations.

Release dates:

  * PlayStation 1: '94/'95
  * N64: '96
  * Dreamcast: '98/'99
  * PlayStation 2: 2000
  * XBox: 2001
  * GameCube: 2001

View on HN

They confused it with Sega Saturn, that's the one that was pushed under the bus by Nintendo 64 in 1996. Nintendo however was late to the game, the PS1 was already entrenched.

If I remember right, the Saturn shipped shortly before the PlayStation, but it was more expensive ($400USD vs $300USD) and shipped in a manner that annoyed most retailers (it was initially exclusive to KB Toys, I believe). The article also didn't go into the add-ons released for the Genesis/Master System (the Sega32X and SegaCD among them), and how Sega's attempts at keeping the G/MS alive instead wore out many console owners.

They launched much earlier than expected, before really any meaningful library of games were available. Third party developers were taken completely by surprise by the early launch.

It didn’t help that the Saturn didn’t ship with an SDK and was painful to develop 3D titles on due to being a sprite based machine (3D was effectively transforming sprites. Which caused bugs like breaking alpha blending).

The PlayStation wasn’t exactly easy by modern standards either but it was compared to that generation of consoles. For starters it had an SDK. Then there was the lack of storage constraints (unlike with the N64 cartridge). And while it didn’t have a Z index, at least it’s polygons weren’t just hack around 2D sprites.

That all said, I do still love my Saturn and N64 more than my PlayStation. This is Tony a rational preference but more just what I enjoy more as a retro gamer. In some ways their faults enhance the console.

I think I've seen videos saying they somehow overengineered the hardware too, and without libs (as you mention) people struggled to make use of the many processors and couldn't reach goals.

It wasn’t so much over engineered but more old before it’s time. Sega bet on 2D and then retrofitted their console to be 3D after rumours emerged that the PlayStation and N64 were 3D-focused systems.

I wish they would have doubled down on the 2d games.

It was a dead market. Everyone wanted 3D because that’s what they saw at the arcades so that’s where Sega’s developers were already skilled at. Plus that’s what was already appearing on PCs.

Most probably. Even with the best 2D games, the playstation would have wiped the competition even faster if left alone on the 3D market.

I'm curious if that was the whole story. Arcades were clearly a major factor in steering customer preferences, but nowhere near a complete lock on it.

Home consoles and computers had already established a huge range of gaming experiences that are not viable in the arcades. (RPGs, strategy games, more sophisticated sports games-- anything where the mean game time is more than a couple minutes)

I wonder if Sega could have leaned into the strengths of 2D hardware by capturing lucrative, well-known franchises rather than rushing to make something 3D. In retrospect, a lot of the early 3D games were sort of forgettable, and aged poorly?

If they could have said "we wooed Square, and the next two Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games exclusive", the Saturn would have sold several million units regardless of hardware.

The 32x was released by Sega America and the Saturn by Sega Japan. The two groups couldn’t agree on much in that era.

It's easy to use 20/20 hindsight and say failures were a mistake, but at the time, Genesis was selling like bonkers in the USA and was a relative failure in Japan. Sega (both Japan + USA) had to balance the need to generate excitement for a new console in Japan while maintaining a happy Genesis install base in the USA. At the time, the best compromise seemed to be an early launch of Saturn in Japan while giving the USA market a stop-gap next generation experience to current Genesis owners.

The whole point of the 32x project was to help and excite the American market, and it was developed by Sega USA using Saturn components.

Yes, after the fact when it didn't work out, there was much finger pointing and blame games happening, but at the time, the strategy did not seem to ridiculous and there is a universe it could have worked. Sega invested heavily into the 32x to make it successful, including cannabalizing Saturn's only Sonic game to move it to the 32x (Chaotix).

I wasn’t finger pointing. I was just making the same point you did. :)

Knuckles Chaotix was originally penned to be Sonic 4 but I think it was always planned to be a Mega Drive release. There were a couple of failed attempts at bringing Sonic to the Saturn (the engine of one of them lives on in Saturns “Sonic Jam”) but in the end it was pushed to the Dreamcast as Sonic Adventure (and apparently influenced much of the hardware design of the DC too). There are some leaked demos of Sonic for the Saturn though.

Also I think it’s a stretch to say the Mega Drive was a failure in Japan (the US market was the only market that sold the Mega Drive as “Genesis” and that was due to someone else having the IP for the name “Mega Drive”). It was successful in Japan too. But America and Europe were undoubtedly massive markets too.

I do have both the 32x and Mega CD (as well as several versions of the Mega Drive / Genesis). The 32x wasn’t intended to be a taster for the Saturn (as you stated) but rather a device to prolong the life of the Genesis because of how successful it was. In reality it is hard to see how the 32x wasn’t undermining the Saturns market share (even Sega Japan knew this at the time and weren’t happy about it). But I honestly think the Saturn would have flopped in the west regardless because Sony outplayed Sega at every element of the PlayStation. Sony knew this too; one of the leads on the PlayStation project would often have lunch with the leads for the Saturn and Sony would taunt Sega saying how it’s only a matter of time (there’s extracts of their conversations online but it’s in Japanese).

That all said, it’s worth noting that the Saturn wasn’t a complete flop in Japan. It wasn’t massive but it did sell better than in the west and saw much more titles from more studios too.

The Master System did rather well in Europe. Better than in North America. But the real location the Master System excelled in was South America. Games were still being made relatively recently for that device. In fact there are a number of Sonics ported to the Master System exclusively for the South American audience (such as Sonic Spinball, which was previously a Mega Drive exclusive).

That's about how I remember the Saturn being; at first you couldn't find it anywhere, then it was hard to tell the difference than the Sega CD which I had just gotten, then it was expensive and lastly there wasn't much games for it. I think the only time I really saw it was years later as a display at Toys'r'us showing off "Nights into Dreams" and then it was just kinda forgotten about.

Meanwhile the Dreamcast I had one friend who had one, but I also remember how everyone had a PS2, I remember the backwards comparability and launch titles were what sealed it. I'm the type that would have picked it up a few years later but it kinda always felt like the best games never left Japan for it, and then it was just kinda gone before you knew it.

That might be the case outside Japan, but the Sega Saturn was still relatively successful inside it's home country. Sega Saturn outsold the N64 in Japan. Saturn and Playstation were competing head to head for a while, with the Saturn frequently outselling the Playstation in Japan. The nail in the coffin was Final Fantasy 7 where Playstation took off like a rocketship and never looked back.

I think OP’s sentiment was right. I vividly recall seeing at Christmas time at a Toys R Us dozens and dozens of Saturn boxes next to handful of Dreamcast boxes, next to 2 N64 boxes. And I remember talking to the cashier and them complaining that they couldn’t sell Saturn and Dreamcast. They expected Sega to go out of business soon. They also remarked that the Dreamcast was being artificially held back to make seem as big a seller as the N64.

According to my memory of the time, the Dreamcast launched a bit too early compared to the PS2. The Dreamcast was trying to sell games and systems right when the PS2 marketing engine went into full swing. The marketing hype for PS2 was huge, everyone I knew was talking about how many millions of pixels it would push, how the multi-core architecture would make everything else obsolete, and of course, how it was backwards compatible with existing libraries.

I knew one guy that had a Dreamcast, everyone else saved their pennies for a PS2 and made do with their existing PS1.

Yep, I was that kid who got a Dreamcast for Christmas (my parents' compromise since my brothers and I wanted different systems) and I remember the same about commercials for the PS2 having just started.

> Yep, I was that kid who got a Dreamcast for Christmas

There are dozens of us!

I believe the PS2 marketing hype was further bolstered by great initial sales in Japan, because it was a reasonably priced DVD movie player.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps2-primarily-used-as-dvd-...

Oh I so remember that, and can even find mainstream media articles to back that up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/26/technology/playstation-2-...

Same thing with the PS3—it was a lot of bang-for-the-buck for Blu-rays when it debuted. (Not that Blu-ray took the world by storm like DVDs, but still.)

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992215/playstation-3-ps...

You touch on a really important point here that I feel is totally underreported: marketing. My friend group all had Saturns or wanted them. I remember it being a big topic for us how there were constantly PlayStation ads everywhere while they were pretty much absent for the Saturn, especially on TV where Saturn ads existed but were terrible and and they were almost never run (this was in Germany). Our own narrative always had been that it was lack of marketing and bad marketing that killed the Saturn.

I'd love to see some actual data on marketing spent in different regions for the consoles.

There was a rumor that in the UK SEGA pretty much spent their entire Dreamcast marketing budget on the Arsenal sponsorship. Would like to know how close to the truth that was.

128bit!

Article also seems confused that the NES competed against the Genesis - the Master System was Sega's 8-bit console; and no mention of the 32X or Sega/Mega CD either

iirc a big selling point of the PS2 was it could play DVDs, whereas the Dreamcast couldn't

The NES did compete against the Genesis. Different technology generations, but they overlapped in the market for more than half of the NES's active lifespan, from 1989 through 1994. There were plenty of comparisons between early Genesis games and later NES games.

The genesis was available in stores concurrently with the NES, and once it was released the master system didn't get much shelf space at stores anymore. The genesis has nearly around 2 years lead on the SNES if I remember correctly. The NES and Genesis definitely competed.

(source: I remember the store displays)

Yes, I remember this as well. Growing up, late 80's, we had a NES, then in 1989: a Sega Genesis, and also a Turbografx 16. Yes, we were spoiled kids...

We had to sell half our NES games and pool together Christmas money from 3 brothers to get an open box genesis from the BX. Ah, military brat life :)

The Mega Drive / Genesis was release to the NA market in 1989, a couple of years before the SNES. So for a time, it was competing with the NES.

But, overall agree that the article has some factual issues.

It was absolutely the PS2 that tanked the Dreamcast. Perhaps the author meant Xbox.

Yeah, Sony's PS2 pre release marketing hype was out of control, and a lot of it was directed at how the Dreamcast wasn't going to be worth it. The CPU of the PS2 was called the "Emotion Engine" with Sony just straight up saying it had the power to emulate the human mind.

Best selling game console of all time I think. No shame losing to the best.

It was only the best in terms of hype and sales. Video-quality-wise, it was likely the worst of its generation.

All for nothing if you haven’t got the games, and PS2 was selling games for 10 years.

Although the PlayStation 2 had the brute force, from this programmer's perspective the Dreamcast had a certain finesse, largely due to the PowerVR GPU. SEGA's teams were also on a strong creative streak at the time too. Such a shame it didn't pan out.

I think they probably meant to write GameCube there.

This still doesn't make any sense, as Sega discontinued the Dreamcast 6 months before the GameCube even released.

That's as far as I read before deciding the author had no idea what they were talking about and closed the window.

This; I went from being astonished by Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the N64 to being stunned by Shenmue only a two years later on my Dreamcast. I bought both of them on release.

The Dreamcast was a great machine, I have fond memories of many hours playing Rez, Phantasy Star Online, Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia and Space Channel 5..

The Sega Dreamcast release date was 9/9/99

Reply on news.ycombinator.com