Growing up in the 90s, it was bizarre to witness the downfall of Sega. Here the Mega Drive (Genesis) was almost as successful as the SNES. Everyone either had a Mega Drive or played it regularly with friends. It was a very popular piece of hardware.

Then the generation after everyone had a Playstation, and I knew of only one kid who ended up with the Saturn. It's so strange considering that the Saturn was released several months ahead of the Playstation here.

I dont't know if it was due to the Saturn being seen as the inferior option at the time, pricing, availability or some other factor, but the Playstation absolutely killed it. After that Sega was gone.

I remember people at first buying playstation since they could buy cheap pirated games with the swap trick and all

I think the missing link in tale is the failure of the SegaCD and 32X, which really poisoned Sega's core fans in the years before the Saturn.

A lot of diehards (like me) felt really burned by those failures.

It wasn't just the Saturn (though issues surrounding its release definitely didn't help) - Sega already looked kind of like bunglers after neither the Sega CD nor 32X really caught on.

Sony rushing to release the Saturn before the PSX was a mistake IMHO. Not only did it beat Sony to market, it beat its own games to market. But mostly it just cost too much, especially compared to the PSX.

i'm 38 and grew up with this lineage:

NES, Genesis, PSX/N64, PS2/XBOX, PS3/XBOX360, XboxOne.

I was fanatic about Genesis because of the big title games like Mortal Kombat, Sonic, etc.

I VORACIOUSLY read gaming mags and the hype around the PSX was massive. It utterly dwarfed Sega. And seeing the first image of Cloud starting up at the Shinra tower captivated me. The games they were touting were just incredible looking.

I was just a kid and marketing won me over.

This! I grew up in Europe around the same time. Me and my small friend group hyped ourselves up for the Saturn. We were frustrated how Sega dropped the ball on marketing. Initially there were a few bad ads showing the mediocre Daytona USA and then nothing. Meanwhile Playstation ads were everywhere and were very well done.

As always bad console sales resulted in a vicious cycle of fewer attention from 3rd-party devs resulting in even fewer console sales.

Sega’s colossal screwup of the launch with a high price, pissing off huge retailers, and then months of no games was a total disaster.

> pissing off huge retailers

In the US Sega provided early release units to several retailers but notably skipped Best Buy, Walmart, and KB Toys. KB Toys was so mad they didn't carry Saturn stuff at all from that point.

At the time KB Toys was a pretty major retailer for video games, they'd have a presence in malls where a Babbages, EB, or Software Etc (retailers that got early release Saturns) wouldn't be found.

Sega's early release of the Saturn was one of the dumbest own-goals in video games. The Saturn was already going to have a serious struggle against the PlayStation for other reasons, fucking over retailers did absolutely nothing to help Sega.

Games media were really wined-and-dined by Sony. I remember Ultra Game Players with a Pic of someone wearing a memory card around their neck and calling it sexy. Sony really beat SEGA at their own game. As a rabbit hardcore videogamer I was miffed why anyone cared about the system since it didn't have many (any, to me) interesting games until FFVII came out. All my friends were amazed by Guardian Heroes and Dragon Force especially, and I was like, why isn't anyone playing these????

In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Genesis was huge in NA/Europe, but it was considered somewhat of a failure in Japan.

Sega has always floundered with its home consoles — they released 3 competitors to the NES after all. Genesis ended up being more of a one-trick pony than any indication of longterm success.

> In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Genesis was huge in NA/Europe, but it was considered somewhat of a failure in Japan.

Ironically, it went the opposite way for the Saturn. It was pretty successful in Japan (slightly ahead of the N64) but a complete failure elsewhere.

> I can understand that scaling out the game "work" into multiple CPUs and dedicated processors makes sense from a cost-benefit perspective

IIRC it was not that, the Saturn was the most expensive to manufacture of the big three, and the need to price match the PS made it a financial disaster for Sega.