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This mostly. Although our view on this might be biased, the were reportedly severe tensions between Sega of Japan and the West (mostly America). As the story go

This mostly. Although our view on this might be biased, the were reportedly severe tensions between Sega of Japan and the West (mostly America). As the story goes, the Japanese HQ wanted to assert dominance over the imperitent westerners, since after all the American video game market crashed while Japan succeed. When SGI first contacted Sega of America with their 3D hardware they were thrilled and tossed it to HQ, which shot it down since the Saturn was supposed to bring the arcade experience into the living room and didn't need 3D. SGI then showed their stuff to Nintendo... Then when Sega saw that Sony and Nintendo did 3D, they panicked and bolted on some 3D capabilities last minute resulting in an architecture that makes the PS3 look easy to code for. Then at E3 1995, they suddenly announced an earlier release date for the console than what was communicated to all the developers pissing those off, with a release price of 399. This lead to Sony's legendary press conference for the PS1 directly after Sega's: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI https://youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI

ekianjo 6y ago
Yes, both entities did not really collaborate between each other's and there were in effect 2 R&D organizations, one in the US and one in Japan with almost no communication in between.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
> which shot it down since the Saturn was supposed to bring the arcade experience into the living room and didn't need 3D. This doesn’t add up when their most popular arcade experiences were Virtual Racing, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop and Daytona
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  That's what's been told by experts on our side at least. The majority of their arcade collection was still 2D though, and they probably have considered it to be too expensive to bring that 3D tech to the homes. Especially Daytona looks much worse on the Saturn than on arcade, so there's that at least. Their 3D tech was much inferior to what SGI offered, and it might have been that they didn't want to give up on what they developed in-house. At least the part that they added 3D very late in the development cycle is very clear if you look at the system architecture, the rest might very well be up for discussion.

ekianjo 6y ago

Yes, both entities did not really collaborate between each other's and there were in effect 2 R&D organizations, one in the US and one in Japan with almost no communication in between.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

> which shot it down since the Saturn was supposed to bring the arcade experience into the living room and didn't need 3D. This doesn’t add up when their most popular arcade experiences were Virtual Racing, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop and Daytona

iforgotpassword 6y ago
That's what's been told by experts on our side at least. The majority of their arcade collection was still 2D though, and they probably have considered it to be too expensive to bring that 3D tech to the homes. Especially Daytona looks much worse on the Saturn than on arcade, so there's that at least. Their 3D tech was much inferior to what SGI offered, and it might have been that they didn't want to give up on what they developed in-house. At least the part that they added 3D very late in the development cycle is very clear if you look at the system architecture, the rest might very well be up for discussion.