Why Sega Stalled: 8-Bit☛16-Bit☛Saturn.

this is the second video in an ongoing
series that fundamentally reflects on my background as a video game journalist and I was a video game journalist during the crucial years when this company Sega really lost its way and fell apart this video is inevitably gonna have less of an upbeat and colorful and fun tone than the first video that was talking about the n64 because we're talking about failure and we're talking about failure of a huge company that was a huge part of my childhood and if you're watching this video quite likely your childhood as well Sega now look this video is not gonna have a whole lot of props you guys will know right away this is not a real Sega Genesis this is this is from the current Sega corporation but this is the reissue HDMI Genesis replacement which I'll probably do a separate video talking about this in head can head-to-head comparison with the Super Nintendo mini another HDMI 16-bit reissue I do not have with me now a Sega Saturn um but the point is if you didn't see the first video I was actually employed as a video game journalist at the time when the Sega Saturn and the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation 1 were directly competing with one another and I'm not exaggerating at all my importance or significance as a journalist I was a zero importance absolutely zero but what you have to understand is at that time the industry was much more generous and open and forthcoming so a dumb teenager like myself who happened to get a job writing video game reviews would get invited to the Sega corporate headquarters would get invited to be given a tour of sega city would get some level of inside information and promotion from sega would get given a Sega Saturn and the the forthcoming games and so on and so forth I think so that was maybe 1995 we're talking about and today by contrast you know everything is done over the internet if you're not writing video game reviews for the New York Times I don't think you get this level of just real world face-to-face Enter action with these companies and you probably don't get that level of tangible gifts in suasion providing you from the companies of course one of the reasons they did that was back then there was no option for journalists to just download these games or something like that so it was done much more in a face-to-face handshake basis the way the whole industry worked so my analysis of why Sega declined and fell and failed falls under two categories two headings and the first is part of a kind of mainstream analysis that I know other YouTube channels have discussed and other websites have discussed in print and other articles have been written on it and the second I think I I have never seen anyone discussed before and I googled around a bit before making this video and I couldn't find anyone discussing it before so it's an original idea to that extent uh the first one I want to point out is this what was the fundamental difference between Sega and Nintendo when they made their their transition from the success of their 16-bit era to the failure of their 32-bit era the transition from Sega Genesis which was a big success to the Sega Saturn Sega Saturn was not just less successful but is in many ways the start at the end of the company say no more it is the same difference between Sega and Sony and that exists between Sega and Microsoft on as deep a level as is humanly possible the corporate entity that was Sega was created for arcade games it's even in the name of the company service games where they came from what they did and not just their business model but their creative model and mentality about what a game was supposed to be and how it would reach the public and then be adapted to appear on a console was all utterly built around the arcade game experience was that true of Sony no not at all Sony was a company and their corporate model in their creative process was built around making a stereo stereo system that sits in your in your living room Sony's idea of what they did was great a TV set or a stereo or this kind of equipment that was sitting your living room then they looked at video game systems in video game software as another kind of equipment they were gonna furnish you with really we like the furniture business a living room furniture if that happens to light up and make noises um and Microsoft again coming out of a different kind of corporate culture and background making computers making operating systems making word processors and then stepping into video game hardware and video game software from that background Sega's mentality was totally different so in this period like 1995 through 1998 with the launch of the Saturn and then Nintendo 64 emerging and you know that the decline and fall of the Saturn what was most absurd was that all over the world Sega was actively building and expanding what were normally called Sega City arcades they were trying to build new monuments to the idea that people were gonna line up and put quarters into a machine to have a five-minute entertainment experience now it is not so paradoxical that today in 2018 this same mentality Sega had that from my opinion is one of the two big things that destroyed the company makes their their software and their hardware more collectible and more interesting especially to adults today because the arcade experience was all about five minutes of entertainment it was vote very brief very shallow pick-up-and-play entertainment and I've got to say this above all else there's a difference between something being false and something being misleading Sega was very successful in the arcades from their earliest period of activity as a video game producer the problem is they let that success mislead them and Nintendo did not Nintendo had a crucial outstanding success in arcades with Donkey Kong the original Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong jr. Nintendo had a crucial out stand success in the arcades with the original punch-out an arcade game that used two TV screens is quite innovative and the whole control system everything they did not let that become their obsession and driving and guiding force a Nintendo their corporate culture or their creative process it really is what it's like you're thinking about it like cinema or writing books or like pulp fiction or something um did not become centered around the arcade and at sega their mentality remained steadfastly obsessed with the arcade to such an extent that when they had a little bit of success with something like Wonder Boy in monster land Wonder Boy in Monster land was an action role-playing game that involved collecting coins and upgrading your armor and getting better boots so you could jump higher what do they do is oh we have to make this into an arcade game and it's the most surreal ridiculous Arcadian the idea that people will stand there and insert quarters stand there for like three hours or something doing this repetitive crap that genre the action role-playing in the action RPG became huge did Nintendo try to take Selda and make it into an arcade game that's as absurd as that would be be as absurd as as Nintendo saying hey we've got a hit with Zelda now we've got to make Zelda into an arcade game or even I mean really what's going on at Sega is not even inventing Zelda because you're so obsessed with only making things that work in the arcade formula and Sega always had enough success for this to continue to work their perception of the company and what it should be and what children's entertainment should be what home entertainment should be what video games should be golden axe big success getting into the the Saturn era they made a game that spun off from the die hard movies even though the die hard movies were already way in the past in Japan was called dynamite Decca dynamite detective but in North America was called die hard trilogy big success in the arcade everything about that even the hardware it was running on all in the saturn period what's their idea of success oh Timecop what what's the concept of cop is fun for 30 seconds five minutes that's the kind of experience I've got even the name is laughable right what what did they do to launch time oh we've got to create hardware for the arcade that's as close as possible to the Saturn so that we can have an arcade perfect game world or the Saturn I was a journalist of the time I think I was given time koffice as a review copy maybe I'm miss remember I think they gave me time cough is one of their star products that was the plan what are they gonna do with diehard diehard trilogy this this game also known as dynamic where they do again they developed this arcade hardware that was cold sorry it's named after one of the moons of Saturn so there's the Saturn and then the other hardware is Titan that's it Titan is one of the moons of Saturn they developed hardware in tandem with the whole hardware so that they could then advertise to you we have an RV arcade perfect conversion oh this sorry this shows how hilarious mysteriously misconceived it is to try to launch and promote home software through arcade software and it means that you're inevitably producing incredibly shallow stupid video games that are fun and eye-catching for 30 seconds or five minutes and this is not what was happening at Nintendo this is not what was happening at Sony or Microsoft the one real parallel that nobody at Sega would want to think about was the rise and success and then eventual failure of the Neo Geo so Neo Geo AES Neo Geo arcade and home system Neo Geo was built on that concept that what people really wanted was an arcade perfect experience at home and again today if you're an adult maybe you find that stuff very collectible if you spent over 300 dollars so you can sit down and play a game like Neo Geo bowling that's fun and well animated eye-catching for 30 seconds or five minutes this is a business model that's never gonna work and whatever again success can be misleading it would be false to say that the NeoGeo was a total flop even though it was incredibly expensive and for the amount of money you spent it offered you a really low-quality really shallow arcade-like experience that was they tried to do seiga had enough success during the 16-bit era that it sustained their faith in this arcade centered business model which had been everything they've been doing since they they started as a company and then again right through the Saturn period there there are some infamous quotations from the guy who was then the CEO of Sega of America where he actually said no more 2d games no more role-playing games talked about all those genres he didn't want the system at all it was this total overweening focus on on games like the ones I've mentioned that were hits in the arcade however fleetingly and thinking that was gonna drive adoption of this home system so what I've just said this is kind of my first point I'm definitely not the only person who picked up on this I might be one of the few people who was employed as a employed as a journalist at that time and who saw inside yeah again not look at any it's not deep I mean it was very open none of this was hidden this was overtly pits this model they're preparing you so again it's not like I'm telling you some secret it's like if you were alive at the time when coca-cola had a certain marketing strategy this is what the whole company was doing and they were about to be wiped out they were about to be destroyed by Sony who had none of these misconceptions and none of these hang-ups and didn't have this approach to to hardware or software and they also were of course being beaten by Nintendo who probably understood several different things better than Sega did including the fact that what they were doing fundamentally was more like a children's storybook Alton what is the Legend of Zelda ultimately right so the only thing I'd say here briefly is of course there are counter examples but the counter examples within Sega I think really proved the point okay so somebody might comment below this video oh well you know you say that but Sega had the fantasy star Siri so if you guys don't know fantasy start someone might say it's similar to Legend of Zelda very broadly very loosely okay what did Sega do with with fantasy star the original fantasy star fantasy r1 was this huge hit this huge innovation everyone got excited about it they did not feature it or put resources into it or make a cartoon for it the way Nintendo did with Zelda right because that was not their focus or interest as as a company their interest was totally on the arcade and arcade like game experiences so again even the exceptions prove the rule some other company who had a hit with fantasy star would have said Wow here's something we need to be doing you're selling we need to focus on making a game that has a story in text form and takes hours to play it's like it's for children you know when it combines these elements there's a little bit of strategy and exploration or whatever again very very broadly similar to Zelda they're not that similar doesn't matter and develop the company in that direction and that's not what they did so again where is the fantasy star cartoon where the signs that are at a corporate level or even just at a creative level that was what they saw as the future of the company they're not there so yes you can you can pick and choose examples that are a counter-argument but I think in broad brushstrokes that was what differentiated Sega from all of its competition Nintendo Microsoft and Sony and that was their short term success and their long term failure they're doomed okay the second point of one to make is this Sega and and again part of this I've never heard anyone say before in the internet from the creation of the sg-1000 the sg-1000 was the precursor to the Sega Master System Sega thought that the key to their success was being first coming out before Nintendo and have a new hardware maybe every two years like as often as possible bringing out new hardware and anyone today anyone just from a consumer perspective would say that's insane how can you expect parents to buy a new video game system every two years that's completely ridiculous this so that part other people Adela said here's her thing nobody's said before the most ridiculous thing of all is how can you expect third-party software developers to learn how to program from scratch to go back to assembly code and make new tools and new libraries and go back basically like going back to college and learn how to program a video game again every two years and hear me out on this it's a little bit more sophisticated might think that's the most crucial problem and they didn't experience it with their first several transitions sg-1000 comes out successful but of course not successful enough within just a couple of years the mark 2 and the mark 3 come out mark 3 is a significant technological improvement on the sg-1000 but fundamentally the same processor fundamentally the same architecture programmers could take code they did for the SP 1000 and rehash it rework it to run on the mark 3 no problem mark 3 is succeeded by Sega Master System so even though there's a discontinuity even though from the consumer perspective it's like whoa this company is asking me to buy new hardware ever every year every two years all the time to bring up new hardware at least from the software designers perspective from the programmers perspective they're able to build up the same skills continually and apply it to the evolving hardware because the hardware it is getting better we can have more colors on screen and more sprites and more animation but it's still similar from an insider's perspective this actually continued to a greater extent than most people appreciate in the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit the Sega Genesis was in many many ways just an upgraded Sega Master System and they tried to conceal this it doesn't actually require any kind of adapter to run 8-bit Master System titles it's completely continuous on such a we're level in terms of the architecture the cartridges don't fit but for example fantasy star they put it a collectible edition which was the master system phantasy star cartridge inside the plastic housing of a Genesis cartridge and it would run on the Sega Genesis with no emulator no adapter this is totally different from a situation like the so-called super Gameboy a super Gameboy has its own computer it has a lot of hardware basically a super Gameboy has all of the hardware you'd have inside a Gameboy then feeding the data to a Super Nintendo that's much more than just an adapter or software emulation that's hardware there's nothing like that so again people who had put years of work into learning how to make a very crude baseball game on the sg-1000 and on the Sega Master System could now take that and directly recycle their efforts programming a baseball game in 16-bit for the Sega Genesis right so it was new hardware coming out consumers had to pay more but most of the creative staff were able to recycle a lot of their assets take their job training and experience and apply it again guess when this broke down this continuity of hardware and and programming skills completely and utterly broke down with the transition to the Sega Saturn and that's the universal complaint at third third party software houses and so on was Sega Saturn was incredibly tough to code for if you didn't know assembly code if you weren't able to work from scratch and put a ton of time and resources into retraining all of your staff Sega didn't provide you with the libraries you needed software libraries it was just a huge investment of time and money to learn how to code for this thing you so there was a total discontinuity from the the creative people's point of view and the companies that were able to do it were companies like Capcom Capcom just had the depth of resources and skills and they devoted enough people to developing everything needed to be able to produce great software for the sake of center but you see sega didn't change their attitude they were into this really tight cycle of obsolescence so you guys already another story five minutes after the genesis comes out they're working on the Sega CD also known as the mega CD could have been great you'd need to support it for years to get software really taking advantage of what Sega CD had to offer never happened five minutes after that bringing out the Sega 32x a 32-bit system building on a lot of the same base ease could have could have been okay no gonna say it could have been great never really developed it was undercut software designers software houses that put resources into it felt cheated had the ground could have come out of them five minutes after that Sega Saturn comes out so the rate of systems going obsolete they kept up at this breakneck pace which they thought was part of their success in the earlier transition from sg-1000 to Master System Master System to the 16-bit era Sega Genesis and Mega Drive but again the same principle it's it's not something that's false it's something that's true but misleading they felt this as part of their success ultimately it discord destroyed them as a company and then obviously when they made the next transition from Saturn to the Dreamcast nobody was with them anymore they'd alienated exactly all the people they need to support them and they knew that this is a well-known fact Sega originally was going to release the Dreamcast under a new company where the name would just be Dreamcast they were actually gonna remove the name Sega there were many companies that ended up publicly denouncing them and breaking from them when the Sega Saturn at some point during the sega saturn's life not necessarily at the beginning when it launched at some point they got fed up and walked one of those i remember happened well it was a video game journalist and the other thing you guys might be forgetting is sega relied really heavily on a software house called Electronic Arts and Electronic Arts already made it clear they were sick and tired of Sega's crap when they jumped ship to support the 3do the panasonic 3do panasonic 3do failed yeah my girlfriend's never heard of the panasonic 3do yeah I do not have a panasonic 3do to hold office a prop that's for damn sure right well they've been there so around they're still massively successful and no but they mean you have a bunch of games here or for Sega that are Electronic Arts yeah they were very very successful sufferers for the 16-bit era and and continuing after that already made it very clear that even Electronic Arts who'd been you know a crucial part of Sega's success they had run out of patience at this company they were looking to jump ship to anyone else who was who was offering a better alternative and jump ship they did okay stay cool guys again maybe a bit of a downer but I mean that is why from my perspective you know Sega failed I have many videos on this channel by the way I about playlist um where I really do regret the role that video games had my own life and I can remember the different points in my youth when I kind of broke away from video games and wanted to have a more meaningful life and in a lot of ways the period of my life when I was involved in video games journalist I was already too old to untie Roenick Lee Love or enjoy video games video games were already something I really kind of looked down my nose at as a snob I mean it was interesting and it was interesting being swept up in this particular moment in the history of the video game industry where there was intense competition and nobody knew what was gonna happen next I mean nobody knew what the future of Sega and Nintendo were and what happened next was sony sony wiped them all off the map nobody really saw that coming I think nobody thought that you know what company that makes it's kinda hard work but this is what I say my other videos and I'd like to talk about this more in future videos too because it's interesting I mean I reflect on really briefly I remember at one point in high school I totally stopped playing video games and then I made this new friend and he became a really close friend of mine for several years he was really dragging me back into playing video game because he was still into it and I was completely done with it but I think we all go through those kinds of things where you have some connection in your life for some friend who you know is still excited about stuff and you feel it's childish and you've given up on it and then again it's bizarre but I ended up being pulled back into video games by being paid and it was really very generous I was paid very when you're being paid to play video games suddenly get interested but I mean the sense in which video games are a waste of time I think it is worth reflecting also you know do they have to be you know I've said this since forever on the Internet you know there's no reason why put it this way there's no reason why an article on a website has to be worse than an article in a magazine in a newspaper in a journal or even a Peer Review Journal I'm cynical as hell about peer review topic for another video by the same token there's no real reason why literature especially we're talking about children's literature which doesn't have that many words there's no reason why a children's story book has it should be worse on a cartridge as opposed to being worse on a DVD like a movie as opposed to being worse in the in book format one medium or another doesn't really define this however if you were to ask over a 50 year period why are comic books so much worse than other forms of literature why is that comic books are worse than you know even mainstream pop literature like yeah okay my girlfriend says Harry Potter I was gonna say detective stories or something you know things that are in book format but are very much just trying to be mass love your Sherlock Holmes this is a good example Sherlock Holmes are originally published in newspapers and then publishing books why is Sherlock Holmes a step up from Batman spider-man in the x-men well one of the most fundamental reasons is scheduling in the organization of labor right one of the most fundamental reasons is that videogames like comic books were produced by heartless corporations who wanted all the work done in two months you know okay you got the script written okay you have to tell Tuesday to write the script okay they're doing character design character designs going to be done in two weeks and then we got a code and then we got a music composer is doing this all this stuff was done on site a tight schedule with no sincere interests in the final product and the focus as they say something as subtle as the focus on arcade games as opposed to other kinds of immersive experiences as opposed to educational content as opposed to just sincerely trying to provide children's entertainment as opposed to thinking of yourself as a furniture manufacturer that just happens to also make video games whatever those corporate perspectives may be the corporation that owns you know the hardware and software and that sets the schedule and shapes the creative process that utterly determines the quality and content of the quality of the ensuing content and in a profound way so even though x-men oh time over like a 30 year period or fifty or third x-men is very different from Batman different company and just different writers different artists but nevertheless they were both produced by this kind of grinding soulless anti creative for-profit corporate structure and both the success and failure of sega reflects that kind of meta analysis if you like the higher levels of the organization of labor in the creative process and sadly the meaninglessness of so many hours of my own childhood reflects this also because the stuff I was reading like Batman was produced in five minutes on schedule to produce a monthly comic for profit with as many spin-offs from merchandising as possible and tie-ins the TV shows movies this stuff was not produced even like Sherlock Holmes was produced at that level of artistry and creativity this stuff was not produced you know in the same way that even george RR martin writes Game of Thrones or something it this was not produced in an educational way or artistic way it was produced in this kind of horrible for Broadway so I mean many many hours lost reading schlock comic books and you know video games regardless of the format of the particular corporation yeah ultimately sadly this was a medium or for my generation whatever potential they had to be a positive part of my childhood I think was undercut by the core for conditions that produce with few exceptions I think I should do a follow-up video on my most my most positive experiences with video games growing up was there anything good or was it all just a complete waste of my time then I now look back on as a as a crippling source of regret in in how I grew up in in modern Western Canada because I think I think there probably are stay tuned