Since I last posted in this topic I started listening to They Create Worlds, a video game history podcast co-hosted by Alex Smith, who is in the process of writing a three part history of gaming (the first part of which has been published). Smith has conducted research using many primary and secondary sources, interviewed many industry figures, and in the process dispelled a number of common myths about gaming history. All of which is not, of course, to say that anything he says should be taken as the gospel truth, but it is at least the result of extensive research and not just a regurgitating of conventional wisdom or console war arguments.Kizyr wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 2:27 am I'm not sure how true this is, but one often-cited thing about the Saturn is that it was designed for 2D graphics and arcade ports of existing Sega properties, while Playstation was designed more for 3D. That's often given as a reason why Saturn didn't make it when games started going much more 3D and things like sprite rendering were less important. That would explain some of the better look of the Saturn version since, well, Lunar is still a 2D game.
I'm honestly not sure how much of this is really accurate, and how much is just analysis after-the-fact looking for justifications. There was a lot during those console war eras that got tossed around as factoids that weren't really accurate (or more commonly just didn't matter).
That's not to say the Saturn version didn't look better, or sound better (I think it certainly did), but that it often got chalked up to the relative strengths/weaknesses of each console, and that's the part I'm not so sure about anymore.
The podcast did a series of episodes on the Nintendo/Sega rivalry which talked about the development of the Saturn. The discussion more or less confirmed the story of Saturn being designed around 2D graphics, with 3D tacked on later in development. As Smith tells it, when Sega started development on the Saturn they believed that 3D graphics at a practical cost for building a console were too far off for Saturn and that the best course of action was to focus on giving the system the best 2D capabilities possible. It was seeing early tech demos of the PlayStation that convinced Sega they needed acceptable 3D capabilities for Saturn. Nintendo was working on the 3D focused hardware that would become the Nintendo 64, but that wasn't expected to be ready until at least a year after Saturn would be. What spooked them about the PlayStation was that it had good enough 3D capabilities for the time and was going to be ready around the same time as Saturn. At that point Sega approached Hitachi about speeding up the SH-2 processor that was to be Saturn's CPU to give the boost in power they'd need for 3D graphics. Hitachi told them they couldn't do that without significant delays but they did offer up the alternative of linking two SH-2s together. This is the solution Sega went with and it worked after a fashion, but at the cost of making an already complex architecture (the system had already been planned to have two video display processors) even more complex.
Anecdotally I remember reading gaming magazines around this time and the consensus was that early PlayStation games looked more impressive than early Saturn games, with reports that developers were struggling with how to best use the system and even statements from Sega referring to a learning curve for the hardware.
This was a pretty volatile time in the video game industry and there's certainly a lot of interesting stories from back then. For instance, it's fairly well known that the PlayStation evolved out of the canceled SNES CD-ROM project, but somewhat less well known that Silicon Graphics Incorporated first approached Sega about building a console around their tech and some people at Sega (notably including Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske) were interested but the two sides never reached a deal. SGI then went on to make a deal with Nintendo instead, where their tech became the heart of the N64.