30 years ago - PlayStation and Saturn western launch details announced at E3

Which did you buy back in the 90s?

  • PlayStation

    Votes: 143 89.4%

  • Sega Saturn

    Votes: 44 27.5%
  • Total voters
    160
I saved up for ages when I was 10 in 1996 to buy a Sega Saturn in a deal with my parents that if I paid for half of it, they'd pay for the other half. I thought Sega was proven and that the Saturn console looked a lot cooler than the Playstation.


I was not a smart kid.

Still had tons of fun with Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter, House of the Dead, D, Knights into Dreams, Sega Rally Championship, Clockwork Knight, and Guardian Heroes
 
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I was tired of waiting for the Ultra 64/Nintendo 64, so I went for the PlayStation, after many a trip to my local Electronics Boutique to gaze longingly (and eventually be allowed to play) Ridge Racer.
Less than a year later, the dreaded skipping audio and fmv began, so I contacted Sony who promptly dumped (Quite literally, it was dropped by the Courier) a reconditioned PlayStation for me.
I complained and was eventually given a brand new one.
I was soured by the whole experience and traded my PlayStation and 13 games towards a Saturn.
The staff at Gamestation looked at me like I was some kind of freak.
But I didn't care, Saturn was the shit.
I fucking loved that machine.
Picked up a PlayStation again around 97 for FF7, naturally.
 
analog_future said:
I saved up for ages when I was 10 in 1996 to buy a Sega Saturn in a deal with my parents that if I paid for half of it, they'd pay for the other half. I thought Sega was proven and that the Saturn console looked a lot cooler than the Playstation.


I was not a smart kid.

Still had tons of fun with Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter, House of the Dead, D, Knights into Dreams, Sega Rally Championship, Clockwork Knight, and Guardian Heroes
Click to expand...

PlayStation's 3D looked far more impressive than Saturn at launch, but by Christmas 1995 Sega Saturn had Virtua Cop, Sega Rally and Virtua Fighter 2.

For that brief moment, Saturn was on top.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
PlayStation's 3D looked far more impressive than Saturn at launch, but by Christmas 1995 Sega Saturn had Virtua Cop, Sega Rally and Virtua Fighter 2.

For that brief moment, Saturn was on top.
Click to expand...
Saturn was a 2D POWERHOUSE, but def lacked the 3D the PS1 could do. Perhaps it was their two co-processors (apply named Tom and Jerry) that made it hard to program for?!
 
PS1.

Fond memories with so many great games and a lot of forgotten gems such as:

G-Police
Soviet Strike
Nuclear Strike
Colony Wars
Destruction Derby
Pandemonium
Alundra
 
The birth of the goat. I'm more of a Sega guy before with my Sega master system which I enjoyed and impress with Megadrive games library. Saturn was attractive to me at first because it looks slick and powerful, but they focus to much on 2D games. PSX looks so clean and has many games especially on 3D. And PSX have FF7 and MGS1
 
I got the PlayStation at launch, and also got the Saturn a couple of years later.

CrimsonTide said:
Saturn was a 2D POWERHOUSE, but def lacked the 3D the PS1 could do. Perhaps it was their two co-processors (apply named Tom and Jerry) that made it hard to program for?!
Click to expand...

That was the Jaguar, not the Saturn.
 
I Want It All GIF by Awkward Daytime TV


I still have my Saturn and memory expansion. I no longer have my original Playstation because I replaced it with the PSOne and that cute little monitor attachment. I still have it too. Trying to play on that monitor is ass these days. :LOL:
 
I bought PSX when FFVII came out and also grabbed Tekken, Risge Racer and a ton of other stuff over the years.

Although now I kind of appreciate Saturn library a lot more than I did back then, especially with Japanese titles.
 
The beginning of the end for Sega.

analog_future said:
I saved up for ages when I was 10 in 1996 to buy a Sega Saturn in a deal with my parents that if I paid for half of it, they'd pay for the other half. I thought Sega was proven and that the Saturn console looked a lot cooler than the Playstation.


I was not a smart kid.

Still had tons of fun with Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter, House of the Dead, D, Knights into Dreams, Sega Rally Championship, Clockwork Knight, and Guardian Heroes
Click to expand...

I think I've already said this here. I made a deal with a HS friend at the time. I would buy a Saturn, for D&D Mystara, Daytona etc., he would get a PSX for RE and anything.

He's still waiting for me to buy that Saturn...
 
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I remember being super jealous of my friends saturn when it launched, playing the imported dragon ball z legends absolutely blew my mind. A year and a half later when I finally saved up enough money, all eyes were on the playstation. Games like jet moto, gran turismo, tomb raider, and resident evil ushered in a new golden age of gaming.
 
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I don't remember when I got a PlayStation, but my mom bought me one. It had to have been 1996. The early games I owned were Air Combat, Resident Evil, and Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors. That was when the game cases were the huge rectangular box.

My friend had a Sega Saturn. Very cool console at the time since you could play Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona at home. I was jealous that X-Men Children of the Atom was Saturn exclusive back then.
 
PS1 was first, but i later bought a Saturn because my brothers hogged the ps1. Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter 2, Virtual On, Daytona USA, House of the Dead, Clockwork Knight, and Bug were my jam. It didnt have the output of the PS1 but damn those were some good memories. Also used it as a cd player for the cool space ship visualizer and it worked with karaoke discs.
 
We didn't have a lot of money growing up so I didn't get one at launch but I got a PS1 sometime in 1997 I think. It was my first console and what a glorious time it was.

Gran Turismo was mind blowing to me and created a car guy out of me for life.
Metal Gear Solid was just a holy shit moment.
Resident Evil and Silent Hill made me a huge horror fan.
So many JRPGs that made me fall in love with the genre.

I could go on and on. I still think the PlayStation 2 is better but the OG was amazing.
 
Only owned a ps1. At the time the graphics of games like ridge racer and nfs2 looked absolutely amazing to me. Pretty much everyone I knew growing up had a ps1 and or an n64. Never knew anyone that had a Saturn.
 
My friend worked at Software ETC at Lenox Mall, Atlanta. Called me and said "Dude. We have the Saturn for sale right now." Drove up there and bought one that day.

Got my PS on launch day in the fall. 95 was an awesome year.
 
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I think Sega should release some new equipment, it's very sad to keep remembering Saturn or porting games forever to the Dreamcast If these acts don't move Sega, nothing will.
 
Had Sega listened to Tom Kalinske, instead of shunning his views, they may have stood a better chance in the West with the Saturn and it's longevity could have been as close to what it was in Japan...
 
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In 95 I would have chosen Saturn... but when my parents were going to buy me a console in 96 it was clear that PSX was the winning bet and that Sega was finished, it was sad not to have a Sonic, pathetic.
 
I traded my SNES with a ton of games and accessories in exchange for a PS1 with demo disk.

Needless to say i was i bit disappointed that day before going to bed, later i realized it was one of the best choices of my life.

I bought another SNES later :messenger_beaming:
 
Saturn launched on May 11th 1995, which was also the first day of E3 1995. I'm not sure what day at E3 1995 the company keynotes happened on, I would assume either May 11th or May 12th? Tom Kalinske did say at Sega's 1995 E3 keynote that the "Saturn launched yesterday" which would have been May 11th. So the Keynote was probably May 12th... After the Sony Keynote, I would imagine. The Sega Saturn may have actually been the first stealth launch in the gaming industry. It was announced at E2, most people thought it was going to be a September 2nd 1995 launch at $3999 or $449 with Virtua Fighter and a demo disc. Sega surprised them all by announcing it early. The Playstation stuck to its September 9th 1995 launch at $299. The E3 1995 footage is courtesy of someone who was (or still is?) a member of NeoGAF.

Sega's Saturn announcement.


Sony's price announcement (it's in the god damn OP)


E3 1995 was the first real E3. When I was 14 I only ever got to read about E3 in magazines. I was subscribed to Game Fan magazine back in the day, and I remember their coverage.

I was lucky enough to rent both a Saturn and a Playstation back then. I remember renting them both from a local rental shop called Movie Gallery (I think?) . The first games I have played for the Saturn was Clockwork Knight, Panzer Dragoon and Daytona USA. Yeah, I thought it was cool for what it was. I was mostly impressed by Panzer Dragoon. I was a bit underwhelmed by Daytona USA with its bad pop-in. I could deal with the framerate, at least it was running at a steady 20fps. Clockwork Knight was neat visually, but I remeber compleying it in a single rental.

Renting a Playstation months later, I remember getting Rayman, Wipeout and Total Eclipse: Turbo. WipEout was really impressive to me. I loved the game overall. It has its own unique hover physics and the ships felt like they had some weight to them. The game runs at 30fps, and not a bad showcase of the PS1. Rayman also looked good on the PS1 too, but that game was also on the Saturn and looks just as good there. Nice showcase that the PS1 does have a sprite engine built into it. It can do some solid 2D. I never really got into Total Eclipse: Turbo much, to be honest. It was OK.

Out of those two, I ended up with the Saturn for Christmas later that year. I had the 3-in-1 game pad that came with Virtua Fighter 2, Daytona USA and Virtua Cop. Virtua Fighter 2 was bad ass. I also really liked Virtua Cop, but I could never find light guns anywhere to buy for it. Shame. It was a great arcade port. I would rent a lot of Saturn games and would only own a small number of them... why? Because it was hard to find retailers around me that stocked Saturn games. How Sega went from "You could but a Genesis anywhere" to "Saturn's were stocked nowhere" was beyond me. Even the Dreamcast had a better presence at retail. I love the Saturn too.

I never really felt like I missed out on the Playstation. At the time I still had access to one, even if I didn't own it, and I would be able to play a lot of games for that.I would later just buy PS1 games and emulate them on my Windows 98SE PC using the Connectix Virtual Game Station emulator. I had Bleem too. But I could never get Bleem to work. Connectix Virtual Game Station was amazing. I would rent or buy PS1 games, load them int my PC CD-ROM drive and play them with an emulator and a Gravis GamePad Pro. Sometimes I would rent the PS1 games, make .iso files out of them on my PC, and mount them with a virtual drive and return the disc. I thought of it as an extended rental. But since I had limited HDD space, I would have to delete iso's. I still have PS1 game discs even though I don't have a PS1 unit.

But I did get to play suff like Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill on a real Playstation, as well as Symphony of the Night, Rage Racer, Ridge Racer Type 4. I was really addicted to Command & Conquer Red Alert on the PS1. Then I got the Windows 9x version, which was supper experience on better hardware.


I would rent a lot of Saturn games, and own a small library. Because they were hard to find anywhere unless I ordered them from an online magazine.

I really love the 5th generation consoles. I also owned an N64 with 30+ games. I liked all three systems. I think each one had something to offer. The PS1 being the most accessible and having the largest library of games. The N64 being great found couch co-op and also having some good single player stuff. The Saturn Having a lot of great Sega Arcade ports, with some rough spots. A quirky library. I would've gotten more into the Saturn if games were easier to obtain. Oh well.

I had this poster up on my wall when I was like 14, despite owning a Saturn. I still had this on my wall. I thought it was a great poster regardless :

AO37UMs.jpeg
0bS7HSp.jpeg
 
Bought N64 when it came out, parents got me a PS1 at the tail end of its gen because I didn't know PS2 was going to be backwards compatible, and then got a Saturn 2 years ago.
 
The first few years of Saturn software were diabolical, aside from bright spots like Panzer Dragoon. By the time they started making bangers it was too late.
 
analog_future said:
I saved up for ages when I was 10 in 1996 to buy a Sega Saturn in a deal with my parents that if I paid for half of it, they'd pay for the other half. I thought Sega was proven and that the Saturn console looked a lot cooler than the Playstation.


I was not a smart kid.

Still had tons of fun with Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter, House of the Dead, D, Knights into Dreams, Sega Rally Championship, Clockwork Knight, and Guardian Heroes
Click to expand...
I desperately wanted a Saturn for Christmas 1995. My older brother wanted a PlayStation and thought it looked better.

Big bro won that debate... and he was right.
 
I've been online since 1994 when the organization I worked for connected their network to the internet, but it still took a while for me to find out about stuff back then. (You guys realize, nobody saw these E3 videos back in the day... we read about it a month later in magazines.) I was at the mall just to buy a new wallet when I walked past Software Etc. and noticed a sloppy handwritten sign in the window: "SEGA SATURN! ITS HERE! IN STOCK NOW!" I shit my pants and went in to buy a Saturn and a copy of Panzer Dragoon. Fuckers wouldn't take a personal check, so I had to go to an ATM, withdraw my max of $300 and then wait until the following day and withdraw the rest. God damn it SUCKED to have to leave the mall empty handed and come back the next day. But I swear to god, in all the years since, I have never experienced a mind blowing generational leap like I did when I went from playing Super Metroid and Sonic & Knuckles one day to Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter the next. Diminishing returns is too real.

I actually wasn't planning on buying a Playstation at first, since the day it was announced I assumed it was going to be in the same bin as the 3DO and the CDi. Just another big greedy corporation wanting to throw their hat in the ring and steal some of slices of the pie that Nintendo and SEGA had been splitting for 10 years. It wasn't until about a month before launch that I stumbled into a playable PSX kiosk at Toys R Us and the Wipeout and Jumping Flash demos triggered me to grab a pre-order voucher and run to the cashier.
 
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Muffdraul said:
I've been online since 1994 when the organization I worked for connected their network to the internet, but it still took a while for me to find out about stuff back then. (You guys realize, nobody saw these E3 videos back in the day... we read about it a month later in magazines.) I was at the mall just to buy a new wallet when I walked past Software Etc. and noticed a sloppy handwritten sign in the window: "SEGA SATURN! ITS HERE! IN STOCK NOW!" I shit my pants and went in to buy a Saturn and a copy of Panzer Dragoon. Fuckers wouldn't take a personal check, so I had to go to an ATM, withdraw my max of $300 and then wait until the following day and withdraw the rest. God damn it SUCKED to have to leave the mall empty handed and come back the next day. But I swear to god, in all the years since, I have never experienced a mind blowing generational leap like I did when I went from playing Super Metroid and Sonic & Knuckles one day to Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter the next. Diminishing returns is too real.

I actually wasn't planning on buying a Playstation at first, since the day it was announced I assumed it was going to be in the same bin as the 3DO and the CDi. Just another big greedy corporation wanting to throw their hat in the ring and steal some of slices of the pie that Nintendo and SEGA had been splitting for 10 years. It wasn't until about a month before launch that I stumbled into a playable PSX kiosk at Toys R Us and the Wipeout and Jumping Flash demos triggered me to grab a pre-order voucher and run to the cashier.
Click to expand...
Good read that was.
 
I still have my old fat PSX, stored in the house. And it probably still works.
This age of early 3D gaming was incredibly vibrant. Studios constantly trying new things to see what worked. So much new ideas and concepts.

Here in Portugal, the PS1 was the winner. But the Saturn put up a decent fight, much more than in other regions.
The N64 was in a last place, because Nintendo didn't have their own distribution channel here. So they relied on a toy distributor called Concentra, but they didn't care much about consoles.
That meant advertising, booths in stores, were very lacking. So most people ignored Nintendo products, except for the Gameboy.
It took until the early 2000's for Nintendo to take back control and make things right.
 
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Wanted the Saturn at first so bad as it was the new shiny thing but it cost more than I could afford. My parents made me wait to "decide" on what I wanted and they gave me a ps1 for my birthday. Oh man was I happy.

I eventually got a Saturn like 6 years later. I still have it in a box. Wonder if it even works anymore….
 
CrimsonTide said:
Saturn was a 2D POWERHOUSE, but def lacked the 3D the PS1 could do. Perhaps it was their two co-processors (apply named Tom and Jerry) that made it hard to program for?!
Click to expand...

Lots of reasons for Saturn's difficult-to-program nature (with most devs; some like Treasure apparently loved it and thought it was easier to code for than N64)

1: Dual SH2s in a master-slave mode where both had to share the same bus, leading to bus contention and one SH2 needing to wait for the other to finish accessing the bus

2: The SCU (which connected to multiple (3) chips) having a super-complex DSP for its time that was poorly documented. Also couldn't access external WRAM-L, so only had its internal SRAM cache and WRAM-H to work with. WRAM-H was faster than WRAM-L, but only half the total WRAM in the system.

3: VPD 1 having two discrete framebuffer RAM pools (rather than one larger, contiguous pool)

4: Saturn's use of forward texture mapping (resulted in excess of drawn pixels, wasting bandwidth), which wasn't great for 3D in particular

5: The setup of VDP1 & VDP2 making it very hard to do transparency on 3D games

6: Very "poor" dev tools and support early on. Documentation existed for almost all of the system components (tho SCU documentation was lacking), but the early SDK environment was way behind PS1's. SEGA also didn't work well with 3P who were working with their own IP, i.e refusing to provide Time Warner with Virtua Racing source code for their Saturn version of that game.

7: Saturn's use of quads vs. triangles, meaning all polygons had one additional vertex to calculate for. This is also partly what contributed to making 3D transparencies difficult.

8: No hardware-based Z-buffering, although the PS1 lacked this as well. Still though, Sony provided more robust tools to address these types of things, whereas on Saturn, most of the time devs had to go at it alone.

Now for my personal experience...I never had a Saturn back when it was on the market. My dad got me a Genesis in '95, that was my first console as a kid (otherwise I played some stuff in arcades sporadically prior to that). In '98, got a PS1 and then a N64. Although I had magazines that talked about the Saturn, it just seemed like a super "hardcore" system and many of the games I read about weren't in the same style of games I had been playing on my Genesis.

Also prior to getting a PS1, I played PS1 at my friend's house in the neighborhood (hope you're well, Danny!). Playing stuff like Tekken and DBZ (I was super-big into DBZ back then, well before Toonami brought it on), and realizing no such games were on Saturn (later I'd learn Saturn did get Dragonball games, but none of them were localized)...well, made it easy for me to pick PS1.

Of course nowadays, I've been playing tons of Saturn stuff and I'd have to say some of my favorite games ever, like the Shining Force III series, are Saturn games. I don't know if I would've appreciated them, or the system, as a kid back in the day though, so maybe it's a good thing I didn't get into its library until I got older.

EDIT: MrCunningham MrCunningham The PS1 doesn't have a sprite engine, traditionally speaking. It doesn't have hardware support for tiles and such the way Saturn does. Instead, programmers just made quads out of joining two triangles, applied textures on them, and rendered everything to a single flat layer.

RetroGamingUK said:
trlA7Hz.jpeg
Click to expand...

Damn the PlayStation Tax™ was real even back in 1995!!
 
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thicc_girls_are_teh_best said:
EDIT: MrCunningham MrCunningham The PS1 doesn't have a sprite engine, traditionally speaking. It doesn't have hardware support for tiles and such the way Saturn does. Instead, programmers just made quads out of joining two triangles, applied textures on them, and rendered everything to a single flat layer.
Click to expand...

Well, it technically does have a 2D rendering pipeline of some kind built into the graphics processor. But yeah, it doesn't use raster based sprites like the Saturn. From what I understand the 2D rendering engine is an extension of the systems polygon capabilities, and everything is UV mapped onto flat rectangles that are made out of two polygons each with the z-axis disabled. As you have described. The system was designed to replicate the 2D capabilities of the SNES with additional horsepower behind it and the ability to mix layers with the Playstation's polygon pipeline. The "2D engine" was also there for menus and such.
 
RAIDEN1 said:
Had Sega listened to Tom Kalinske, instead of shunning his views, they may have stood a better chance in the West with the Saturn and it's longevity could have been as close to what it was in Japan...
Click to expand...
Its thanks to that twat SOA was in the mess it was, pushing for a upgrade and trying to hang on to a 16 bit market in decline and vastly oversaturated and his silly believe that people didn't have money for a true next gen system.
 
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