An interesting view of console competition in the ’90s.
John Harrison has been on a special mission, collecting documents describing the history of Sega’s Mega Drive and Genesis consoles on his Twitter page called MegaDriveShock. It was recently reported that a very private material had surfaced on the Internet.
It’s 272 pages of previously top-secret documents from Sega of America uploaded to a wiki called Sega Retro, intended to chronicle Sega’s history from the 1940s onwards.
In this bundle of documents that just surfaced is an email that Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske wrote in the mid-1990s regarding Sega Saturn consoles.
The Saturn was launched in Japan in November 1994, in North America on May 11, 1995, and in Europe a few weeks later on July 8. Kalinski wrote his letter even before the American launch, as the Sega Saturn proved to be a major failure overseas. However, the company’s manager could not have guessed this before, as the new product had performed particularly well in Japan.
We’ll cut Sony. Saturns have been picked up from every store in Japan, while PlayStations are in the mountains. The sellers said they couldn’t even say the real sales rates because Saturn consoles sell out before they can make accurate measurements. If only all of our colleagues could see what’s happening in Japan, maybe they would understand why we beat everyone else here in the States.
– Written by Tom Kalinsky. In his email dated March 28.
However, the success of the Sega Saturn in America was hampered by several things: the console also had its own problems, but the biggest problem was that it had a rather poor launch, with the Nintendo 64 appearing in the US within a year, which took everything – Also including his job Kalinske, who had to leave Sega of America back in 1995.
The rest of the document should also be browsed by those who like interesting things from gaming history, as the documents reveal, among other things, Sega’s business strategy, but also include storyboards of old adverts and the Sega Saturn release of some games – Shenmue, Jurassic Park, VectorMan – Also mentioned, which ultimately never saw the light of day.
