[bitwize]

It allowed for repurposing of sprite-drawing hardware the Japanese were already familiar with. Most Japanese programmers at the time were at complete sixes and sevens with the sort of triangle-based, texture mapping 3D hardware that had been developed in the west. I guess Sega thought it would be either a faster path to developer success, or easier to implement in hardware, if the Saturn's 3D engine resembled the sprites that game and console makers already knew, rather than gamble on unfamiliar triangle rasterization.

Nintendo collaborated with SGI on the N64, giving them a HUGE leg up on ALL the competition with respect to rendering techniques -- perspective-correct, filtered textures when even the PlayStation could only do affine transforms on textures (leading to the "texture warping" phenomenon). But even their programmers had to come to grips with 3D, which was hard. One reason StarFox 2 was cancelled was because Nintendo wanted to use its camera code in titles like Super Mario 64 (and did NOT want word of this getting back to Argonaut).