[laumars]

I wasn’t finger pointing. I was just making the same point you did. :)

Knuckles Chaotix was originally penned to be Sonic 4 but I think it was always planned to be a Mega Drive release. There were a couple of failed attempts at bringing Sonic to the Saturn (the engine of one of them lives on in Saturns “Sonic Jam”) but in the end it was pushed to the Dreamcast as Sonic Adventure (and apparently influenced much of the hardware design of the DC too). There are some leaked demos of Sonic for the Saturn though.

Also I think it’s a stretch to say the Mega Drive was a failure in Japan (the US market was the only market that sold the Mega Drive as “Genesis” and that was due to someone else having the IP for the name “Mega Drive”). It was successful in Japan too. But America and Europe were undoubtedly massive markets too.

I do have both the 32x and Mega CD (as well as several versions of the Mega Drive / Genesis). The 32x wasn’t intended to be a taster for the Saturn (as you stated) but rather a device to prolong the life of the Genesis because of how successful it was. In reality it is hard to see how the 32x wasn’t undermining the Saturns market share (even Sega Japan knew this at the time and weren’t happy about it). But I honestly think the Saturn would have flopped in the west regardless because Sony outplayed Sega at every element of the PlayStation. Sony knew this too; one of the leads on the PlayStation project would often have lunch with the leads for the Saturn and Sony would taunt Sega saying how it’s only a matter of time (there’s extracts of their conversations online but it’s in Japanese).

That all said, it’s worth noting that the Saturn wasn’t a complete flop in Japan. It wasn’t massive but it did sell better than in the west and saw much more titles from more studios too.

The Master System did rather well in Europe. Better than in North America. But the real location the Master System excelled in was South America. Games were still being made relatively recently for that device. In fact there are a number of Sonics ported to the Master System exclusively for the South American audience (such as Sonic Spinball, which was previously a Mega Drive exclusive).