SEGA Saturn 29th Anniversary Game Competition

Every year since 2019, around the last third of the year or so, I’ve hosted a game development and hacking competition. This is the fifth annual SEGA Saturn Anniversary Game Competition! (Not actually associated with or officially approved by SEGA, please don’t narc.) The competition is hosted on my website along with, of course, Sega Xtreme.

For the last four years, I’ve brought together prominent figures from the Saturn social media space and homebrew development scene to create the Supreme Court of Saturn. People tend to drop in and out of the judge lineup, providing a healthy rotation rate. This year, the judges are Christa Lee, David Jiménez, Jason Steele, Jenovi, Johannes Fetz, PandaMonium, Saturn Dave, The SegaHolic, and TraynoCo. If you spend any time on the internet looking at Saturn related stuff, at least one or two of these names will be familiar. The diversity in experiences, perspective, and tastes helps to round out the court and provide a more impartial and balanced scoring mechanism for the competition. (It also keeps my hands clean of the competition results so I have an excuse to participate, too.)

When I started organizing the competition, it was with a couple things in mind. First was to try to make a weekend game jam. If you’re familiar with Saturn development, you know this is a dumb idea. Most people aren’t willing to try to squeeze out a game for the Saturn using the available tools in the space of a day or two.

The second thing I had in mind was the series of old Rockin-B competitions from the 2000’s. Like myself, he self hosted most of his content, though he was associated with the Sega Xtreme crowd. You can even see some of the earlier work from our resident tech demo, port, and large truck enthusiast VBT. As far as I can tell, the Rockin-B competitions lasted for four years, and included physical prizes of some games and other curiosities.

This year’s competition was announced on September 2nd, while I’m here drafting out this piece near the end of November. “So Emerald,” I rhetorically imagine you asking, “why wait so long to promote the competition properly on the Shiro home page?” First, shut up, I was busy. Second, I have only just now updated the competition page with the final sponsor. Yes, we have sponsors!

The competition runs a donation driven prize pool for cash prizes (donate here to contribute) and also awards physical prizes to ranking winners in each of the three categories; Original Game, Hacks Patched Translations, and Utilities. Donations come in throughout the year. Last year it reached over $1,300! This year, the cash prize pool will be distributed among the top six Original Game Entries, top five Hacks Patches Translations entries, and the top three Utilities. While it may be hard to top that number this year, the sponsors more than make up for it.

As always, we have Meleniumshane90 with That’s It guys 3D Printing Service. Anyone with a cash prize is entitled to their choice of the following 3D prints: SEGA CD/Saturn Game Case Snap Hinge Replacement, SEGA Saturn Battery Door Replacement, SEGA Saturn Controller Stand, SEGA Saturn Display Logo, ODE Tray Insert (options for Saturn and Dreamcast available.)

Knight0fDragon is providing a Saturn serial to USB adapter for all entrants! That means no matter how you rank, you can request one as long as you enter something to the competition. (You will need to pay for shipping, however.) This cable can be used with the Netlink OS and NetBand tunnel application for Netlink for a high speed internet connection for patched games. This is the ground floor on new high internet capabilities for the Saturn. Who knows? Maybe some new online games will start popping up in the next few years.

Lee of Haruman Customs, along with a board donation from CronoLe, is providing a customized The Fighter for the top prize winner of the Hacks Patches and Translations category! Can come in white or black. This a sleek fighting stick perfect for playing fighting games. (Thank to Malenko for organizing this prize.)

For the top prize winner of the Original Games category, Ced of Fenrir fame is providing a Fenrir DUO. This optical drive emulator replaces the CD drive in your Saturn with an SD card filled with as many games as you can squeeze into it. No disc swapping, no Psuedo Saturn Kai, no soldering.

To top that off, Crista Lee of Sound Retro Co. will do the install for you, along with a system capacitor replacement and a save memory FRAM mod. Your system will run good as new with no worries about your saves being lost due to a dead battery.

All in all, the physical prizes are worth several hundred dollars on their own. The competition to win these prizes promises to be pretty intense. I count twelve entries between all three categories so far, and we haven’t even hit the Christmas crunch rush where everyone gets their entries in last minute.

Now, the competition results are hardly a forgone conclusion. Every year there are dark horse entries that blow away expectations with no warning. Anyone can cook develop games. And it’s never been easier to start. Jo Engine provides a solid foundation to get your games off the ground and, combined with ponèSound, gives you everything you need to get a 2D game off the ground. 3D dev is still a bit of dark magic as the community works on a public standard or group of standards. If you want to use the same toolset as the original developers in the 90’s, SGL Tutorials are available. Another option that has been growing in popularity is mrkotfw’s Yaul, which is a growing, open source replacement for Saturn libraries.

Entries are due on the contest thread by 12 AM UTC January 8th, 2024 (7 PM EST, January 7th, 2024.) That’s more than a month to get some good work in, and I want to encourage everyone that ever wanted to explore game development to give it a shot to make and play your own games on the Saturn. After all, you MUST play SEGA Saturn.