A not-so-surprise Saturn launch, Western boxarts for unreleased Capcom games and a look into Bernie Stolar’s 1998 console strategy — these are just a few of the interesting tidbits that can be gleaned from scans of an E3 magazine released this week.
The Video Game History Foundation launched a collection E3 materials Wednesday, including video tape footage and scans of programs, reports and directories covering the entire history of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, from 1995 to 2016. The video included some never-before-publicized comments from Sega of America’s CEO at the time, Tom Kalinske, as SHIRO! reported yesterday.
Among the materials are scans of a magazine called E3 Show Daily, a publication that featured show-specific information, such as floor plans, exhibitor profiles, discussions of trends in the game industry, and unique advertisements for game companies and their booths. It was made available for free to attendees and there was a new edition for each day of E3, making it a fascinating time capsule into video gaming’s biggest show as it happened.
The Saturn appeared at four E3s, 1995 through 1998. Unfortunately, the VGHF doesn’t have any issues of E3 Show Daily from 1996. But it does have two issues from 1995 and all three from ’97 and ’98. Here are some of the more interesting Saturn-related ephemera found within their pages.
E3 Show Daily 1995
The front page of the Day 1 issue in 1995 calls attention to the keynote speeches by Kalinske and Sony Electronic Publishing president Olaf Olafsson. They would become famous for the surprise announcements of the Saturn launch and the PlayStation price.
The publication likely was paginated the day before on May 10 and made available to attendees the morning of May 11, so it’s interesting that its editors apparently already heard rumors about the early Saturn launch. They even name two of the four chains that would carry the Saturn beginning that day. Their speculation that Sony would move up the PlayStation’s launch wasn’t on target, though.
Sega of America was ready to go with their Saturn advertising ahead of E3. Both available issues of E3 Show Daily 1995 feature a two-page “Head for Saturn” spread.
Unfortunately, the VGHF doesn’t have the Day 2 issue of E3 Show Daily 1995. It would have been interesting to see the reaction to Day 1’s keynote addresses.
But Day 3’s issue calls out a couple Saturn-related events on top for that day: Actress Claudia Chistian was set to talk about Saturn-exclusive rail shooter Solar Eclipse, whose full motion video cutscenes she stars in. And apparently, Sega of America paid for 10 Major League Baseball players to hang out at their booth to promote their baseball games.
One company estimated that the Saturn would win the 32/64-bit wars, according to a fact box that estimated software sales in 1995, 1996 and 1997 for the 3DO, Sega 32X, Saturn, PlayStation and Nintendo “Ultra” 64. Robertson Stephens & Company apparently thought the Saturn would sell 29.6 million games by the end of ’97 compared with just over 27 million for the PS1 and almost 26 million for the N64. Perhaps the funniest thing is that the firm thought the 32X and 3DO would still be selling games in 1997.
E3 Show Daily 1997
Capcom ran a double spread on all three issues of E3 Show Daily 1997. See anything unusual?
Not only does this ad have prototype North American boxart for Resident Evil on Saturn, but it shows NA boxarts for two games that never came out in the West: Darkstalkers: Jedah’s Revenge, aka Vampire Savior, and Dungeons & Dragons Collection! The ad says to look out for them that fall, which was pretty optimistic. Vampire Savior didn’t release in Japan until April 1998, and Dungeons & Dragons Collection was delayed there all the way until March 1999.
On Day 2, the magazine ran a short story about Sega planning to launch six games simultaneously on Saturn and PC rather than waiting months or a full year to port Saturn games to PC. The author speculates that it’s a sign that Sega is shifting away from hardware toward being a software-only company. How right they’d end up being…
Sega didn’t quite end up pulling off their plan — while NBA Action ’98 did launch on Saturn and PC simultaneously, Last Bronx, Sega Touring Car Championship and Enemy Zero still hit PC a few months after the Saturn. The House of the Dead took six months and Sonic R took a full year to make the jump.
The glimpse of Sega’s booth below the story is fun, though.
For more evidence of Sega’s increased focus on the PC, here’s a story about SegaSoft announcing its HEAT.NET internet gaming network. Many of Sega of America’s internal developers were spun off in November 1995 to form a semi-autonomous subsidiary, SegaSoft, that focused on making and publishing games on PC. It bet big on internet gaming with the HEAT.NET service but ultimately lost money on the venture and shut it down after a few years. It might have been nice to get some ports of SegaSoft’s PC games to fill out the Saturn’s 1998 software lineup…
Next to that story is one about Sega of America switching advertising partners. The “Head for Saturn” ads from Goodby Silverstein & Partners and the followup campaigns in 1996 from Ingalls Moranville apparently didn’t quite do the job, so Foote, Cone & Belding got tapped in 1997. They made the “Hard Stuff” campaign used late that year and through 1998, and they were kept on for the Dreamcast’s launch in 1999.
On Day 3, a magazine author says Sega is “struggling to keep its shrinking market share.” It’s June 1997 and already Sega is accused of not keeping customers happy after “failing to support so many expensive add-ons over the years, such as the 32X and Sega CD for Genesis, and most recently the Net Link modem accessory for Saturn.” It’s interesting that they lumped the NetLink in with the 32X and Sega CD, but to be fair, Sega still hadn’t released an online-enabled Saturn game yet in North America by that point. It wouldn’t be until a couple months later in August that Sega would launch NetLink editions of Sega Rally and Virtual-On as well as Saturn Bomberman.
E3 Show Daily 1998
There’s not much about the Saturn at E3 1998. Sega of America mostly touted its PC games at the expo in addition to the last couple Saturn games it planned on launching: Burning Rangers the following month in June and Shining Force III the month after that. Its Japanese parent officially announced the Dreamcast the week prior to this May 28 publication, which the Day 1 issue reports on its front page.
A series of quotes from Sega of America’s then-new president and COO Bernie Stolar shed some light on why the company only published six Saturn games in 1998, the last coming at the end of July. For comparison, it published 24 titles in 1997, 30 in 1996 and 19 in 1995.
You can tell this piece was prewritten well before E3 because it still calls the Dreamcast by its project codename, Katana, and Stolar plays coy about the technology details that Sega of Japan would reveal on May 21.
It seems that in 1998, Stolar was focused on “driving the mature platforms that we already have on the retailers’ shelves off of their shelves, so when we get to the next stage of where Sega is going, we’ll be very clean at retail.” In other words, they wanted to get Saturns off of store shelves and out of inventory channels as quickly as possible to make retailers happy. They sacrificed the Saturn’s last year in the hopes that retailers would support them again when they launched the Dreamcast.
“To drive Saturn sales, we’ll be releasing five new Saturn titles and we’ll be very aggressive in our pricing,” he continued. Those five titles were Winter Heat in February, House of the Dead and Panzer Dragoon Saga in May, Burning Rangers in June and Shining Force III in July. Perhaps this interview was conducted at the beginning of the year before any of those games came out.
Sega also published Daytona CCE NetLink Edition in February, but that apparently wouldn’t have helped move Saturns off of store shelves because it was only sold through Sega’s website.
That aggressive pricing he mentioned included dropping the Saturn’s price to about US$100 that January. Some retailers sold it for even less than that just to move consoles. The PS1 and N64 still cost $150 at the time and wouldn’t drop to $100 until August 1999.
“Sega’s goals at this year’s E3 show are to talk with retailers about how the company plans to support the Saturn, Genesis and Game Gear platforms throughout this year in order to clear retailers’ inventories, and to open or solidify discussions with third-party software developers in preparation for the release of Sega’s new system,” Stolar said in the piece.
He never thought about making existing Saturn owners happy, let alone making money for his company, by releasing games to those Saturn owners, it seems. He only focused on convincing new customers to buy up remaining Saturn inventory to get it off of store shelves and out of retail channels. And like pawns, he used Winter Heat, House of the Dead, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Burning Rangers and Shining Force III to do that.
Be the first to comment