“DrunkTendo, now you're playing with Vodka” Will NOT be seen at this time.
For now, here’s something that you might not regret in the morning…
This is GTV!
The Center of The Universe!!
The Sega Saturn!
The name invokes the image of a far off place.
A beautiful exotic light shining from millions of miles away.
An untouchable world filled with unimaginable pleasures and delights.
It may have been the perfect name to encapsulate the experience SEGA was trying to deliver
to the player in those days gone by.
But the naming of this machine wasn’t very hard and was known as the Saturn from the
days when the machine was on the drawing board.
That’s because in the 1990s SEGA codenamed all of their projects with a corresponding
celestial object.
Stay here for The Sega Solar System Story!
In 1988 the Mega Drive aka Genesis, was the center of the Universe for SEGA.
The *NEW* 16-bit hardware was a sophisticated machine.
Lightning fast for the time, and capable of near perfect arcade conversion, the machine
was poised to take over the world, and for most of the world, in the 1990s, it did!
With SEGA in the Market Leader position in the US, UK, Brazil, and Australia and with
a dedicated following in Japan and Korea, they were not going to stop at just the Mega
Drive.
In fact, a whole galaxy of products, for lack of a better term, were developed to maintain
and solidify that position.
And almost all of those products were given codenames of the planets of the Solar System,
with the Mega Drive slash Genesis at the center of this orbit from which we can see moving
all around us.
Now I did start this episode about the Sega Saturn, which was the only machine from this
era to make it to the store shelf using a planetary name, but The Sega Solar System
didn’t begin in 1994.
Actually it was much earlier than that.
The first project born out of Sega’s labs at this time was Project Mercury.
Named after The First Planet in The Solar System.
Project Mercury became The Game Gear.
At the end of 1988, The Mark 3 and Master System, were over at Sega, at least in Japan!!
as all game development was moved to the Mega Drive.
Though of course the Master System continued on elsewhere.
The plan was to somehow keep the Mark 3 somehow alive and still profitable, which lead to
a full color portable game machine, better than Nintendo’s Game Boy.
Yes I know Sega was courted by Epyx for the Atari Lynx for a while there too.
The Game Gear started being shown off In Japan in the Summer of 1990 and formally released
on October 6th, 1990.
It sold OK in Japan, almost 2 million units and you can even find them used in shops every
now and then.
Outside of Japan, The Game Gear was very popular, and much cooler than the GameBoy, of course!
And while the TV Tuner no longer works, The Master Gear Convertor will let you play proper
Master System games on the Game Gear forever, if you have them!
The imagery of Mercury actually fit the Game Gear quite well.
Mercury is the fastest planet and the Roman god Mercury was the messenger of the gods,
always on the go!
A perfect, complimentary image of what carrying a portable Mark III would be like!
Oh and one final point of trivia to wow friends and strangers alike.
Mercury is also used on the Periodic Table of Elements, and all Game Gear models, at
least in Japan start with the letters that designate Mercury on the table, HG!!!
The Second Planet in The Solar System, after Mercury, is Venus.
Another portable machine takes Venus’s designation in The Sega Solar System, The Nomad.
This Machine was released in 1995 and is in nearly every way identical to the original
Mega Drive and Genesis.
It’s very commonplace these days to take the game you’ve played at home all day with
you for that extra level grind, but in 1995, it was very groundbreaking.
It was a technical feat to shrink the Genesis down first of all, but then Unlike the Game
Gear, Sega didn’t double dip and force you to buy different versions of the same game.
The Nomad is direct descendant of the Mega Jet which was the same machine, but without
a screen, that connected to a TV or Monitor and were available for rent on certain Japan
Airlines flights and were also sold briefly in Japan in 1993.
Venus was also the Roman goddess of beauty and there’s nothing more beautiful than
Phantasy Star IV on the go!
As a final Note, one more page was added to the Project Venus Story, as Sega unveiled
a long lost prototype of the Nomad, the bore the name Venus!
Next up is the 3rd Planet in The Solar System, our home, Earth!
Was there ever a Sega Earth?
Well.... no!
Only recently has Sega admitted there NEVER was a project of any kind called Earth.
For years, many had speculated on the matter, but It had never been 100% air tight, slam-dunk
proven.
Many assumed that Project Earth was the Mega Drive and Project Moon became the Sega CD..
If you consider the Mega Drive as the centerpiece of SEGA’s fortunes in its hey day, you could
assume that it could have been named after Earth, but it isn’t true, as the code name
for the Mega Drive was Mark V, following in the tradition of past Sega Hardware.
However it was admitted by Sega, officially that the Mega Drive Mini, released in 2019,
WAS actually known as Project Moon.
The project earned its name from members of the project erroneously believing the Mega
Drive was called Project Earth and therefore the Mini version of that should have some
kind of connection.
As far as I know, no one was fired over the mistake.
But when you start up a Sega CD you see a picture of the Earth and Moon in orbit!
Was this a secret tip of the hat to a Project Earth and Moon??
Well, it turns out, it’s not true.
But if it makes you feel better to keep that hope in your heart, I guess it won’t hurt
anybody.....
The Fourth Planet in The Solar System is Mars.
For Sega, Project Mars became The 32X!
An attachment that was brilliant in its capabilities.
You could upgrade your 16-bit MegaDrive and Genesis into a 32-bit machine for less than
half the price of what a 32-bit machine was expected to cost, and you could have the 32X
now!
Not in a year or 2.
That is, if now was 1994.
Ah those were the days, when sets of hardware would leapfrog over each other year after
year, rather than now where each new machine comes out once every 8 years or so and there’s
very little new about it.
Some people may look back and laugh, but the rush to get to the “next gen” was important
at the time, sooo very important.
And there were many who jumped at the idea, I was just one of them!
Mars was the Roman god of war, and so the code name Project Mars fit the 32X perfectly.
Video games, as a business is a war!
A never ending battle for your money, time and space in the house.
To have 32-bit games ready 1 or 2 years before Nintendo, or Sony, was a shot across the bow,
retaliation, pre-emptive strike and whatever warfare terms you can come up with.
Passing through the asteroid belt we come to The Fifth Planet in the Solar System, Jupiter!
For Sega, Project Jupiter was to be a cartridge version of the Saturn!
Now of course this was never released and the Saturn was, and with it, cartridges were
never seen or heard from again.
So, what is the story behind The Sega Jupiter?
Well I need to jump all over the place to frame this complex issue into a simple understandable
explanation, but if your watching this, you’re part of the smartest audience on YouTube,
smart enough to follow along!
The Saturn has its own legacy but it kind of gets overshadowed by the big Sony/Nintendo
rivalry, or schism that took place in the early 90s.
Of Course you know Nintendo and Sony were to team up for the Super NES CD add on, which
Sony could release as an all-in-on called the Play Station.
You know, like the WonderMega.
Nintendo didn’t like the terms because it gave Sony more control than Nintendo would
have liked (which if it was 0.001%, thats still too much for them) and so they dumped
Sony for Philips and eventually ended up doing nothing with CD-Roms until all of this was
long over anyway.
That’s Nintendo for ya!!
But not long after that very public breakup, Sony teamed up with Sega of America, which
led to Sony Imagesoft producing several Sega CD games while Sony prepped the actual Playstation,
which before it was reality, Sony and Sega possibly could have ended up partners.
Tom Kalinske was strongly in favor of teaming with Sony for various reasons, including marketing
and production resources.
However that partnership would, just like the deal with Nintendo, cede some control
and some profit from Sega to Sony, which the Japanese HQ was wary against.
Had the “Sega Playstation” Deal gone through, the Saturn and the development it had to that
point could be saved and moved to a different machine, locking Sony out.
And since the main feature of the Playstation was the CD-Rom, that meant Project Jupiter
would stick with cartridges.
Now that’s all happening behind the scenes, and for us on the other side of the curtain,
we would get small doses of info in little snippets of “hot rumors and gossip” from
the likes of Quartermann.
Many of these were merely a sentence or two without any real substance.
25 years on they’ve been filtered and processed though websites and YouTube to paint a picture
larger than what probably happened.
So while Sega and Sony go round and round trying to figure things out, Sega simply had
a plan A and a plan B, and with 32X a plan C too!
It’s why Project Jupiter and all kinds of hardware and software doesn’t actually exist
in any form beyond a name or a rough sketch.
But Until Fall 1994 none of this stuff actually mattered because it wasn’t for sale.
It was all talk!
Something to fill up a magazine and get you excited for the next shoe to in the next big
issue!
Thats it!!
I wonder how much old Q-mann actually knew and how much was complete, Grade-A “you
know what!!”
Let’s take one more brief time out and see how far we can push ourselves out into the
reaches of deep space.
The Sixth Planet in The Solar System is Saturn!
And Project Saturn was released as is!
It’s obviously the one machine we know the most about.
Many of your probably have one!
So there isn’t much to say, because you already know it.
However, you can’t actually say “Yeah.. the Saturn was that one machine that had its
code name survive all the way to the end.”
Because isn’t true!!
The Saturn actually began life as Project Aurora!
Though soon after it was realized that this project would become SEGA’s 6th TV Game
Machine, the code name was changed to Saturn, the 6th planet, and all future projects at
the time were then assigned planetary names as well, while Aurora would resurface years
later as an arcade board in the early 2000s, and as a star map projector released under
Sega Toys.
I don’t know who made the final call to keep the name Saturn, but after 2 years of
mentioning The Saturn month after month, they probably thought “Hey we should just go
with it!”
And of course the Saturn was the 6th machine from Sega and Saturn is the 6th planet from
The Sun, so it’s just cool how everything lined up in the end.
The 7th Planet in The Solar System is Uranus.
In The Sega Solar System, nothing is known about a Project Uranus.
It’s not known if anything ever used this name, or if nothing was ever designated Project
Uranus, no one knows why.
Now I know what you’re all thinking, and it would certainly have been great ammo for
Nintendo or Sony to make fun of such a machine.
However at least in Japanese they call this planet ウラノス or ten-nou-sei 天王星,
so that wouldn’t matter much at least in Japan.
I guess sometimes the answer is there is no answer.
You can believe it was the codename for the Prologue 21 if you want….
Or maybe Pico..
Uranus…
The 8th Planet in The Solar System is Neptune.
Sega Had a Project Neptune waiting in the wings, though never released as Project Neptune
would have been a Genesis 32x all in one machine, no add on needed!
As well, 32X or Neptune Cartridges would probably replace Genesis ones at Ome point.
A few design drawings were shown off in 1995, but the machine never came to be.
In early 1996, to strengthen the Saturn against the Playstation, and upcoming N64, Sega cut
the price of the Saturn to $200, Dropped the Genesis 32x and Sega CD entirely and focused
solely on the Saturn.
Regardless of what opinion you have on this move, it meant Project Neptune would never
become reality.
In 2001, EGM played an April Fool’s Joke on everyone by saying that they had a stack
of Neptunes in their offices and would be selling them off.
The 9th Planet in the Solar System is Pluto.
For over a century after the discovery of Neptune, astronomers theorized a potential
“Ninth Planet” which was finally discovered and named Pluto in 1930.
The 9th Planet existed as standard textbook learning until 2006 when the International
Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet.
However Project Pluto is a great planetary parallel as for Many Years we all thought
The Sega Solar System ended with the 8th planet, thinking all had been discovered all had been
uncovered, then much like the real Pluto, something that was out there all the time
finally became known.
Project Pluto was uncovered in 2013 by a former Sega employee, who had one of only two machines
ever produced.
The machine was a basic Saturn with a NetLink modem built right in.
Kind of bridging the gap between Saturn and Dreamcast.
Now we’re actually not quite done because there are still 2 more Sega machines that
were part of the Sega Solar System!
Project Janus and Project Titan, both named after moons of Saturn
Project Titan was a simple straightforward design that allowed for an arcade board very
similar to Saturn hardware, officially named ST-V, which meant easy porting of games from
the arcade to home and vice versa.
In a way, choosing Titan as its code name was very fitting.
Project Janus, was something quite different on the other hand, Project Janus did make
it to store shelves in Japan, but not as any standard video game, but rather a drawing
tablet, camera and printing device.
In 1996 Sega released these devices, known as PictureMagic, PriFun and Digio SJ-1 (SJ
stood for Sega Janus) The Digio took photos, while the Picture Magic allowed you to alter
and enhance them, and the Prifun, printed the photos out to share with friends!
You may wonder why Janus was chosen as it isn’t near the size or importance as Titan
or others, but you must remember that each celestial body is named after a Roman or Greek
deity whose characteristics define that body.
Janus was the roman god of transition and was often depicted with 2 or more faces.
The PictureMagic is much like Janus, a machine that isn’t all you see on the surface, as
PictureMagic is basically a repurposed 32X and in fact 32X parts that were never shipped
were recycled into more than a few units of PictureMagic.
As Sega planned to move beyond the Saturn, The Sega Solar System was dropped.
It had after all been fully explored and the time had come to move on.
The next major machine from Sega would be the Dreamcast, which was developed in different
forms under the names Katana and Blackbelt.
As well, Sega continued on into the 21st Century with more software, toys, and other merchandise.
Though The Saturn and all the others have left Sega’s Orbit, the Bright Star in the
sky that Sega is, shines on, hopefully never to set!