There’s something satisfying about rooting for the underdog. That’s probably why my Sega Saturn shares pride of place on a shelf with my PS5; and why I’ll freely admit I use it more often than my spanking new Sony console. I spent three hours playing Guardian Heroes last Sunday – and my wife came downstairs, caught sight of those huge pixel sprites plastered across her 55-inch TV screen and gave me “that look”. You know the one. “You have PlayStation 5 and access to literal hundreds of modern games, and you choose to play… this? !” Yes I do!
It’s because I didn’t choose the Saturn — I fell into it by mistake. It was 1997 and I’d been saving up for ages to get myself a PlayStation — everyone was going on about Resident Evil and how good Tomb Raider looked. But Dave down the road worked at Dixons and rang me up one day to tell me they were clearing out their Saturn stock for peanuts. “Console and four games for less than a PlayStation will cost you.” And being the perpetually cash-strapped student living off Heinz beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner meant this math seemed too good to be true.
I remember carting that weird-looking black box home to my student digs house – I hadn’t realised I was investing in what was essentially going to become a gaming cult. The Saturn was already dead and buried according to the mags — CVG and Edge had basically thrown a wake for it by then. But I didn’t care about sales figures or Sony steamrolling Sega; I cared about games, and my bundle came with Virtua Fighter 2, Daytona USA and NiGHTS. I was gone those first few weekends – combo diving in VF2, slamming around those wacky circuits in Daytona, swooping around those whacky… whatever NiGHTS was. Magical stuff.
Just think about how the Saturn launched – it’s comedy gold. Sega taking the proverbial, straight in the guernsey. Their big E3 gambit in 1995 was announcing “It’s here now!” – launching the thing four months early, thinking they were being clever. But the problem was nobody was ready – programmers hadn’t finished creating games for the hardware yet; only half of the retailers were actually selling it; and Sony instantly under-cut them on price. I still have the mags from back then, telling the story of what happened with plenty of ! !!! headlines and publishers bleating “What the f**k are they doing? !” Yeah, pour one out for all those poor executives. Looking back at it now, feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Yet underneath all that boardroom stupidity was genuinely incredible hardware. Everyone bangs on about how superior the PlayStation was for 3D gaming, and y’know what, the PlayStation was easier to create games for. But throw those Saturn disks into your Mega Drive slot adapter and you were in business – capable of handling sprite-scaling and double-rate sound playback like *no one’s business. * Loads of extra chips gave it unparalleled power for creating crisp 2D gameplay. It was like Sega had built an F1 race car but then handed programmers an instruction manual written in Egyptian. The potential was there – you just needed a PhD in Computer Science to understand it.
Saturn 2D gaming was next level. You had games like Guardian Heroes and Marvel Super Heroes showing people what sprites could do on the Saturn – huge characters, buttery smooth animation, dozens of things happening on screen simultaneously without a hint of slowdown. PlayStation owners were popping rocks at polygon acne and texture stretching, meanwhile Saturn owners were treating themselves to arcade-perfect 2D gaming at home. It was like having a NeoGeo you didn’t have to take mortgage payments out for.
Which brings me neatly onto my favourite genre – fighting games. Virtua Fighter 2 basically ran identical to the arcade version – and that being available at home changed everything for me. I’d blown so much cash playing that in arcades over the years – but suddenly I could spend all day practising Akira’s dreaded dragon live on my doorstep. And me and my housemate Marcus instituted a Friday-night fighting game tradition – Pizza, cheap beer and Virtua Fighter tournaments until the early hours. We kept proper stats, had proper brackets, took the *entire thing way too seriously*. Spoilsport girlfriend I had at the time thought we were insane. Thankfully she never found out how important it was to master Wolf’s German suplex.
I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but my love of Saturn grew tenfold when I accidentally discovered imports. Turns out Marcus’s brother was over in Tokyo on business, sending back these mysterious Japanese Saturn games with all Japanese text but gameplay anyone could understand. Radiant Silvergun. Sakura Wars. Dragon Force. Games that never saw an official Western release but were a showcase for everything the console could do. I bought one of them dodgy Action Replay cards that allowed you to spoof the region lock on my UK-only Saturn and basically turned my console into a window into Japan.
My parents had no idea why I was spending sixty pounds on games I couldn’t read. “It doesn’t need translating,” I told them. Didn’t fix the mood, but hey. Suddenly I had access to a whole new library of games. I wouldn’t discover Street Fighter III until years later — I learnt how to combo on Grazion D.hawk before anyone in Europe had heard of him. Saturn wasn’t doing great sales-wise over here, but in Japan they were neck-and-neck with PlayStation for a good few years.
Collecting Saturn games took hold of me around this time too. Now as anybody who owns ‘dead’ consoles knows, failure = rare games. Saturn bombed hard – which meant great games had tiny print runs making collecting them a dream. Snagged a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga from a car boot sale for a tenner back in 2001. Guy had obviously no idea what sat on his hands. Worth north of a grand these days complete – but I’ll be buggered if I’m selling it. Easily one of my favourite games of all time, that 30-hour rollercoaster through Panzer Dragoon’s weird mutant post-post-apocalyptic fantasy setting.
Saturn’s hardware eccentricities added to the atmosphere. Remember those Saturn CD ring thingys? – those plastic circles in the middle that were apparently designed to stop your discs warping, but seemed designed to crack if you glanced at them sideways. Learned to spot the hairline fractures in the rings before they gave way so I could replace my favourite games before they suddenly became wall-mounted DVD players. Owned about three copies of NiGHTS over the years; had to pay more for each subsequent replacement as demand for the game far-outstripped supply.
Don’t get me started on the original controller though – that *was* awful. Horrible shape, awful D-pad. Just awful to use. Second iteration of Japanese Saturn controller addressed all these problems and is widely considered to be one of the best controllers of the generation. But by that point Nintendo had wedged it for me. First impressions count, and controller number one left a bad one.
NiGHTS deserves a special mention too. That game was just… insane. Sonic creator Yuji Naka channelled all that manic energy into this flying dreamscape simulator. A clown riding dreamworlds? Flying through hoops of fire to chain together combos? Just the game description sounds stupid. But playing it, you slip into this state of zen that no other game gives you. The yearly Christmas NiGHTS gameplay trailer given away with Game Pro magazine was a December tradition. Every December to this day I fire up that damn game and play it. Still makes my wife scream.
Beyond the infamous classics, there were countless Saturn diamonds in the rough. Burning Rangers – a game about putting out fires Sega Team developed but nobody gave a toss about. Shining Force III – Only 1/3 of the trilogy got a European release. Enemy Zero – that batshit crazy horror game where you had to track sound down. Invisible enemies. The list goes on. Games that only existed because their creators properly understood the Saturn’s weird limitations. They weren’t just Saturn classics – they were just great games, period. Punished for being on the wrong system at the wrong time.
Region-locking led to all sorts of fascinating discoveries. As Saturn was dying a death here –PS dominated Europe and America – they were selling hearty clawbacks of PlayStation in Japan for years. Japanese gamers liked their 2D games like fighters and RPGs more than their western cousins – genres of games the Saturn absolutely crushed at. I even ended up with a small collection of Japanese Saturn mags from the era – yet another rabbit hole I found myself down – serving as a time capsule of what Japanese gamers got up to on the system that never happened here.
Hardware limitations became part of the charm. Because Saturn couldn’t do proper transparency effects – they used mesh patterns instead – giving Saturn games that signature dithered appearance. What started off as a necessity became a style choice. The fog in Panzer Dragoon wasn’t just there to set the mood – it covered up how little Saturn could see. Technical limitations forced developers to be creative and defined a visual style unique to Saturn games.
I’ve since amassed a collection of over 200 games now – UK, European and Japanese mixed in, in original keep cases (fragile, London fanfare boxes) and jewel cases. They’re all alphabetised too. *They have all the stories. * The Shining Wisdom I traded my Warhammer army in exchange for. Street Fighter Alpha 3 I picked up in Gamestation for £1.99 on closing-down sale. The Dark Story I found that had the complete instruction manual still in it. Takes up 3 shelves in my spare room – alphabetised by game title. It sounds petty but seeing them all lined up alphabhetically just makes me smile. It drives the wife insane but whatsheknows.
Every few years some random gaming website ‘discovers’ the Saturn and runs articles like “Omg Was the Saturn Really Any Good?!”. Pissing away of long-time Saturn owners who get smug knowing they told you all along it was. Like watching a film that everyone hated but you loved – except everyone else was right and you get to feel smug about it years later.
Saturn lives on through emulation, hardware resellers and trendy indie throwbacks but you can’t beat the real thing. Fire up your PlayStation 5 and the game immediately thrusts you into action. Pop in a Saturn disk and you get to enjoy those signature boot-up sounds. Wait five seconds while your disc loads. Smell that distinct plastic smell of the Sega Saturn. It’s the little things gaming has forgotten about.
Found myself caught in a power cut during winter not too long back, whipped out my battery-powered CRT television I keep for power-cut-only retro gaming. Complete darkness. Popped in my Saturn and sat there watching those iconic swirling colours that explode into the Sega logo backlight my entire room. Saturn had turned my wife from a perennial “What are you playing?” gamer into someone who sat down and played Bomberman for three hours straight. By the time the lights came back on, she looked legitimately disappointed. “Oh,” she said. “Now I get it.”
You see, that’s what makes the Saturn so special to me. It never cared about polygons, or market-share. It was all about games that were just a little leftfield, developers that pushed what you could do on hardware most folks didn’t ‘get’. PlayStation gamers were getting all the Hollywood budgets games everyone else was playing. Meanwhile us Saturn enthusiasts were enjoying miracles like Elevator Action Returns, or Two Moonside Professionals Kiss.
Welcome to Saturn owners club. Best membership you’ll never pay for. You’ve got the secret handshake when you see someone else browsing Sega Saturn Magazine in WHSmith. The fist-pump you feel when you find a copy of Cat Butt at your local charity shop. It wasn’t just a console, it was membership of an army of people that got what Sega was trying to do.
Maybe that’s why I still fire up my Saturn all these years later. Gaming has got so corporate and rinse-repeat as of late. When I want to unwind I like to play games that don’t treat me like a child – kicking me through endless tutorials. Something about Saturn games just respected you as a gamer, rewarded you for exploring. And if you gave them a chance, they rewarded you tenfold.
So yeah, my Saturn will stay plugged in and ready for action. Not sat on a shelf like some museum piece – but on hand for when I want to explore gaming’s most interesting alternative universe. Sure I could boot up Skyrim any day I like. But there’s no Pixelated Crunchy Snow in my Saturn library. Thanks for reading! ❤️
Marcus is a retired software engineer from Seattle who spent his career debugging games before the industry transformed beyond recognition. He writes with technical precision about the engineering elegance behind classics, from Z80 assembly language to Mode 7 scaling tricks, treating code like archaeological artifacts worthy of study. His articles are deep dives into why certain games pushed their hardware to breaking points, paired with the dry humor of someone who’s actually shipped titles and understands the impossible constraints developers faced. For readers interested in the “how” behind their favorite games, Marcus is essential reading.
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