Sega talks Saturn re-releases

It’s already pillaged its Master System and Mega Drive libraries and turned them into viable digital businesses and it recently announced that the Dreamcast is to receive the same treatment – but what of the Sega Saturn?

It had always been presumed that the Saturn has so far missed the digital distribution bandwagon thanks to the difficulty Sega would have emulating the Saturn’s rather odd architecture. Indeed, of all retro consoles, the Sega Saturn remains nearly the only one that doesn’t have a working emulator freely available online.

However, the producer of the Dreamcast re-releases at Sega Yosuke Okunari has said that the only reason the Saturn has so far remained MIA is thanks to its well-documented commercial failure in most key markets.

But that might be about to change.

When you look globally the Genesis and Dreamcast are well known, but Saturn is unknown,” he told Andriasang.

During that period, PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were a success overseas, but to be honest Saturn was not a success. Because of this, we decided on Dreamcast.

It’s not that we’re ignoring Saturn. I think you can see this, considering that we ported Nights Into Dreams and other titles. What we announced this time is a project where we will have consecutive releases of titles that were debuted on Dreamcast.

Separate from this, we’re of course thinking about ports of Saturn games. It’s the same as how Sega Ages and Virtual Console were separate existences. It’s not that we have no intention of porting Saturn titles, so please share your requests.”

Were Sega to begin re-releasing Saturn titles, games at the top of MCV’s shopping list would include NiGHTS into Dreams, Sega Rally, Virtual On, Detana Twinbee, Fighters Megamix, Burning Rangers, Shining the Holy Ark, Silhouette Mirage, DoDonPachi, Daytona, Sexy Parodius, Sonic R, Virtua Fighter 2 and, of course, the simply fabulous Panzer Dragoon Saga.