That sounds oversimplified, but that's literally what a leader does: identify weak points in a company and assign the task of improvement to certain people. He shouldn't tell people HOW to solve a problem. That would be micromanagement.
a glimpse inside completely incompetent madness. they were a special company that wilfully destroyed their standing in the industry. not calling sega a joke, but a shadow of what they were
The emails just confirm everyones suspicion on how chaotically run sega was after the genesis's boom. Doesn't change any part of history for Segas fall, just cements it
@@groidcel no doubt, so many classics on Saturn and Dreamcast. But it would've been incredible to see Sega participate in the 7th gen if this didn't destroy them...
When you're being micromanaged from 5,000 miles away, you go out of business. That's how capitalism works and why so many Japanese companies have gone under.
save a backup of your emails leak it in 30 years, and also encourage your coworkers to do the same, with a big enough of people onboard, most of your emails will be leaked in 30 years
6:34 "improve hardware velocity" is business speak for "sell stuff faster". That strategy point isn't so much a strategy as just saying "improve the number of people that buy it". Truly genius insight.
@@fluffy_tail4365 Nope, once you get to the high level management at large corporations, they're managers because they're well connected, sociable, and most importantly, willing to ruthlessly exploit labor to cut costs.
@@mandymom2800 "Research incentive methods. What can we get away with? Can legal greenlight our coercive Sega home insertion strategy? Make it so that they will. Tom K."
If you've ever experienced what they call imposter syndrome, this is why. Literally everyone is out of their depth, just pretending to know what they're doing, all the way to the top. The reason new employees get the feeling of being imposters among competent professionals is that all of the competent professionals are also imposters. At every company.
This will be more and more true every day as the old timers who eventually figured stuff out finally leave and it will be mostly younger folks filling the roles.
As a small child, adults seemed infallible to me. Watching Sega step on rakes over and over in the 1990s was a big eye opener and how I learned adults are just big children pretending at competence and responsibility. Prior to that epiphany, when the Sega CD came out I was awed, and wondered where Sega would go next. Then the 32X came out right before the Saturn, and I began to worry something was wrong with the brains of people I considered up until then to be some of the cleverest in the world. What it must be like to grow up in a household with parents that suffer from substance abuse/addiction, thinking they must have a handle on things and it's normal to live this way until you're old enough to figure out it isn't.
Sega wanted to pour more money in the arcade market than the home market. Gamers did benefit because we got cutting edge technology and kino games from the Model 2, Model 3, Naomi and even the Hikaru boards. But it obvious wasn't a financially sound move for Sega.
That is exactly what it’s like to grow up in that type of household, and even more worrying when you start to realise that as a child, you’re smarter than them at a lot of things. Then as you get to higher education and eventually the workplace, you realise a lot of your teachers and every one of your managers are all children that happened to get older. So much of the world’s problems wouldn’t occur if we actually required maturity for people to be in certain roles. But on the plus side, it does give us a sense of responsibility to not allow anything in our control to get as messed up as all the “adults” in our lives allowed things to get under their watch.
Because those devs truly cared about the games they were making. It is a miracle they were able to make what they made with the blunders at SOA and SOJ
The Dreamcast library is especially since by that point the company was pretty much on borrowed time and pretty much was destined to fail no matter what they could’ve done
I think we cracked why sega failed, they were run by insane and incompetent people who can't spell and dont see an issue with shipping a game that doesn't even have a dev team yet.
Sega never understood the appeal of their own game IPs and home consoles. They also were very hands off with their internal teams, leading to infighting and disagreement. This behavior continues to this days, and you can see the damage done to franchises like Monkey Ball and Sonic. Sonic specially has never been a hit in Japan, and I used to believe it was because japanese players didn't care. But I think it was simply because Sega of Japan never really advertised Sonic in their domestic market, as Frontiers was a hit with japanese players, and before this it was Forces that was the best selling Sonic game in Japan - all thanks to the ad campaign with Hooters, which I heard is big in Japan.
If Sega can partner with Hooters without destroying their brand then Sega can give the Furries what they want, a Sonic themed MMORPG that gives them virtual fursuits and conventions. Don't tell me it's toouch, they partnered with HOOTERS.
The interesting part is that they were actually aware of the many issues they were facing, price point competition, third party developers leaving, necessity of 3D games instead of 2D ones. Which makes it all the more puzzling why they failed to act upon all these issues appropriately.
Making 3D games on the Saturn was just ass. It was born as a 2D powerhouse and got bolted 3D capable hardware later during its development due to SEGA sniffing the trend in the industry, so programming for that thing is literally ass. That's also why in the emails there is traces of having difficulty in keeping and finding programmers for the games
how exactly would you fix 3D on the Saturn? the hardware simply was not optimized for it, SEGA could launch 3D game after 3D game, it wouldnt make the job of third parties any easier when it comes the time to develop their own 3D titles or port existing ones
Well to be fair, this is after those blunders in 1995, where they drove away developers and fucked up with the price, so perhaps they had not realized their mistakes until those mistakes lead to this noticeable shift for the worse for Sega in the console war. This is like looking at the correspondence of people who have just experienced a tipping point in a competition, and who can tell that they are losing the game now.
The Saturn had completely trash development kits up until late '94. Not early enough to get good games ready for launch period. Sony bought Psygnosis to get SN Systems who made cheap, easy to use PC-based PSX kits for everyone
What's crazy is that this isn't really uncommon. At the last company I worked at (which has since folded), we pitched a car combat game based on a large movie franchise that was billed as "like Overwatch, but with cars." The concept literally never worked from day one of playtesting but it sounded good on a powerpoint and Overwatch was popular at the time, so it was greenlit. Ended up humiliating the company upon release.
To be fair, go read any geocities or even Usenet archives and you'll see noticably less goofy boneheaded spelling going than in these ~professional~ emails LOL
Even when using the old version of Word that had Clippy as a kid, I remember my teachers having to turn that off during spelling tests because it would show when my spellings were wrong and offer corrections when I did the right click
13:42 So, this bit about focusing on 3D instead of 2D and delivering 3D environments for every game, followed by "make games the Playstation cannot duplicate," demonstrates how little marketing actually knew about the Saturn hardware. Those two statements are inherently contradictory because 2D was what the Saturn did better than the other consoles. While the Playstation hardware was much easier to leverage for 3D, the Saturn was actually an absolute juggernaut at pushing 2D, and could absolutely run circles around the Playstation. It's why the best versions of fighting games at the time are typically on the Saturn. SoA insisting on pushing 3D and refusing to allow RPGs to be localized for the western market, especially 2D ones, is a large part of what killed the console. They also wouldn't put advertising budget behind the 2D games that did make it to market. Technically the Saturn's raw hardware power was likely in excess of the Playstation, but it required developers to tie themselves into knots to get the same kind of performance as the Playstation could, due to the Saturn's 3D being an overengineered mess. The Saturn actually has a lot of parallels with the Playstation 3: It doesn't matter how many or how powerful your chips are if they're too hard to program for. On the other hand, using the hardware for 2D was easier, and much more well understood at the time. Neither the Playstation or the N64 could match the Saturn's ability to push 2D, but SoA insisted on focusing on the Saturn's weaknesses rather than strengths and the Saturn never got to become the console of vibrant sprite based games and top notch arcade ports that it should have.
I can’t prove this because I wasn’t there-I was entering my early childhood right as SEGA exited the console market-but from what I’ve gathered over the years from people that were there, focusing on 2D games would have been detrimental to the Saturn. In an era where true 3D games had just become a reality, 2D games were viewed as generally antiquated. Their quality was mostly irrelevant, making a 2D game meant you had a huge uphill battle ahead of you. These days the new-toy-syndrome of the 3D game has long since worn off and we have a much healthier appreciation for 2D games. It’s easy to look at the success of the 32bit Sonic Mania and say “this is what the Saturn should have done”, but Sonic Mania released in 2017, when we all appreciated the focused gameplay often afforded by 2D games. But if Mania had released back during the 3D arms race, the larger public likely wouldn’t have been as interested. There’s a lot of assumptions to be sure, and it may well have worked out better than their strategy of “do the thing but better and cheaper”, but I doubt it would have saved the Saturn and SEGA. Maybe just have made the Saturn looked back on more fondly in the future as an unfortunately overlooked victim of the 3D craze with some real 2D gems, rather than a misguided disaster.
@colbypassadore 2D games were seen as antiquated, true. However there was still plenty of 2D games that people wanted that were not released in the west, mainly Capcom 2D fighters. That combined with Square and Enix both pledging exclusivity to Sony, RE1 for the Saturn being delayed, RE2 for the Saturn being canceled, Konami dropping the nuke that was MGS, plus a bunch of other 3rd parties canceling Saturn ports of many sequels like Tomb Raider 2, essentially signed the death certificate. Once all those exclusives and sequels hit, it was over. If Sega had focused on translating Japanese games to keep sales afloat, 3rd parties wouldn't have had such a mass exodus. Honestly back then it was unreal. Nearly every 3rd party turned their backs on Sega and Nintendo, giving only them scraps.
@@Demon_Curse probably worth mentioning Namco also didn't make anything for the Saturn. There WERE plans for a port of their arcade game Cyber Sled, but they scrapped it and they pretty much became PlayStation-exclusive (aside from some N64 and Dreamcast games). Saturn missed out on a LOT of hits from them (Tekken, Air Combat, Ridge Racer, Namco Museum).
@@drachenzahne9262Namco was one of, if not the first, main third-party developers for the original PlayStation. They didn't like Nintendo's monopolistic practices and they were SEGA's main rivals at the development of arcade games, it's easy to see that most of Namco's games were answers to SEGA's ones (Tekken = Virtua Fighter, Ridge Racer = Daytona USA, Time Crisis = Virtua Cop). That's why most of Namco's games were exclusive to the PSOne. Heck, most of the Namco arcade boards for games like Tekken shared the same components with the PSOne
It is entirely possible that they never did, and they simply stumbled upon success through sheer happenstance. And I'm not saying this to be harsh, I just feel like it would be weird if they suddenly became incompetent after success, I think it's more likely that they were successful _despite_ any shortcomings that they may have had.
@@NiiRubra No, they were smart when they market the Genesis for the US. as weird as it is, they just became out of touch really fast after the genesis.
@@banjo9158 oh yes, the Genesis/Mega Drive had an incredibly aggressive marketing campaign in the U.S. and Europe and SEGA also found great success in Brazil. But after 1994 it seemed like they couldn't replicate what they did
The highlights of these emails for me were the advertising team recommending that they just lie. You can always tell a company's doing great when that's one of their first options "make *long list of games* hits" and "this game is complete trash, it will hurt the company if we release it, kill this shit or sell it off" was pretty funny too
as a software developer, hearing “make up for our lost talent by hiring a new dev lead, greatly improve product quality, and also cut two months of development to release earlier” sent shivers down my spine. that NBA game must have been a perfect storm of absolute hell for whoever was still/ended up working on it
SEGA destroyed itself by repeatedly pulling the rug out from customers and developers. After that, no one would stupidly waste money on their consoles.
@@MaxAbramson3 I agree! I was very young when my father pre-ordered a 32X from Electronics Boutique, but can still remember that it only took a couple months before he began to talk about his regrets buying it.
I know that this doesn't look good in retrospect, but it looks like these emails came out in early 96, and this was only a few months after the 1995 holiday where Playstation was first unveiled. Many of the higher ups at Sega likely did not realize that a brand new company with no experience in the industry would deliver superior hardware and software right out of the gate and take a commanding lead over them in the USA in just a few months (remember other companies like 3DO and Atari released competing systems just a few years prior that didn't even make a dent in Sega's market share). The immediate success of the Playstation would have sent Sega of America scrambling to try and catch up, which is a position they never expected to be in in early 96.
It's pretty funny how nobody in marketing or upper management had their finger on the pulse of gaming at all. The stuff they say is so vague/broad as to indicate they actually know nothing about their market, but aren't willing to say the quiet part out loud. Oooooof.
It's hilarious how many of their plans were essentially to do better or make better games than Sony. Not to mention, they were trying to make online games without an actual framework for how to do that.
To be fair it was pretty difficult to figure out how to do online gaming properly back then and sega was writing the rulebook for online console gaming @@zenoblues7787
Honestly to me those emails where he sounded like an incompetent redditor just stringing words together with a mess of typos was him just not giving a fuck anymore and just getting the little bit of office work he was responsible for out of the way as quickly as possible so he can be done with it. That last email is telling because it was well worded and made tons of sense with some genuine insights. The other emails just sounded like a jaded employee who hates his job just doing the bare minimum work to get through the day and be done. This dude was indeed having issues with his highers ups and was just about ready to bail out.
maybe it's jusat a madeup email then! like that one konami one from superbunnyhop saying the company was subjecting it's employees to a torture camp because le.........good kojima kept spending his budgets on metal gear with celebrity cameos
This was so fascinating, I'd kill to see internal emails and financial reports like this from the Xbox one era at Microsoft. I'd imagine it's just Don Mattrick being raked over the coals on the daily. 😂
I didn't know about this leak. But my impression was always that Sega was generally a more segmented corporation, and that Sega is a different story on each continent. The Master System apparently dominated in Brazil, and the Mega Drive won in Europe, while the Super Nintendo and Genesis were very competitive in North America. I did know that the Japanese Sega Saturn was apparently much better than the American Sega Saturn. Like, look at the controllers if you wanna compare. The Japanese Sega Saturn controller is honestly as good as the SNES controller, in my opinion. It's top-tier for 2D games. The American Sega Saturn Controller is bad. It's weird and bulky and awkward looking. Then couple some of the bad redesigns with the fact that the early launch of the Saturn alienated retailers and confused customers, and it just gives this impression that Sega of America was making unforced errors in the 1990s
The story goes like this, based on my info: In Japan the SFC was far more popular than the Mega Drive. Sonic CD was their attempt to capture the Japanese market and didn't work. The Saturn did way better than the others because of their shift towards a Japanese audience, something the Mega Drive didn't because they tried to put their eggs in the US market (specifically the US according to info.), a lot of 1st party games were made with the US market in mind. But all of that aggressive marketing and ads worked for the US and the Genesis thrived against the NES, while Nintendo of America refused to move on to the Super NES. Edit: Another thing they tried to capture Japan was the arcade ports which didn't exactly made people go nuts like Nintendo's games did (and this is why the MD is full of arcade ports more than any other SEGA if I remember correctly), those ports obviously didn't sell much in the US because most ads focused on other games, at least the ones I saw have more of Sonic, NFL, those kinds of gases rather than games like OutRun or Space Harrier. Also, most Japan exclusives in the Genesis/MD are RPG's as I remember in the top of my head same with the Saturn. So in short: Japan won Nintendo, US won SEGA.
@@design1of470 Well, the fault is here is Nintendo, they HATE Latin America so the Super NES and even the NES was never really seen here and we only got bootleg NES at first even in Mexico (making it so people remember here the Famicom more), so since no one bothered to pirate the Super NES it never came... and TecToy got the chance to produce Master Systems in Brazil by themselves before the bootlegs came and as TecToy is based on Brazil they literally advertised the console specifically to the Brazilian market even making original games based on Brazilian shows and such. Even to this day a lot of Latin American countries don't have an official eShop in their Switches.
@@design1of470 so the story goes like this: back in the 80's Brazil was end of in a dictatorship and it was not fully open to foreign investment. think of how china is nowdays. for a foreign company to launch their products there they either had to license to a local company or open a local subsidiary. so the toy companies in Brazil licensed products from foreign companies and sold them. then this one company called Tec Toy licensed the Sega's laser tag toy gun called Zillion and even had the anime that was made to sell the toy to air on TV. something that likely only happened because there are a lot of Japanese descendants in Brazil. as Japanese toy companies kinda kept to the their local market. turned out that the anime was a massive success in Brazil as it was fucking 80's anime and it put every other cartoon on TV to shame. thus the toy gun sold very well, legends says it sold better than even in japan. Sega saw that and went "hey we have this video game thing, want to release it?" and that's what happened. Sega thru tectoy was the only "legal" consoles selling games on stores during the late 80's early 90's in Brazil. the emphasis is on legal, local companies made nes clones(which was legal since Brazil didn't cared about international IP laws at the time) and piracy of nes games was widespread. but being the one with ads on TV and games in actual stores made a difference and mastersystem was a success in Brazil. things were not so great with the genesis, becouse then Brazil was more open and getting a imported snes with pirated games was a lot easier.
@@khhnator Yep, Brazil only got Nintendo games in Portuguese (of Brazil) very recent with Mario Superstars. Pokémon was NEVER translated to Portuguese. Latin America is land of SEGA and possibly after that Sony not Nintendo.
It's interesting to see these emails, but honestly it just kind of makes Sega of America look like the team who is entirely out of their depth and perhaps a little incompetent. I am pretty convinced that the issues the Saturn faced in the west (especially North America) can mostly be linked back to the utterly absurd decision to launch the console ahead of schedule.
@@DestinyZX1They did that because SEGA of America was bleeding money thanks to the 32X crashing and burning and the 16-bit market imploding. The early launch was an attempt by SEGA of Japan to stop SoA from sinking further into the red by putting an actually sellable product on the market.
SEGA's strategy in the mid 90s was to learn how to walk forward and backwards at the same time and we will win this generation. How did they ever fail?
The sheer amount of misspelling can’t just be attributed to not having access to spellcheck. These guys presumably went to business school, learned marketing. No way any professor would accept papers with this level of misspellings AND YET THEY ARE WRITING A REPORT FOR ONE OF THE BIGGEST GAMING COMPANIES IN THE WORLD. Holyshit this is hilarious.
Back then older people didn't know how to type well. Even if you can speak and write english perfectly people like this still struggled to. Even then just because somebody can't spell correctly doesn't make them stupid or incompetent. I've met bad spellers who were insanely smart people oddly enough.
@@baronvonslambert this wasn’t business emails, these papers are supposed to be reporting on the state of the company and giving tips on future strategies. There is a level of professionalism that is expected in these, yet not only is the spelling bad but the strategy given to make up for lead developers leaving during a crucial time of year is “do better”. This isn’t grammar policing a tweet dude, these are papers read in boardrooms and meant to be taken seriously.
English major here: outside of school or some kind of public facing position spelling is pretty much ignored, especially nowadays. Unless you're in the business of writing, proofreading, or publishing, nobody cares about a word being spelled wrong in an email, least of all when you're a company as poorly managed as 90s Sega 😂. Much bigger problems than spellcheck evidently.
He was the only one trying to save the company with facts while others insisted on cutting corners, in terms of hardware/ entertainment and promoting. If only he succeeded the network compability then just maybe they had a console that could differentiate with Sony. But allas, hindsight is a bittersweet thing...
@@hoshi314 jesus christ you people get tons of leaked emails showing how everything in the US was falling apart and still refuse to accept it. Whose ego is being bruised here, these people from decades ago, or you guys not wanting to admit SoA fucked up?
This is so cool its like a time traveler from the future hacked the Sega's internal files from that time and got those emails to read all of them online to his or her fellow time traveller pals from the future
Regarding spelling and grammar, it is honestly hard to maintain perfect form on internal emails and get things done. Usually, you are editing something and forget to put in a needed word after changing the syntax (e.g. “I accidentally the car”). There is a reason things like “editor” are an actual job. If you are pressed for time, spelling and grammar checks are only essential for external communications.
4:40 that control pad came with Nights into Dreams the game as it was the first game of theirs to use analogue controls. It was the basis for the Dreamcast controller. Note the round shape and analogue stick positioning.
welcome to american branches where Nepotism reigns and the Tittle of the game is suck the dick of some one higher up the ladder and LIE to your HOME branch. Doesnt matter what company the American branch will always be the worst.
I had no idea they were ever going for the Elder Scrolls series! Only company ive heard ever trying to get the first two on console back then. Theyre also the only ones at the time who tried to give a console voice to Postal and Half Life as well!
Would have been better if they wernt so again 2D games and refusing to localize a lot of good JPN only games. SOA seemed to be borderline incompetent with SOJ constantly telling the to Retie 32x genesis and CD already while the Saturn was out.
Man this is so interesting I miss the era of sega when it was booming back when segata sanshiro was on top. I still love the dreamcast and it’s whole aesthetic but this is crazy to see and get a look inside
It's both fascinating and harsh at the same time. On one hand it's charming to see how little was known between studios on every fundamental level, the movement in that space left a lot to the imagination for how projects would start, evolve and ship. On the other hand the tech limitations on meeting those imaginations of the time must have been daunting enough without feeling like they are behind; All while panicking to the point it shown in their emails and tittles. I'm unsure if anything would have shifted the trajectory of Sega honestly. Several blunders for their tech like the 32X, Sega CD, battery hog Gamegear, Dreamcast CD burning or the general distaste of the Saturn. It was just getting left in the dust. Which is ironic given the old commercials Sega once ran during the Genesis era. The creeping doom seemed unavoidable. That's all without knowing of the general day to day that these emails revealed. What a tight ship here with the exciting insight of; "Make good on next major project" of which it's 'Goals' are to "Be better than competition" next to "see what competition is doing and copy their marketing, budget blueprint." Baffling.
@@LalitoTVI think during the Nintendo Giga Leak from a few years ago some internal correspondence from some developers who worked for Nintendo leaked, but to be fair most of it were personal emails, too personal in some cases
8:30 holy fuck, the dollar has basically halved in value between 1996 and 2023. Fucking hell, no wonder everything is so god damn overpriced these days.
This goes to show how incompetent the two main branches of Sega were. The success of their games and home console can be attributed to local distributors more than the company's vision. The Master System was a failure everywhere else, but was a huge success in Brazil thanks to TecToy handling. The Mega Drive was a failure in Japan, but was hit in USA because of SoA's marketing. The Saturn was well received in Japan, and failure everywhere else. The Dreamcast had more time to shine in Japan than in the west.
@bluestar5812 The master system was popular in Europe as was the megadrive and while the saturn sold better in Japan than in the west it wasn't that successful for the size of the market
That controller was made for the game night's. Or meant for it. Works pretty well with panzer dragoon or whatever its called if i remember right. I could be wrong.
One of my favorite parts of the document is the hopefulness of big arcade ports, of which about 3 of the proposed 10 were actually made for the Saturn.
You may say this stuff about Sega being incompetent, doing typos, etc. And I'm not defending them, but those kind of 'not professional' sort of environment was pretty common back in gaming. Same with Nintendo, same with Sony. Just look at the recent Pokemon games for example, and yet people still buy it. So it's not exactly 'professionalism', that gets rewarded in the industry.
It's easy nowadays to make fun of these folks for having terrible spelling... however, you need to consider that much of the software they used was old ass operating systems and mailing applications. In fact, these emails likely took tens of minutes to both create and transmit so spelling mistakes were just... not a problem. They had bigger issues, like their entire company tanking hard.
I do find it funny the amount of people looking at these e-mails and saying "look how chaotic things were at Sega, no wonder they failed" when this is what these kind of e-mails look like, literally in any/every company. People don't know how to spell, people state the bloody obvious or tell you to do things like "just sell more products" which is just nonsense advice. This isn't something exclusive to Sega, I'm sure if you saw e-mails from Nintendo or Sony from around the same time they would look equally inept.
Sega's sharp decline in big box retail presence from before the Saturn launch and towards the end was a huge problem and one that did more damage to Sega than most people realize. By retail presence, I mean both retail sales but also retail ads, demo kiosks and other things.
Sega was arcade first. AM2 was making pretty much most of the arcade ports for the Saturn from Sega. Virtua Fighter 3 was meant to be on Saturn but got pushed back to the Dreamcast. You notice how it's all 3D games? Granted that's what AM2 was making at the time, all 3D games in the Virtua series. But Saturn was also capable of really nice looking 2D games, certainly way better at it than the Genesis. It needed 2D stuff like Golden Axe The Revenge of Death Adder. But by the mid 90s, 2D was seen as old hat. Crystal Dynamics was making all kinds of new IPs at the time, stuff like Blood Omen, Gex, ect. But they all went to PlayStation. Wait Gex did end up on Saturn, but not the sequels in 3D. Go figure. Tempo had a nice sequel on Saturn called Super Tempo but it was Japan only. Manx TT Superbike could have been better with more racetracks because it only had one track. That's it. Imagine paying full price for a racing game that only has one racetrack? That's less than Virtua Racing and Daytona USA! Tom was right about a lot of it, he just had a weird way of wording it. My guess is the typos were due to total exhaustion.
SEGA was probably the top arcade developer back in terms of pushing technology, I remember seeing games like Star Wars Trilogy, Jurassic Park/The Lost World, Virtua Fighter 3, etc. But thing is that during the late 90s console game were outpacing arcade games, they were also getting more complex, having more narrative, being longer. That was the era when games like Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time were among the most talked about games, most of the Saturn and Dreamcast library was comprised of arcade ports like Soul Calibur and Hydro Thunder. Games like Shenmue, Sonic Adventure, Skies of Arcadia were few and far in between. The fact that some companies like Electronic Arts and Konami did not want to develop for the Dreamcast did not help either
@@pablocasas5906 Star Wars Trilogy was one of the only arcade games at my local mall when I was a kid and I played it all the time! It'd be nice if Arcade 1-Up could port that next.
@macuser7048 Saturn also had a 3D hang on game that almost nobodt talks about , if hang on and super hang on was popular in the arcades why didn't the 3d version sell better on the saturn ? I've never played it but it has really good music
On the subject of "Possitive" and "Possition" I wouldn't be surprised if these studio management types tried to shoehorn in "SS" wherever they could as a way of invoking "Sega Saturn" EDIT: Commented way too soon. They clearly can't spell.
This... ridiculous. I'm surprised how horrible the spelling and grammar were in these correspondences. People aren't even this bad when they're rushing to respond in a chat room. How the hell did this guy get past fifth grade without failing? Also, having looked at other internal documents from other companies before like... 2010? I wanna say? Marketers wrote things that made you think they were as observant as a five year old. But really it's often just to pad out the document because they know their superiors are only going to glance at it to prove it exists. And somehow having *less* issues is a worse situation than having *more* issues for marketing to solve. This kind of stuff basically died out when you had marketers become hypercompetitive in the face of global reach.
working in the corporate world and sitting through presentations and reading emails and slop, its just fascinating how video games companies were doing it too back then too and how shit has not changed at all.
I think I remember going to a Kohls and playing at/seeing a kiosk with either a Saturn or a Dreamcast. The game was a 3D mech game whose title I didn't know at the time but I think I came across it once or twice on UA-cam. Sadly, I can't remember the name of the game now.
@@theonlybilge Oh no. I don't think it was from that series. I quickly looked through the Dreamcast game list on Wikipedia and I think the game I recall seeing was Slave Zero.
"We need to combat the fact that we suck" killed me
We suck. How do we change this?
-> Stop sucking!
-> Be successful. 👍
@@NiiRubra
-> Don't blow it.
-> Keep it simple.
-> Count your money.
@@NiiRubra it took me a second to realize that was a joke because it looks so fucking spot on corporate speak lmao
That sounds oversimplified, but that's literally what a leader does: identify weak points in a company and assign the task of improvement to certain people. He shouldn't tell people HOW to solve a problem. That would be micromanagement.
Problem: We suck.
Solution: Suck less.
Problem: We suck. Simple as that.
Solution: Suck less. Simple as that.
Simple, simple, simple, and more simple!
a glimpse inside completely incompetent madness. they were a special company that wilfully destroyed their standing in the industry. not calling sega a joke, but a shadow of what they were
I get the joke
@@AlexsAnimations2107 Sega Japan at Sega America: "I think you're the fake hedgehog around here"
Tom is a toy marketing guy. He's not the one who has to make the games.
Jokes are funny, this one is just tragic.
Stupid people are funny.
The emails just confirm everyones suspicion on how chaotically run sega was after the genesis's boom. Doesn't change any part of history for Segas fall, just cements it
No joke and no shit
Gamers benefited from it because in that time period we got so many gaming classics on the arcade, Saturn, and Dreamcast.
@@groidcel no doubt, so many classics on Saturn and Dreamcast. But it would've been incredible to see Sega participate in the 7th gen if this didn't destroy them...
to quote walter white “..so you were always like this”
When you're being micromanaged from 5,000 miles away, you go out of business. That's how capitalism works and why so many Japanese companies have gone under.
I hope somebody from my company leaks their emails in 30 years so everyone can see what a shitshow we were dealing with.
Do you work for Xbox lol
save a backup of your emails leak it in 30 years, and also encourage your coworkers to do the same, with a big enough of people onboard, most of your emails will be leaked in 30 years
@@ThomastheDankEngine8900 for legal reasons, no.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I want to see the emails from 2010-2015 Xbox division lol
6:34 "improve hardware velocity" is business speak for "sell stuff faster". That strategy point isn't so much a strategy as just saying "improve the number of people that buy it". Truly genius insight.
"not enough people are buying saturns, make them buy our stuff"
all of those emails boil down to "there is a problem, the fix is to fix the problem". No shit, weren´t managers supposed to be the best?
@@fluffy_tail4365 Nope, once you get to the high level management at large corporations, they're managers because they're well connected, sociable, and most importantly, willing to ruthlessly exploit labor to cut costs.
That's more of a goal than a strategy.
@@mandymom2800 "Research incentive methods. What can we get away with? Can legal greenlight our coercive Sega home insertion strategy? Make it so that they will. Tom K."
"Sonic Xtreme ain't happening, our staff is literally dying"
*Probably the content of one of the emails*
TITLE: Overwatch 2
ISSUES: Shipping Late; Creative director quit;
ACTION REQUIRED: Purse Insurance strategy through acquisition.
When talking about Overwatch it's tittle.
Or more precisely assle
ISSUES: We can't stop raping.
ACTION REQUIRED: Announce character is homogay.
@@theonlybilgeWTF LOL 🤣
I'd rather play the Zelda CD-i games than Overwatch 2!
If you've ever experienced what they call imposter syndrome, this is why. Literally everyone is out of their depth, just pretending to know what they're doing, all the way to the top. The reason new employees get the feeling of being imposters among competent professionals is that all of the competent professionals are also imposters. At every company.
This will be more and more true every day as the old timers who eventually figured stuff out finally leave and it will be mostly younger folks filling the roles.
you could say the imposters are amogus
Yeah man I learnt this when I finally got a “professional” job and quickly realised this ENTIRE PLANET is held up by duct tape and cardboard :^)
@@rattmcpossumI realized that after covid happened
Tom K had to deal with the worse cards in every single way possible.
As a small child, adults seemed infallible to me. Watching Sega step on rakes over and over in the 1990s was a big eye opener and how I learned adults are just big children pretending at competence and responsibility. Prior to that epiphany, when the Sega CD came out I was awed, and wondered where Sega would go next. Then the 32X came out right before the Saturn, and I began to worry something was wrong with the brains of people I considered up until then to be some of the cleverest in the world. What it must be like to grow up in a household with parents that suffer from substance abuse/addiction, thinking they must have a handle on things and it's normal to live this way until you're old enough to figure out it isn't.
Jesus Christ you good man?
Sega wanted to pour more money in the arcade market than the home market. Gamers did benefit because we got cutting edge technology and kino games from the Model 2, Model 3, Naomi and even the Hikaru boards. But it obvious wasn't a financially sound move for Sega.
@@aturchomicz821 existence is suffering for Sega fans
@@groidcel I woulda settled for a complete set of Model 1 & Super Scaler ports to the 32X but we never even got Wing War, Galaxy Force 2 or Outrunners
That is exactly what it’s like to grow up in that type of household, and even more worrying when you start to realise that as a child, you’re smarter than them at a lot of things. Then as you get to higher education and eventually the workplace, you realise a lot of your teachers and every one of your managers are all children that happened to get older. So much of the world’s problems wouldn’t occur if we actually required maturity for people to be in certain roles.
But on the plus side, it does give us a sense of responsibility to not allow anything in our control to get as messed up as all the “adults” in our lives allowed things to get under their watch.
Honestly incredible that the genesis and dreamcast libraries were as good as they were with these chuckleheads at the helm.
Because those devs truly cared about the games they were making. It is a miracle they were able to make what they made with the blunders at SOA and SOJ
Imagine how much better it could have been.
they had a amazing dev team from all the arcade money SEGA made
Seriously. The fact they managed to make two classic consoles with solid game libraries is practically a miracle.
The Dreamcast library is especially since by that point the company was pretty much on borrowed time and pretty much was destined to fail no matter what they could’ve done
I think we cracked why sega failed, they were run by insane and incompetent people who can't spell and dont see an issue with shipping a game that doesn't even have a dev team yet.
Sega never understood the appeal of their own game IPs and home consoles. They also were very hands off with their internal teams, leading to infighting and disagreement. This behavior continues to this days, and you can see the damage done to franchises like Monkey Ball and Sonic.
Sonic specially has never been a hit in Japan, and I used to believe it was because japanese players didn't care. But I think it was simply because Sega of Japan never really advertised Sonic in their domestic market, as Frontiers was a hit with japanese players, and before this it was Forces that was the best selling Sonic game in Japan - all thanks to the ad campaign with Hooters, which I heard is big in Japan.
@@bluestar5812 the what with who now
@@AccelerateHedge Yeah there was a partnership between Sonic Forces and hooters. Look it up it led to some pretty funny images lmaoo
@@alexos9011 oh no
If Sega can partner with Hooters without destroying their brand then Sega can give the Furries what they want, a Sonic themed MMORPG that gives them virtual fursuits and conventions. Don't tell me it's toouch, they partnered with HOOTERS.
Damn the older I get, the more I realize I’m not the only one who has absolutely no idea what they’re doing .
The interesting part is that they were actually aware of the many issues they were facing, price point competition, third party developers leaving, necessity of 3D games instead of 2D ones. Which makes it all the more puzzling why they failed to act upon all these issues appropriately.
Making 3D games on the Saturn was just ass. It was born as a 2D powerhouse and got bolted 3D capable hardware later during its development due to SEGA sniffing the trend in the industry, so programming for that thing is literally ass. That's also why in the emails there is traces of having difficulty in keeping and finding programmers for the games
how exactly would you fix 3D on the Saturn? the hardware simply was not optimized for it, SEGA could launch 3D game after 3D game, it wouldnt make the job of third parties any easier when it comes the time to develop their own 3D titles or port existing ones
Well to be fair, this is after those blunders in 1995, where they drove away developers and fucked up with the price, so perhaps they had not realized their mistakes until those mistakes lead to this noticeable shift for the worse for Sega in the console war. This is like looking at the correspondence of people who have just experienced a tipping point in a competition, and who can tell that they are losing the game now.
The Saturn had completely trash development kits up until late '94. Not early enough to get good games ready for launch period. Sony bought Psygnosis to get SN Systems who made cheap, easy to use PC-based PSX kits for everyone
They did what they could... The Dreamcast. But it was too late
What's crazy is that this isn't really uncommon. At the last company I worked at (which has since folded), we pitched a car combat game based on a large movie franchise that was billed as "like Overwatch, but with cars." The concept literally never worked from day one of playtesting but it sounded good on a powerpoint and Overwatch was popular at the time, so it was greenlit. Ended up humiliating the company upon release.
What game was it (if you can say that is)?
^I am also curious
I'm curious too
To everyone asking in the comments, it's most likely Fast and Furious Crossroads
@@csabaweisz8791 Correct. I hope there's a documentary done on it one day.
In 96, I don't think email software had real time spell check, you would have needed to go to some dropdown menu and manually run it.
I don’t think they even had that until Microsoft Word 2000
Yeah, this is my recollection. Spell check wasn't a thing yet for the vast majority of folks at this time.
To be fair, go read any geocities or even Usenet archives and you'll see noticably less goofy boneheaded spelling going than in these ~professional~ emails LOL
Even when using the old version of Word that had Clippy as a kid, I remember my teachers having to turn that off during spelling tests because it would show when my spellings were wrong and offer corrections when I did the right click
I'm amazed that these emails survived for 30 years.
SEGAs downfall is interesting. I hope they come back with the milk😢
Well, they did Alpha Protocol, the Creative Assembly games, etc.
Don't worry, Saturn. There's just a long line at the store. They'll be back...
At least on the publishing side they are doing ok, and the Yakuza/Judgment games are fuckin good
I’m still waiting to this very day for the promised release or *Roach Racer!*
_SEGA betrayed us._ 😢
They sure did Milk the Sonic brand
13:42
So, this bit about focusing on 3D instead of 2D and delivering 3D environments for every game, followed by "make games the Playstation cannot duplicate," demonstrates how little marketing actually knew about the Saturn hardware. Those two statements are inherently contradictory because 2D was what the Saturn did better than the other consoles.
While the Playstation hardware was much easier to leverage for 3D, the Saturn was actually an absolute juggernaut at pushing 2D, and could absolutely run circles around the Playstation. It's why the best versions of fighting games at the time are typically on the Saturn. SoA insisting on pushing 3D and refusing to allow RPGs to be localized for the western market, especially 2D ones, is a large part of what killed the console. They also wouldn't put advertising budget behind the 2D games that did make it to market.
Technically the Saturn's raw hardware power was likely in excess of the Playstation, but it required developers to tie themselves into knots to get the same kind of performance as the Playstation could, due to the Saturn's 3D being an overengineered mess. The Saturn actually has a lot of parallels with the Playstation 3: It doesn't matter how many or how powerful your chips are if they're too hard to program for.
On the other hand, using the hardware for 2D was easier, and much more well understood at the time. Neither the Playstation or the N64 could match the Saturn's ability to push 2D, but SoA insisted on focusing on the Saturn's weaknesses rather than strengths and the Saturn never got to become the console of vibrant sprite based games and top notch arcade ports that it should have.
love this comment
I can’t prove this because I wasn’t there-I was entering my early childhood right as SEGA exited the console market-but from what I’ve gathered over the years from people that were there, focusing on 2D games would have been detrimental to the Saturn. In an era where true 3D games had just become a reality, 2D games were viewed as generally antiquated. Their quality was mostly irrelevant, making a 2D game meant you had a huge uphill battle ahead of you. These days the new-toy-syndrome of the 3D game has long since worn off and we have a much healthier appreciation for 2D games. It’s easy to look at the success of the 32bit Sonic Mania and say “this is what the Saturn should have done”, but Sonic Mania released in 2017, when we all appreciated the focused gameplay often afforded by 2D games. But if Mania had released back during the 3D arms race, the larger public likely wouldn’t have been as interested. There’s a lot of assumptions to be sure, and it may well have worked out better than their strategy of “do the thing but better and cheaper”, but I doubt it would have saved the Saturn and SEGA. Maybe just have made the Saturn looked back on more fondly in the future as an unfortunately overlooked victim of the 3D craze with some real 2D gems, rather than a misguided disaster.
@colbypassadore 2D games were seen as antiquated, true. However there was still plenty of 2D games that people wanted that were not released in the west, mainly Capcom 2D fighters.
That combined with Square and Enix both pledging exclusivity to Sony, RE1 for the Saturn being delayed, RE2 for the Saturn being canceled, Konami dropping the nuke that was MGS, plus a bunch of other 3rd parties canceling Saturn ports of many sequels like Tomb Raider 2, essentially signed the death certificate. Once all those exclusives and sequels hit, it was over.
If Sega had focused on translating Japanese games to keep sales afloat, 3rd parties wouldn't have had such a mass exodus. Honestly back then it was unreal. Nearly every 3rd party turned their backs on Sega and Nintendo, giving only them scraps.
@@Demon_Curse probably worth mentioning Namco also didn't make anything for the Saturn. There WERE plans for a port of their arcade game Cyber Sled, but they scrapped it and they pretty much became PlayStation-exclusive (aside from some N64 and Dreamcast games). Saturn missed out on a LOT of hits from them (Tekken, Air Combat, Ridge Racer, Namco Museum).
@@drachenzahne9262Namco was one of, if not the first, main third-party developers for the original PlayStation. They didn't like Nintendo's monopolistic practices and they were SEGA's main rivals at the development of arcade games, it's easy to see that most of Namco's games were answers to SEGA's ones (Tekken = Virtua Fighter, Ridge Racer = Daytona USA, Time Crisis = Virtua Cop). That's why most of Namco's games were exclusive to the PSOne. Heck, most of the Namco arcade boards for games like Tekken shared the same components with the PSOne
This is definitely an eye opener. After the success of the Genesis, it looks like they had only half a clue what they were doing.
It is entirely possible that they never did, and they simply stumbled upon success through sheer happenstance. And I'm not saying this to be harsh, I just feel like it would be weird if they suddenly became incompetent after success, I think it's more likely that they were successful _despite_ any shortcomings that they may have had.
@@NiiRubra No, they were smart when they market the Genesis for the US. as weird as it is, they just became out of touch really fast after the genesis.
@@banjo9158they regained some insight with the Sega Dreamcast thanks to Peter Moore, but by then it was too little, too late.
@@banjo9158 oh yes, the Genesis/Mega Drive had an incredibly aggressive marketing campaign in the U.S. and Europe and SEGA also found great success in Brazil. But after 1994 it seemed like they couldn't replicate what they did
@@pablocasas5906 it is still so insane to me that the only time sega was controlled by competent people was a goddamn brazillian toy company
The highlights of these emails for me were the advertising team recommending that they just lie. You can always tell a company's doing great when that's one of their first options
"make *long list of games* hits" and "this game is complete trash, it will hurt the company if we release it, kill this shit or sell it off" was pretty funny too
as a software developer, hearing “make up for our lost talent by hiring a new dev lead, greatly improve product quality, and also cut two months of development to release earlier” sent shivers down my spine. that NBA game must have been a perfect storm of absolute hell for whoever was still/ended up working on it
"Sega equity has been damaged by 32x and Sega CD."
It is so cathartic to know that SOA was mad about it too.
SEGA destroyed itself by repeatedly pulling the rug out from customers and developers. After that, no one would stupidly waste money on their consoles.
@@MaxAbramson3 I agree! I was very young when my father pre-ordered a 32X from Electronics Boutique, but can still remember that it only took a couple months before he began to talk about his regrets buying it.
I know that this doesn't look good in retrospect, but it looks like these emails came out in early 96, and this was only a few months after the 1995 holiday where Playstation was first unveiled. Many of the higher ups at Sega likely did not realize that a brand new company with no experience in the industry would deliver superior hardware and software right out of the gate and take a commanding lead over them in the USA in just a few months (remember other companies like 3DO and Atari released competing systems just a few years prior that didn't even make a dent in Sega's market share). The immediate success of the Playstation would have sent Sega of America scrambling to try and catch up, which is a position they never expected to be in in early 96.
It's pretty funny how nobody in marketing or upper management had their finger on the pulse of gaming at all. The stuff they say is so vague/broad as to indicate they actually know nothing about their market, but aren't willing to say the quiet part out loud. Oooooof.
It's hilarious how many of their plans were essentially to do better or make better games than Sony.
Not to mention, they were trying to make online games without an actual framework for how to do that.
Welcome to literally every corporation. Signed, someone who works in a marketing department.
@@zenoblues7787 "Just be better. Just do it. Come on."
To be fair it was pretty difficult to figure out how to do online gaming properly back then and sega was writing the rulebook for online console gaming @@zenoblues7787
Sega's business strategy was abysmal! "Just do better" is not a plan. Now I know how it got like this.
Honestly to me those emails where he sounded like an incompetent redditor just stringing words together with a mess of typos was him just not giving a fuck anymore and just getting the little bit of office work he was responsible for out of the way as quickly as possible so he can be done with it. That last email is telling because it was well worded and made tons of sense with some genuine insights. The other emails just sounded like a jaded employee who hates his job just doing the bare minimum work to get through the day and be done. This dude was indeed having issues with his highers ups and was just about ready to bail out.
finally, a big picture view. why are these so hard to find?
maybe it's jusat a madeup email then! like that one konami one from superbunnyhop saying the company was subjecting it's employees to a torture camp because le.........good kojima kept spending his budgets on metal gear with celebrity cameos
Well, I’ll tell you this for free: Watching this video has left me in a “possition” which is very “possitive” for the rest of my day.
Game dev Tycoon was a realistic Sim all this time then.
This was so fascinating, I'd kill to see internal emails and financial reports like this from the Xbox one era at Microsoft. I'd imagine it's just Don Mattrick being raked over the coals on the daily. 😂
From the release of the first Kinect to the launch of X1 lol
Please do more of these "best of" edits on your streams. I don't have 2 hours plus to watch them and I like your more concise content.
1. Make better stuff.
2. Make stuff faster.
3. Sell more stuff.
4. Explore network compatibility.
Its like the famous saying "Fake it til you make it" and by 'make it' I mean "make your company have to bow out of the console war"
I didn't know about this leak. But my impression was always that Sega was generally a more segmented corporation, and that Sega is a different story on each continent. The Master System apparently dominated in Brazil, and the Mega Drive won in Europe, while the Super Nintendo and Genesis were very competitive in North America. I did know that the Japanese Sega Saturn was apparently much better than the American Sega Saturn. Like, look at the controllers if you wanna compare. The Japanese Sega Saturn controller is honestly as good as the SNES controller, in my opinion. It's top-tier for 2D games. The American Sega Saturn Controller is bad. It's weird and bulky and awkward looking. Then couple some of the bad redesigns with the fact that the early launch of the Saturn alienated retailers and confused customers, and it just gives this impression that Sega of America was making unforced errors in the 1990s
The story goes like this, based on my info:
In Japan the SFC was far more popular than the Mega Drive. Sonic CD was their attempt to capture the Japanese market and didn't work.
The Saturn did way better than the others because of their shift towards a Japanese audience, something the Mega Drive didn't because they tried to put their eggs in the US market (specifically the US according to info.), a lot of 1st party games were made with the US market in mind.
But all of that aggressive marketing and ads worked for the US and the Genesis thrived against the NES, while Nintendo of America refused to move on to the Super NES.
Edit: Another thing they tried to capture Japan was the arcade ports which didn't exactly made people go nuts like Nintendo's games did (and this is why the MD is full of arcade ports more than any other SEGA if I remember correctly), those ports obviously didn't sell much in the US because most ads focused on other games, at least the ones I saw have more of Sonic, NFL, those kinds of gases rather than games like OutRun or Space Harrier. Also, most Japan exclusives in the Genesis/MD are RPG's as I remember in the top of my head same with the Saturn.
So in short: Japan won Nintendo, US won SEGA.
why was the SMS so big in Brazil, did they actually advertise there or something? Growing up, I knew ONE kid who had a Master System.
@@design1of470 Well, the fault is here is Nintendo, they HATE Latin America so the Super NES and even the NES was never really seen here and we only got bootleg NES at first even in Mexico (making it so people remember here the Famicom more), so since no one bothered to pirate the Super NES it never came... and TecToy got the chance to produce Master Systems in Brazil by themselves before the bootlegs came and as TecToy is based on Brazil they literally advertised the console specifically to the Brazilian market even making original games based on Brazilian shows and such.
Even to this day a lot of Latin American countries don't have an official eShop in their Switches.
@@design1of470 so the story goes like this: back in the 80's Brazil was end of in a dictatorship and it was not fully open to foreign investment. think of how china is nowdays.
for a foreign company to launch their products there they either had to license to a local company or open a local subsidiary.
so the toy companies in Brazil licensed products from foreign companies and sold them. then this one company called Tec Toy licensed the Sega's laser tag toy gun called Zillion and even had the anime that was made to sell the toy to air on TV. something that likely only happened because there are a lot of Japanese descendants in Brazil.
as Japanese toy companies kinda kept to the their local market.
turned out that the anime was a massive success in Brazil as it was fucking 80's anime and it put every other cartoon on TV to shame. thus the toy gun sold very well, legends says it sold better than even in japan.
Sega saw that and went "hey we have this video game thing, want to release it?"
and that's what happened. Sega thru tectoy was the only "legal" consoles selling games on stores during the late 80's early 90's in Brazil.
the emphasis is on legal, local companies made nes clones(which was legal since Brazil didn't cared about international IP laws at the time) and piracy of nes games was widespread. but being the one with ads on TV and games in actual stores made a difference and mastersystem was a success in Brazil. things were not so great with the genesis, becouse then Brazil was more open and getting a imported snes with pirated games was a lot easier.
@@khhnator Yep, Brazil only got Nintendo games in Portuguese (of Brazil) very recent with Mario Superstars. Pokémon was NEVER translated to Portuguese.
Latin America is land of SEGA and possibly after that Sony not Nintendo.
It's interesting to see these emails, but honestly it just kind of makes Sega of America look like the team who is entirely out of their depth and perhaps a little incompetent. I am pretty convinced that the issues the Saturn faced in the west (especially North America) can mostly be linked back to the utterly absurd decision to launch the console ahead of schedule.
That was more of Sega Japan’s decision.
@@DestinyZX1They did that because SEGA of America was bleeding money thanks to the 32X crashing and burning and the 16-bit market imploding. The early launch was an attempt by SEGA of Japan to stop SoA from sinking further into the red by putting an actually sellable product on the market.
SEGA's strategy in the mid 90s was to learn how to walk forward and backwards at the same time and we will win this generation. How did they ever fail?
GIMME THE DIRT
The sheer amount of misspelling can’t just be attributed to not having access to spellcheck. These guys presumably went to business school, learned marketing. No way any professor would accept papers with this level of misspellings AND YET THEY ARE WRITING A REPORT FOR ONE OF THE BIGGEST GAMING COMPANIES IN THE WORLD. Holyshit this is hilarious.
To be fair business school is daycare for 20 something year olds.
Back then older people didn't know how to type well. Even if you can speak and write english perfectly people like this still struggled to. Even then just because somebody can't spell correctly doesn't make them stupid or incompetent. I've met bad spellers who were insanely smart people oddly enough.
@@baronvonslambert this wasn’t business emails, these papers are supposed to be reporting on the state of the company and giving tips on future strategies. There is a level of professionalism that is expected in these, yet not only is the spelling bad but the strategy given to make up for lead developers leaving during a crucial time of year is “do better”. This isn’t grammar policing a tweet dude, these are papers read in boardrooms and meant to be taken seriously.
Maybe they did not understand how to use a keyboard and also it happens to you or me when you do not spellcheck.
English major here: outside of school or some kind of public facing position spelling is pretty much ignored, especially nowadays. Unless you're in the business of writing, proofreading, or publishing, nobody cares about a word being spelled wrong in an email, least of all when you're a company as poorly managed as 90s Sega 😂. Much bigger problems than spellcheck evidently.
The document told me that the 32X was a huuuuuge fucking mistake.
After reading the book Console Wars, I’ve gotta say…. I just feel really bad for Tom Kalinske.
He was the only one trying to save the company with facts while others insisted on cutting corners, in terms of hardware/ entertainment and promoting. If only he succeeded the network compability then just maybe they had a console that could differentiate with Sony. But allas, hindsight is a bittersweet thing...
and to be fair, again, sega was thriving in USA. those old farts at japan is still at fault with the simplest explanation being "ego"
@@hoshi314 jesus christ you people get tons of leaked emails showing how everything in the US was falling apart and still refuse to accept it. Whose ego is being bruised here, these people from decades ago, or you guys not wanting to admit SoA fucked up?
@@hoshi314well that and SOA not translating a lot of Japanese games. Lesser evil but god are they evil.
He was lacking some "tittles" so sell
This is so cool its like a time traveler from the future hacked the Sega's internal files from that time and got those emails to read all of them online to his or her fellow time traveller pals from the future
Sega Saturn: It's the Sony Playstation made by people who don't re-read their emails out loud before hitting "send"
I'm still in stitches by the consistent typos. Posssibly funnier than the "kill it or sell it" comment, even.
Regarding spelling and grammar, it is honestly hard to maintain perfect form on internal emails and get things done. Usually, you are editing something and forget to put in a needed word after changing the syntax (e.g. “I accidentally the car”). There is a reason things like “editor” are an actual job. If you are pressed for time, spelling and grammar checks are only essential for external communications.
The 3D control pad was solid. Came with Nights into Dreams
It makes Sonic 3D Blast play better. It doesn't make it a better game but full analog controls improve the experience somewhat
In summary, beware Crash Bandigoo
So Sega of America already knew that they were screwed lol
4:40 that control pad came with Nights into Dreams the game as it was the first game of theirs to use analogue controls. It was the basis for the Dreamcast controller. Note the round shape and analogue stick positioning.
I cant believe emails have been around for over a half a of a century....
Bootleg sampler is the official demo disc distributed by SEGA of America
How in the world does nobody seem to have nothing to do with the gaming industry?
welcome to american branches where Nepotism reigns and the Tittle of the game is suck the dick of some one higher up the ladder and LIE to your HOME branch. Doesnt matter what company the American branch will always be the worst.
I had no idea they were ever going for the Elder Scrolls series! Only company ive heard ever trying to get the first two on console back then. Theyre also the only ones at the time who tried to give a console voice to Postal and Half Life as well!
I absolutely love the Saturn, but so many good games were left in Japan and this is an absolute hilarious train wreck.
sega didn't have enough tittles
Would have been better if they wernt so again 2D games and refusing to localize a lot of good JPN only games. SOA seemed to be borderline incompetent with SOJ constantly telling the to Retie 32x genesis and CD already while the Saturn was out.
Roach Racer and CRASH BANDIGOO were my favorite tittles from this era.
Man this is so interesting I miss the era of sega when it was booming back when segata sanshiro was on top. I still love the dreamcast and it’s whole aesthetic but this is crazy to see and get a look inside
haha, how many pages for Sega to say, "We're fucked"??
It's both fascinating and harsh at the same time. On one hand it's charming to see how little was known between studios on every fundamental level, the movement in that space left a lot to the imagination for how projects would start, evolve and ship. On the other hand the tech limitations on meeting those imaginations of the time must have been daunting enough without feeling like they are behind; All while panicking to the point it shown in their emails and tittles.
I'm unsure if anything would have shifted the trajectory of Sega honestly. Several blunders for their tech like the 32X, Sega CD, battery hog Gamegear, Dreamcast CD burning or the general distaste of the Saturn. It was just getting left in the dust. Which is ironic given the old commercials Sega once ran during the Genesis era. The creeping doom seemed unavoidable. That's all without knowing of the general day to day that these emails revealed. What a tight ship here with the exciting insight of; "Make good on next major project" of which it's 'Goals' are to "Be better than competition" next to "see what competition is doing and copy their marketing, budget blueprint."
Baffling.
Problens: Game sucks.
Solutions: Do it better and include online connectivity.
Also release it faster.
If Sega's logo alone was affiliated with Stadia or any of the other attempted new game consoles, gamers would have actually cared about them.
Imagine gifting the company you built and love a few hundred millions before you die and they turn out to become this
that's what you want
I just wanna know why the misspelling was so consistent lmao “tittle” over many different emails is insane
These seem like how Nintendo still keeps notes lmao. It all makes sense now.
Source? I wanna see them notes lol
@@LalitoTVI think during the Nintendo Giga Leak from a few years ago some internal correspondence from some developers who worked for Nintendo leaked, but to be fair most of it were personal emails, too personal in some cases
This stream rocked btw!
"Make game be good." Now make me a salary man.
8:30 holy fuck, the dollar has basically halved in value between 1996 and 2023. Fucking hell, no wonder everything is so god damn overpriced these days.
I feel very possitive after seeing this video, thanks!
By Crash Bandigoo
Wow I can't wait for that Alex Kidd reboot on the Saturn!!!
_You either keep up with the competition or you bite the dust._
*Hey!*
*Oh, take it*
*Bite the dust*
*Bite the dust, hey*
This goes to show how incompetent the two main branches of Sega were. The success of their games and home console can be attributed to local distributors more than the company's vision. The Master System was a failure everywhere else, but was a huge success in Brazil thanks to TecToy handling. The Mega Drive was a failure in Japan, but was hit in USA because of SoA's marketing. The Saturn was well received in Japan, and failure everywhere else. The Dreamcast had more time to shine in Japan than in the west.
@bluestar5812 The master system was popular in Europe as was the megadrive and while the saturn sold better in Japan than in the west it wasn't that successful for the size of the market
17:46 Crash Bandigoo, Saturn Sports Tittles, this leak is a meme goldmine
Wow, this is really good video. Not only edit from stream, but with new information and etc
It is almost as if... Sega committed auto kill.
That controller was made for the game night's. Or meant for it. Works pretty well with panzer dragoon or whatever its called if i remember right. I could be wrong.
One of my favorite parts of the document is the hopefulness of big arcade ports, of which about 3 of the proposed 10 were actually made for the Saturn.
Crash Bandigoo, Sega's boogieman from under their bed
You may say this stuff about Sega being incompetent, doing typos, etc. And I'm not defending them, but those kind of 'not professional' sort of environment was pretty common back in gaming. Same with Nintendo, same with Sony. Just look at the recent Pokemon games for example, and yet people still buy it. So it's not exactly 'professionalism', that gets rewarded in the industry.
That last sentence rings so true
the gaming community wants 'professionalism' and gets it, so that applies
Elder scrolls for Saturn huh? Weird maybe that would’ve been cool, maybe…
@Moto_Medics I agree , can't trust bethedsa with them buggy ass early games in the franchise
It's easy nowadays to make fun of these folks for having terrible spelling... however, you need to consider that much of the software they used was old ass operating systems and mailing applications. In fact, these emails likely took tens of minutes to both create and transmit so spelling mistakes were just... not a problem. They had bigger issues, like their entire company tanking hard.
beware of crash bandigoooooo
I do find it funny the amount of people looking at these e-mails and saying "look how chaotic things were at Sega, no wonder they failed" when this is what these kind of e-mails look like, literally in any/every company. People don't know how to spell, people state the bloody obvious or tell you to do things like "just sell more products" which is just nonsense advice. This isn't something exclusive to Sega, I'm sure if you saw e-mails from Nintendo or Sony from around the same time they would look equally inept.
Disastrous, I hope there's more.
Issue: Lead Programmer Quit... oh sweet baby Jesus, my sides...
Sega's sharp decline in big box retail presence from before the Saturn launch and towards the end was a huge problem and one that did more damage to Sega than most people realize. By retail presence, I mean both retail sales but also retail ads, demo kiosks and other things.
You’re just gonna ignore “Duke Newcomb” (12:46)?
Sega was arcade first. AM2 was making pretty much most of the arcade ports for the Saturn from Sega. Virtua Fighter 3 was meant to be on Saturn but got pushed back to the Dreamcast. You notice how it's all 3D games? Granted that's what AM2 was making at the time, all 3D games in the Virtua series. But Saturn was also capable of really nice looking 2D games, certainly way better at it than the Genesis. It needed 2D stuff like Golden Axe The Revenge of Death Adder. But by the mid 90s, 2D was seen as old hat. Crystal Dynamics was making all kinds of new IPs at the time, stuff like Blood Omen, Gex, ect. But they all went to PlayStation. Wait Gex did end up on Saturn, but not the sequels in 3D. Go figure. Tempo had a nice sequel on Saturn called Super Tempo but it was Japan only. Manx TT Superbike could have been better with more racetracks because it only had one track. That's it. Imagine paying full price for a racing game that only has one racetrack? That's less than Virtua Racing and Daytona USA! Tom was right about a lot of it, he just had a weird way of wording it. My guess is the typos were due to total exhaustion.
SEGA was probably the top arcade developer back in terms of pushing technology, I remember seeing games like Star Wars Trilogy, Jurassic Park/The Lost World, Virtua Fighter 3, etc. But thing is that during the late 90s console game were outpacing arcade games, they were also getting more complex, having more narrative, being longer. That was the era when games like Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time were among the most talked about games, most of the Saturn and Dreamcast library was comprised of arcade ports like Soul Calibur and Hydro Thunder. Games like Shenmue, Sonic Adventure, Skies of Arcadia were few and far in between. The fact that some companies like Electronic Arts and Konami did not want to develop for the Dreamcast did not help either
@@pablocasas5906 Star Wars Trilogy was one of the only arcade games at my local mall when I was a kid and I played it all the time! It'd be nice if Arcade 1-Up could port that next.
@macuser7048 Saturn also had a 3D hang on game that almost nobodt talks about , if hang on and super hang on was popular in the arcades why didn't the 3d version sell better on the saturn ? I've never played it but it has really good music
On the subject of "Possitive" and "Possition" I wouldn't be surprised if these studio management types tried to shoehorn in "SS" wherever they could as a way of invoking "Sega Saturn"
EDIT: Commented way too soon. They clearly can't spell.
I love big tittles
This is the content I love from you
This... ridiculous. I'm surprised how horrible the spelling and grammar were in these correspondences. People aren't even this bad when they're rushing to respond in a chat room. How the hell did this guy get past fifth grade without failing?
Also, having looked at other internal documents from other companies before like... 2010? I wanna say? Marketers wrote things that made you think they were as observant as a five year old. But really it's often just to pad out the document because they know their superiors are only going to glance at it to prove it exists. And somehow having *less* issues is a worse situation than having *more* issues for marketing to solve. This kind of stuff basically died out when you had marketers become hypercompetitive in the face of global reach.
My favourite character, Crash Bandigoo.
This looks like a half-assed college project for a business class lol
In your edited stream section you have a weird chorus effect on your voice
fun fact: the todd kalinsky of sega is actually the cousin of the uni bomber
@007kigifrit realy ? WTF since the uni bomber was a maths genesis he might have been usful in designing saturn games lol
this was pretty interesting overall but pointing out EVERY mistake or inconsistency gets exhausting fast
Dude I miss my Sega Nomad. I had one as a tike and, hindsight being what it is, wish I would have kept it.
Business is about discussing business for business people before business can occur
working in the corporate world and sitting through presentations and reading emails and slop, its just fascinating how video games companies were doing it too back then too and how shit has not changed at all.
HOLY CRAP, Knowledge Hub!!
I think I remember going to a Kohls and playing at/seeing a kiosk with either a Saturn or a Dreamcast. The game was a 3D mech game whose title I didn't know at the time but I think I came across it once or twice on UA-cam. Sadly, I can't remember the name of the game now.
Virtual On: Cyber Troopers?
@@theonlybilge Oh no. I don't think it was from that series.
I quickly looked through the Dreamcast game list on Wikipedia and I think the game I recall seeing was Slave Zero.
4:06 not being able to decipher this post-it note message stresses me out so hard. "Screw Be He technology, what is bootleg 96/97"🤔🤔🧐