Happy 17th birthday, Saturn.

[RCM]

Yeah, the surprise launch was an attempt to get out way ahead of the PS1, but it blew up in Sega's faces. A surprise launch means no press coverage, no people sleeping out in front of the store, and games being pushed out the developers' doors before they were complete. Seventeen years, but still a bittersweet moment for Sega fans.

Well, they did announce the launch at E3 where most of the enthusiast press -- if not all -- were there covering them. Besides that, you didn't have folks camping out back in the day the way people do now.

Sega seemed to have done everything wrong with Saturn in the United States, but it was mildly successful in Japan. I'm guessing a lot of that had to do with the Virtua Fighter craze as well as all the other groovy arcade ports from Capcom and SNK. Regardless, it remains my favorite system 17 years later, with Genesis and Dreamcast tied for second. It was the console that forced me to import, and while it would have been nice to save the money and buy stuff domestically, I wouldn't change a thing.

I always have a laugh at Sony's expense 'cause they really did design an elegant machine that deserved all its success with PlayStation. While PS2 sold better than PS, and PSP/PS3 are success stories to a point, they haven't really delivered a system that's developer-friendly in the way PS was. I've heard OK things about Vita, but it may be too little, too late. While they influenced others to create dev-friendly environments, they've kind of produced "Saturn messy" dev environments with newer consoles, as I understand it.