Sega Considering Saturn Download Releases

Sonic Adventure hits XLA and PSN later this year.

Sega offers Genesis and Master System games on Virtual Console. Later this year, they'll be offering Dreamcast games on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN.

Wait... did they miss something?

Yes, Sega skipped a full generation, passing the Sega Saturn in their rush to release Crazy Taxi and Sonic Adventure. So are Saturn titles doomed to exclusive availability through auctions?

Sega's Yosuke Okunari, producer of the Dreamcast re-releases and former producer of the Sega Ages 2500 series of remakes/re-releases, offers hope in an interview that was posted today at Impress Watch.

The site asked Okunari why Sega jumped from Genesis directly to Dreamcast. "When you look globally," responded Okunari, "the Genesis and Dreamcast are well known, but Saturn is unknown. 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."

There's hope, though. Continued Okunari, "It's not that we're ignoring Saturn I think you can see this, considering that we ported Nights Into Dreams and other titles." He's referring herr to a 2008 PlayStation 2 updated port of Nights.

Impress Watch pressed further, asking if we can look forward to Saturn titles as future download releases. Replied Okunari, "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."

Outside of these few questions about Saturn, the Impress Watch interview was focused on the two Dreamcast titles, Sonic Adventure and Crazy Taxi, as well as on Sega's future plans for Dreamcast releases.

The two games will not arrive simultaneously, Okunari said. However, both games are being prepared for Fall release.

Sega has more titles planned beyond Sonic and Crazy Taxi. Okunari revealed to the site that Sega has already decided upon its second batch of titles. While saying they're not able to make an announcement yet, Okunari provided a hint: "The next titles that we announce will be titles that are representative of the Dreamcast."

Okunari said that he wants to preserve quality so he's not thinking about a release pace, but he would like to release games at a pace faster than the Sega Ages line.

The ports are being handled by Sega Shanghai, which also did the PS2 ports of Dynamite Dekka and Nights. Asked if the original staff is having a say in the projects, he said that Sonic Team is supervising Sonic Adventure.

The use of the term "port" here is intentional, as according to Okunari, the games are not running through emulation. One reason for this is due to technical hurdles with emulating Dreamcast, issues that arise in part because of peculiarities with the system's PowerVR2 GPU. Beyond this, the staff wanted to make adjustments to the games, and decided that porting over the source code would be the best bet. No current in-development releases are running under emulation, said Okunari.

Some of the changes being readied for Sonic and Crazy Taxi include updates to visuals. The games run at 720p and are seeing their framerate boosted up to 60 frames per second.

In the future, Okunari said that Sega may put online functionality in some games. In fact, he teased that they may already be doing this with some upcoming games.

The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the ports will be for the most part the same, although Okunari said that there may be some slight differences due to the differences in hardware.

So why is Wii excluded form all this pseudo-retro fun? Said Okunari, "Dreamcast used 1 gigabyte discs, so because of memory problems, Wii would be difficult. However, there are other things we'd like to do on Wii. We're continuing with development of games for Virtual Console, for instance, and would like to keep continuing this."