EGM Feb '97 Lockheed Real3D Saturn upgrade for VF3 and standalone console Pluto

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typed out for those that can't read the blurry scan
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I had been looking for that exact news/rumor clip for a very long time. It's not much, it's just Quartermann's Gaming Gossip from the Feb 1997 EGM, but it supports the older and more in-depth article from Nov 1995 Next Generation about Saturn 2.






This was from the Feb 1997 EGM, and since it would've been written around December 1996, that's about 3 months before Next Generation Online published their first report about the Black Belt in March 1997.


By April 1997, Next Generation Online discovered that Lockheed Martin would not be involved with Sega's home console plans, and that Black Belt would not be an upgrade for Saturn but a whole new console.

But going back to that EGM article at the top, what they're reporting is exactly what Sega should have done -- release a Lockheed Martin Real3D-based 3D polygon upgrade cartridge for Saturn, and also have Lockheed work on a more powerful console for the 1998-1999 timeframe that surpassed Model-3 performance, INSTEAD of Dreamcast.

 

paging Anthaemia , lol he's gonna go ape when he sees this. h:

 

It's nothing I haven't mentioned before, numerous times, it's just that now I actually found the EGM article I had been referring to.

Also, the NG article, I posted that several times over the years.

 

EGM reports in February 1997 that AM2 is planning to use a cartridge based hardware upgrade for Saturn Virtua Fighter 3, which it claimed was due for release in October the same year... and you expect me to "go ape" over this?

I'm fully aware that Real3D technology was being primed for the Eclipse project, but I'd rather not make too much of any links with VF3 because there are too many contradicting and much harder facts I know of from other sources. First of all, none other than Yu Suzuki himself confirmed that AM2 would be starting a Saturn conversion of VF3 in November '96, though I guess someone could have leaked October '97 as a possible release date. Also, years later he revealed that both Saturn VF3 and the 32-bit prototype of Shenmue were running on stock hardware, using new programming techniques his research division had created over various other projects, with Digital Dance Mix being their only commercially released effort in this period.

I don't think we should read too much into the projected date for Saturn VF3 as reported in EGM, since it was decided from a very early point that nothing of this game would be shown publically until Yu Suzuki was absolutely satisfied with the end product, knowing all too well how much potential hype could build around this title. The first complete revision was only finished in July '98, long after Sega of Japan had posted a release date of May 5th (along with Sonic The Fighters, which had already long since been cancelled).

AM2 knew it only had the resources to handle two major projects, and with outsourcing being used to relieve the pressure of realising the ever-growing Shenmue, VF3 was its only other high profile title in development during '98. Following its rejection the first time around, Yu Suzuki personally ordered his team to hold back on Shenmue, knowing all too well it was too late for this game to appear on the Saturn. In the break before it was restarted as a Dreamcast project, making VF3 the best it could be on Saturn became AM2's priority.

Suzuki must surely have known that Genki had been given the challenge of converting VF3 to the Dreamcast, which only happened in the first place because his own team was so pre-occupied with projects that meant it didn't have the resources for a third simultaneously. With upgrades to Shenmue temporarily on the backburner, AM2 threw all of its workforce at getting Saturn VF3 the very best it could be, and again this was achieved without the help of any hardware upgrade. Eclipse had been the brainchild of Sega's US divisions, with no real exchange between its Japanese counterpart except for the fact AM2 did receive a working system for evaluation purposes - this is a lot different than assuming (just as magazines at the time did) they were actually using it for their games!

Anyway, it was finally decided in mid September '98 that even a pixel-perfect Saturn conversion of VF3 would no longer be enough, simply because the world had moved on and the hype was now being redirected to Dreamcast's imminent launch. Hideki Sato had then recently been quoted as saying he believed the Dreamcast was around 1.5X more powerful than Model 3, so naturally with VF3 and Sega Rally 2 announced for the system few would continue waiting for new Saturn games. Even with their less-than-perfect end results, the problem now was that Genki had the upper hand on AM2. Not wanting to be underminded a second time, Yu Suzuki kept a very close eye on Shenmue and didn't care how long the game took to reach shelves.

As for VF3, by the time it arrived on Dreamcast this once groundbreaking title was looking outdated in comparison to newer competitors such as Soul Calibur. Had the powers that be shown more patience and understanding of Suzuki's intentions, VF3 might have been a fantastic proverbial send-off for the Saturn, leaving the door open to far superior products on the Dreamcast. There was clearly room for both VF3 and Soul Calibur in the gaming world, but on one system in such a small period of time? There was always going to be a casualty in this scenario, and due to Sega making the wrong decision they were forced to watch a once killer app playing second fiddle to a title now basking in the hype spotlight, so to speak.

I continue to believe it's not too late for the world to see VF3 for what it might have been, had it not been wrongly put up against Soul Calibur where it was now grossly outdated. This game was once truly revolutionary, with many of its features taken out of later sequels because they were just too advanced - even in their own time. To see a slightly flawed conversion running on the Saturn because its developers genuinely cared and wanted to give their loyal supporters one last treat before moving into the next generation would have been fantastic, if rare in a world where sales are more important. My argument has always been this: do you honestly think Genki cared about its treatment of VF3? Genki won a very important internal war over AM2, and with that Yu Suzuki never felt the same again. With the commercial bombing of Shenmue, it was only a matter of time before he reconsidered his God-like internal status (just as later also happened with Yuji Naka and Tetsuya Mizuguchi) and gave in to those merely concerned with financial returns as opposed to artistic integrity - and that's exactly where Sega as a whole is at right now, which it can only blame on its own past mistakes!

 

Amen

 

I shudder to get involved in this as I know how many times the Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 stuff infiltrates other threads but there is an awful lot of supposition in this about how Yu Suzuki felt etc. Also Yuji Naka had long before then made his feelings known (having worked in the US at the Sega Technical Institute and allegedly threatening to quit if the NiGHTS engine was used in Sonic Xtreme etc)

As a separate thing - Saturn Virtua fighter 3. Does anyone else think that way too much is being made about this? Yes it would have been interesting to see how far the Saturn could be pushed but the assumption seems to be that the leap from Virtua Fighter 2 to Virtua Fighter 3 would have been similarly as massive as the leap from the first Saturn Virtua Fighter to Virtua Fighter 2. I'm more of the opinion that a Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 would have been either:

1) similar to Last Bronx - e.g. Hi Res but with some 3D back-groud elements and ceilings etc or maybe like D-Xhird which seems to feature transparencies, 3D back-drops, ceilings (and very "stiff" animation)
or
2) like an enhanced Fighters Megamix - e.g. lower resolution but with more 3D back-grounds, uneven floors etc.

I have no doubt they would have kept the gameplay intact but I suspect that the graphics would have suffered and that the game would have been lost in the hype for or in comparison to the Tekken 3 conversion on PlayStation. While the Virtua Fighter series is legendary in Japan (and I'm sure the game would have sold well in that territory) I just think it would have sunk without a murmur in Europe and particularly the US.

To be fair to Sega the decision to hold Virtua Fighter 3 as a launch title for Dreamcast was a good one (arguably the decision to farm it out to Genki less so but in fairness many of their own early games were less than impressive too either due to unfamiliarity with the hardware or internal politics or whatever)

The reason I say this is that there was no guarantee that Soul Calibur was going to be as good as it was and Virtua Fighter 3 was a good franchise/marquee title to release on the machine (in Japan at least) and fit a genre that needed a tick in the box.

Apologies for dragging this old topic up again but I see this over and over in all sorts of Saturn threads and tonight, for whatever reason, felt it time I added my thoughts. Apologies also for the crazy number of brackets/parentheses, I fully expect to be quoted with the words "Too Many Brackets" in large letters over my original text

 

After the likes of Virtua Fighter 2 and then Digital Dance Mix, it's easy to understand why many people thought AM2 would continue with that graphical progression for VF3. However, for its first Model 3 to Saturn conversion, Yu Suzuki's team actually headed down the same route it had taken with Fighting Vipers and then Megamix. In other words, every new game sacrificed resolution to allow for better polygonal effects.

I know this has been mentioned countless times already, but VF3 was probably most comparable to Shenmue in its prototype guise, boasting a standard resolution and greater use of texturing. While it's probably unfair to have expected anything like Digital Dance Mix, the high quality texturing of that "game" (or glorified tech demo, as some refer to it) probably came from the same research that later resulted in the impressive-looking Shenmue.

Yu Suzuki himself said that AM2 had conducted extensive research into the possibility of Saturn VF3, only confirming that work had begun once they were absolutely sure it was technically feasible. The work done into higher quality texturing clearly manifested in Digital Dance Mix, while you could argue that Shenmue borrowed the conclusions of AM2's studies into new lighting techniques as well.

For the conversion of VF3 there's no way AM2 could have repeated its approach with VF2 and opted for parallax scrolling with basic polygonal backgrounds, though I've heard it suggested before this was just how the first revision may have looked. In its arcade form, VF3 revolutionised the combat genre with the introduction of what AM2 called undulation terrain topography.

To recreate its complex 3D stages, AM2 decided to lower the frame rate to half of its arcade counterpart - much as Namco did with Tekken 3 on the PlayStation - and managed to achieve basic interactive stages for the second revision of VF3. Without having even a single screenshot I can't be sure, but at the same time it's likely this approach at least meant Saturn VF3 could live up to its name as opposed to just being VF2.5, which is probably a more accurate description of Fighters Megamix.

I'm sure many would have loved to see a high resolution, 60fps rendition of VF3 on their Saturns with all the stage detail and various effects present. All these years later, I seriously doubt the best programmers with the best software libraries available could even come close to realising this, though we do have comparable efforts such as D-Xhird and Savaki, not to mention the footage of Shenmue as proof of just how far the Saturn could be pushed by a select few. Outside the fighting genre, we also have Burning Rangers and Panzer Dragoon Saga, which I feel are two further notable examples of top quality Saturn coding.

Anyway, before I go there's one last point that I'd like to make for now... Maybe their conversion was doomed from the start by its status as a first generation title, but how could Genki's treatment of VF3tb ever match Soul Calibur? There's no way Namco could have ever anticipated the hype for their Dreamcast effort, though at the same time it's not as if this or VF3tb was highly received outside of Japan. Even the highly anticipated Tekken 3 wasn't the landmark hit many expected, and I'm not sure this was due to a less-than-perfect home edition.

Maybe the genre as a whole had died down by 1998, though I'm sure VF3 would have done well enough late in the Saturn's life simply because that's the console most associated it with. Besides, we all know from the pre-launch words coming from within Sega that Dreamcast could "do" Model 3 with power to spare. In reality, we had to do with flawed efforts such as VF3tb and Sega Rally 2: not quite arcade perfect yet neither so bad they were unbearable, either!

P.S. Grey Fox, thanks for some great comments - why keep away from discussions when you're clearly more than capable of holding your own?

 

I'm convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that VF3 on a stock Saturn, no matter how well programmed, would still be massively downgraded from the arcade, and not look, visually, even remotely close to the Model 3 version. The Saturn, while powerful in many ways, was not only not capable of perfect Model 2 ports, but couldn't even do perfect Model 1 ports with flat-shaded polys. While some Model 2 games were brilliantly re-created (Sega Rally, VF2) by using Saturn's 2D strengths, crafting nicely faked 3D games, there's no way VF3 could be done without a staggaring loss in graphics. It's not even an opinion, just fact. A modern example: The Nintendo Wii, as underpowered as it is, is more capable of doing 360/PS3 games than the Saturn was capable of doing Model 3 games.

The only way a decent VF3 could've been done on Saturn IMO, is with a powerful 3D upgrade. Whether it was an upgrade using a 3DFX, PowerVR or Lockheed Real3D chipset or otherwise, there was no point. AM2 realized this, the Saturn version(s) of VF3 scrapped in favor of the Dreamcast version. If the Saturn got a powerful 3D upgrade and got ports of Model 3 games, it wouldn't really have been the Saturn pulling of the visuals, but the new 3D hardware. Saturn was woefully incapable of doing proper 3D graphics on even the low-end of polygon games, nevermind something as highend as Model 3 VF3. I've known that since 1995 and my view on that has never changed.

 

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the locations in VF3, but I can use Lau's wall stage - one of the game's more technically impressive levels - as an example and quite easily picture how it could have been achieved on the Saturn. First of all, you'd only need a few polygons to draw the walls to either side of the fighting area. Then, with a sloped floor and some clever texturing you could easily create something resembling the steps. Finally, for the ring boundaries just have a massive drop and some parallax to cover the background. This is definitely within the Saturn's limited capabilities, and considering how much was going on in Fighters Megamix, Last Bronx or even D-Xhird (the latter a third party game, no less!), not to mention the Shenmue prototype, VF3 didn't necessarily require any kind of hardware upgrade. Only the genuinly foolish would have expected a pixel-perfect conversion, though I'm sure it would have still been impressive for a 32-bit system. After all, when did the AM departments ever let down their followers? Of course, that doesn't include The House Of The Dead, Sega Touring Car or Manx TT, which were all outsourced...

 

Of course the Saturn could be made to run a version of VF3 that plays decently enough, using its own graphics engine, it would just look nothing like the Model3 arcade version. Kind of like how Sega was able to make an After Burner game for the Master System.

 

Why does that remind me of how Galaxy Force II turned out on the MegaDrive?

 

It would be really easy to make a comparisson.

The virtua fighter 3 character selector...and the face of hideo hazuki from the saturn shenmue, they can match in my point of view. Would be great if i can find some good screen captures and post them.

Nobody in the earth was thinking back in the day of a pixel perfect conversion of virtua fighter 3, but come on, looking at shenmue saturn and tekken 3, am2 could have beaten that easily.

30fps , goraud shading with lighting a la shenmue, with 3d backgrounds a la fighters megamix...and the shenmue engine

Probably..

 

I'm not sure about beating Tekken 3, because that was a particularly impressive conversion (despite of some major downgrading in its PlayStation guise). However, VF3 would definitely have fit somewhere between Fighters Megamix and the Shenmue prototype footage. Can we say 30fps in the Saturn's lowest resolution with basic 3D terrain and some lighting effects, possibly Gouraud shading or even the odd translucency? Based on the graphical quality of Digital Dance Mix and what later became Shenmue, we'd have at least got a few well-textured character models. I know they're probably not going to show anything this late in the game, but AM2 could still cause a few jaws to drop... and I'm all for that, especially when it's known the Saturn had a few tricks left up its proverbial sleeves - you only have to look at later efforts such as Burning Rangers, Panzer Dragoon Saga or even the Shenmue video for proof of this!

 

Exactly, that's another example.

 

Taking this thread beyond VF3.


I really don't care that much about VF3 and the point of this thread isn't so much for VF3, but more about the likelyhood that Lockheed Martin was working with Sega on a powerful 3D chipset for both Saturn and a new console, which could power 2 generations of amazing games.

The Saturn 3D upgrade cartridge, with a Real3D/100, which was a very powerful 3-chip chipset, or even the less impressive single-chip i740, could've been used for so many awesome games:



i.e.
A perfect, if not upgraded, port of Daytona USA.
Perhaps a new Desert Tank 2 game (i liked the original)
How about an incredible new 3D Herzog Zwei RTS game?
Maybe a Phantasy Star V RPG with better than Model 2-quality 1st-person dungeons and a massively huge quest. The 3D capablities could be used to render landscapes in several-selectable 3D views, including those for vehicles like the Land Rover.

Of course, the development troubles with Sonic Xtreme would be gone, and Sega would easily be able to create a stunning 60FPS Sonic game to blow Mario 64 away.

How about an action/adventure RPG to blow away both the already-impressive, in-development Power Crystal on the M2 as well as Zelda OoT.

Namco could've brought over upgraded ports of their System 22 / Super System 22 arcade games including Alpine Racer, Time Crisis, Rave Racer Air Combat 22 and Tokyo Wars, among others.

These are the kind of possibilities I think of when I think of Saturn getting a LM-designed chipset.

 

Lockheed Martin / Real3D comments on the home market:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000915221208/www.hardcoregaming.com/spotlight/r3dint.htm

Lockheed Martin people explaining why Sega (at the time) was going with 3Dfx and why it made sense

http://web.archive.org/web/19970605161903/www.next-generation.com/news/042997b.chtml

They would've probably said similar things about Videologic's PowerVR2, which was ultimately selected to be Sega's 3D technology for home use, beyond Saturn.

 

Ok, Saturn was NOT conceived as a 3D console on it's first incarnation, that's something clean and "on the paper".

But the Saturn we got to buy in 1994/5 was conceived to do 3D, with great performance, the problem is that it was totally rushed.

Most of the launch games were crap, because i'm sure 90% they were intended even for the 32X or it's first 1 processor incarnation.

"If" (yeah,,,"if" and "sega" ar two words that match altogheter always..haha!) Sega would have spent all the 1994 and half of 1995 creating great libraries for the console, and with launch titles as sega rally, virtua fighter remix/ virtua fighter 2 or sonic x-treme (wich cancellation was not due to the fault of the console, but the BAD MANAGEMENT Sega will ALWAYS have), the saturn-life span would have been different.

Sony was at the right place in the right moment. And even Nintendo couldn't deal with that back in the day.

Sorry for my bad english (again).

I'm sure, (and this is even more speculative than what i've said before...), that even if Sega had the most powerful console ever back in the day, with the management and commercial techniques they got, Saturn death was certified since day 1.

 

Sega's never going to have decent management when the likes of Hayao Nakayama can't even manage his own hair piece correctly!