Sega had plenty of great games. In fact, despite being a Nintendo household growing up, I'm actually quite impressed in hindsight by the degree to which Sega as a 1st party made games to scratch every conceivable itch you might have as a gamer.
32/64-bit Nintendo really didn't make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn't always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?).
In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There's something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, "Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we're gonna buy a PlayStation.'
Yeah, N64 was weirdly devoid of memorable RPGs. Surprising considering that both before and after that generation the RPGs rained from the sky. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Chronotrigger... the greats.
Playstation became the RPG console back then. Square was the king of the genre, and they wanted to create cinematic experiences with pre-rendered graphics. Only the CD format was large enough to support that.
The N64 also suffered from a margin problem. Game cartridges were sometimes $10-$20 wholesale for producers, while CDs were probably about 10-25 cents. And then they had to pay a hefty licensing fee to Nintendo on top of that.
What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
> What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
I'm pretty sure the hardware would have given developers a real run for their money to create a SNES-level JRPG experience with smooth, good quality sprite-based graphics. As far as I know it has no 2D acceleration like the SNES, and a very small texture buffer, which leaves slow software rendering directly to the framebuffer, or low quality texture-based sprites. The hardware was really not designed for this type of game, so few were made.
Not providing any hardware to handle those types of games was a function of 3D being all the rage, and the hardware being very clearly targeted at that, but it also meant that creating 2D games was not just out of fashion, but impractical.
You could easily just treat it like Unity does, where the 3d ness is an illusion and everything is actually in 3d space.... Super easy, barely an inconvenience...
The real impediment I believe was Nintendo themselves... Think about it for a moment. What was the process for publishing to N64? That's right, you had to work directly with Nintendo and effectively get thier stamp of approval (good luck getting enough carts otherwise).
Nintendo didn't want 2d games on thier precious 3d focused console. That simple.
This may be partly true, but they themselves did publish Yoshi's Story, a 2D game, in 1997, the second year of N64's existence. More likely explanation is that 3D was so novel and new in the mid 90s that it was difficult to argue for 2D games then from a business and marketing standpoint, even though 3D games usually required larger teams and the lack of mature tooling (a lot of devs would have to make their own physics engines from scratch back then) made it riskier. Today Nintendo puts a heavier focus on 2D gaming, with the New Super Mario Bros series and Mario Maker, etc.
Yoshi's Story is prob best example. 2D platformer by Nintendo with gorgeous graphics. However, it was a lackluster, forgettable game. Still it proves the 64 was more than capable of exceeding 2D experiences from SNES.
Other examples are StarCraft 64, Bust-a-Move 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, SimCity 2000, Killer Instinct Gold (character models 2D), Magical Tetris Challenge, Rampage 2, Ogre Battle 64, MK Mythologies: Sub Zero, Clay Fighter 63 1/2 (2D character models), South Park: Chef's Love Shack, Mischief Makers, etc etc
It was more than capable of exceeding SNES quality graphics on every metric. The RDP on the N64 already had to render 2D rasters that were pre-transformed from 3D projections by the signal processor chip.
Remove that 3D transformation step and allocate some RAM for buffer and you had a perfectly capable 2D platform.
There's no question it was possible, but the previous generation consoles provided powerful hardware sprite/tile-based engines with layers, smooth parallax scrolling, '2.5D' transformations and more. N64 has none of that, and as far as I know the SDK didn't include anything like a software 2D engine either. If you wanted to make a 2D game, you'd have to implement your own 2D rendering pipeline more or less from scratch. I also think the N64's relatively low memory bandwidth and low amount of RAM would have been an issue to get past for a software compositor.
So yeah, it does provide access to the framebuffer, and has a reasonably capable CPU - more or less like PCs of the time did, so of course it's a 'perfectly capable 2D platform' but in this era I don't think we were quite at the point where brute-forcing the graphics pipeline in software was 'easy', and the 2D hardware capabilities were... let's say 'not exploited' by Nintendo's SDK.
It wasn't preventing anyone from producing 2D games, obviously good games could be made, it was just definitely not optimized for that, and that just put more pressure towards 3D, that already had a lot of cultural pressure towards it. If the culture was there, I'm sure developers would have hacked away at it and developed it into a strong 2D platform, but without that it was a barrier.
A 2D rendering pipeline is trivial. There are numerous hobbysist 2D rendering frameworks for every computer architecture in the past 40 years. It was far more difficult to program N64 in 3D than in 2D. The CPU was more than capable to exceed SNES in every dimension. It was not hard at all. 3D already requires 2D rendering.
> What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
I think that's something that's easy to say in hindsight, but hard to justify at the time.
The switch to 3d gaming was probably the biggest technological leap games ever had. 3d allowed a huge amount of experiences not possible with 2d games. And while early 3d games look incredibly dated now, at the time they were mind blowing and cutting edge. The SNES and Genesis were also too recent to really have any nostalgia, so and thus no real desire for throwback or "retro" titles. Any 2d game on the N64 would probably have felt cheap and dated at the time.
Finally, for Nintendo specifically, they did release 2d titles during the N64 generation. They just released them for the Game Boy (and later, Game Boy Color). There wasn't much sense devoting resources to make a 2d game on the N64 when your 2d-only console is still selling really well.
I'm not talking about Nintendo themselves, per se. They did a phenomenal job with the titles they did make for N64, including of course Ocarina of Time (a masterpiece) and I'll also never forget how revolutionary Super Mario 64 was.
I'm mainly talking about 3rd party publishers and specifically the JRPG genre. The N64 suffered from a lack of games compared to PS1. It was difficult to do 3D development back then, developers were just getting the hang of it.
In fact that you bring up Game Boy dev as a thriving platform for 2D content is an important point. Pokemon came out during this era. And a 2D N64 based Pokemon would have sold like hotcakes. Instead they built these half baked 3D Pokemon experiences like Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium, which featured no storyline and no overworld.
Even something resembling Super Mario RPG with prerendered graphics on a isometric view would have been fine. It just wasn't generally done on N64. Everyone wanted to mimic Mario 64. The few RPGs N64 did get, like Quest 64, felt so empty, that it would have been much better to just ship it in 2D.
You’re right that Pokémon on consoles would have been great, but you’re conflating some stuff that easily explains why it didn’t happen. First is the idea that Pokémon is a Nintendo franchise. It’s convoluted, but let’s say Nintendo has a stake that allows them some control but they cannot control Game Freak, the developer of Pokémon, directly.
Second is Game Freak proper. They have always valued a small headcount. This has been a problem consistently. They never had the staff to make a console game. They always had the same difficulty with building new ideas. And when they were forced to move to consoles with the Switch, they released their worst games yet, absolutely dispiriting games that probably soured millions of kids on the franchise.
What percentage of The Pokemon Company does Nintendo own? They must have some exclusive arrangement in writing or a 50% or more ownership because it's never been hosted on a non Nintendo platform.
They certainly had the staff to make Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Snap. Most 2D games in the SNES era only needed like 4 to 7 developers. It would have been fine and trivial even to pair Nintendo game artists with Pokemon developers for a true console Pokemon game. It just wasn't done. It took until the Switch to see a true console Pokemon game.
Pokémon Snap and Stadium were made by other companies, not Game Freak.
We don’t know everything about the Pokémon corporate structure in the English-speaking world. Presumably Florent Gorges is researching this as we speak. But the common theory is that when Nintendo invested in Game Freak in the early 90s to bail them out, there must have been a requirement of exclusivity for the franchise in the contract. Game Freak made games for other consoles after Pokémon, and the Pokémon cards had Windows games, but the main RPG series that’s been both only on Nintendo and only done by GF. Last year was the first time another company touched the mainline RPGs: another company did the remake of Pearl and Diamond.
I always assumed it was the memory problem. There is more memory for 2D sprite maps on the CD than the cartridge, and it is easier to cull the landscape to fit in the small RAM of PS1 than to optimize the texture packing for N64. There is Ogre Battle 64, but noticeably the textures look much worse than Final Fantasy Tactics. I thought maybe it is too difficult to get nice textures on the N64, even Paper Mario looks nice, but the textures are not that complex.
The N64 had almost 40 times more RAM than the SNES. Plus you could create custom ROMs with more memory if needed in the cartridge itself.
If textures looked better in FF Tactics vs Ogre Battle 64, it is purely due to storage on CD vs cartridge, a notable 10x plus advantage.
Square used a ton of prerendered graphics in their PS1 games. That is to say, they'd farm out the graphics to super computers and then store them as rasters on disc.
From a YouTube video I watched, the bigger advantage of disks was the manufacturing lead time.
With carts, you had to know how many you needed weeks in advance, and were stuck with excess units if the game flopped. Whereas you could have a run of ps1 disks pressed and in your warehouse in two days.
Square and Enix (before they became one) both jumped ship to PlayStation because they deemed the N64 cartridge's memory capacity far too small for the kind of games they wanted to make. And to that extent, they're probably right--Final Fantasy VII took three CDs as it was. A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them. The RE2 N64 port is the only game that got close, and that was with a ton of clever compression and massive downsizing of audio and video. More likely it would've taken 5-10 carts.
A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them
The problem is worse than that:
1. The largest NES cartridge is 64MB, a PS1 CD is 10x that, so imagine 30 carts
2. A lot of the data across the 3 discs is actually the same data. Think character models and attack animations for your party members, locations you can revisit at any time, the base world map, common soundtracks, etc. The disk to disk differences were mostly things like FMVs and event soundtracks as a result. So the minimum data for the game to run would exceed 1 cartridge. So not only would you have to swap discs at certain points in the story, you'd have to swap them at other points, e.g. because you were backtracking. Trying to gather a spell from a starter dungeon for Beta? Please remove Vincent from your party and insert cartridge 2.
I'm very thankful that a basic statement from myself like, "N64 was surprisingly devoid of memorable RPGs" would be met with input by people who were actually there, and provide first hand accounts. You are the folks who make Hacker News an absolute treat.
I'm convinced that if Falcom had reworked Popful Mail for the Nintendo 64 (with Working Design's 90's anime dub) it could have been a surprise hit with the preteens that only had Ocarina of Time and Ogre Battle on the system.
Super Mario RPG was a collab between Nintendo and Square. Square famously jumped ship after Nintendo ditched the CD format. As another mentioned, Paper Mario was supposed to be the spiritual successor to SMRPG. Even though Paper Mario was a modest success, I still consider it a miss on matching SMRPG's quality bar for an RPG.
In addition, Square still held a bunch of specific legal rights around it, which is why Paper Mario was branded as being distinct, even if it had a lot of obvious commonalities.
Great game (and sequels) but it wasn't released in Europe for example. Nintendo always did these strange business moves that made no sense yet they always prevailed. For example they had everything needed to connect DS and Wii - never did. Online shop? Dead for years, etc.
Historically, people have been reticent for some reason to call it an Action/RPG, preferring to call it Action/Adventure instead, and IIRC the crux of the argument was usually "Link does not gain experience points or level-up, ergo it's not a full RPG."
It's a silly argument, IMO, but at the time "RPG" in everyone's minds meant either JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) or PC RPG (Baldur's Gate, etc).
The demo discs were clutch. I didn't have much money and would play the heck out of demo discs until I could save enough money to buy a game. Saturn didn't seem to have enough titles and PS was spitting them out like crazy.
Yeah hard to describe probably to anyone growing up in a post-YouTube, post-Steam, post-Playstation store era, but getting a video or playable demo of like 20 or 30 games on a demo disc that was sometimes packaged in with a magazine you'd buy in the store was incredible.
Man, that is hooey, if we're talking launch (day one) titles. The US Dreamcast launch lineup was spectacular.
Leading the way was Soul Calibur, one of a handful of games to earn a perfect score from Famitsu[1] and it actually blew away the arcade version (!)
NFL2K was also a launch title and while I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd is allergic to sports titles, it was far superior to contemporary versions of Madden... got correspondingly high reviews as well
Sonic Adventure was pretty spectacular too I thought, I would call that an 8.5 or 9/10 (like a lot of 3D platformers it maybe hasn't "aged well" but at the time, I thought it was spectacular and it was well reviewed)
Power Stone was a blast too.... Hydro Thunder.... bunch of other solid ones. Day one.
Here was the PS1 launch lineup. Ridge Racer is the only really good title here, excluding previous-gen ports like NBA Jam and Rayman. Toshinden was obviously mindblowing as the first polygon fighter many played but it's sort of a notoriously bad game.
But in some ways that just shows Dreamcast had already lost the war before it launched. Sega did everything right and hit the ground running with what many consider the greatest launch title lineup in history, but their rep was too tarnished.
Almost every single game during the PS1 launch was a killer app because every single one was a novel new experience in a 3D rendered space. Dreamcast showed up way too late to compare.
The PS1 also launched several novel IPs.
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable where Tekken and Rayman are not.
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a
dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's
why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable
where Tekken and Rayman are not.
I mean, you could make this same argument to claim that the Atari VCS was better than the NES because the idea of "playing games on your TV" was no longer a novel new experience by the time the NES rolled around.
For everything about to say, please note that I'm not arguing one system was better than the other. Just talking about how they fit in historically. I owned and enjoyed all of these consoles.
For me, the Dreamcast was the first "modern" 3D console where everything came together.
PS1 3D games were largely pretty ugly. Jaggy warping textures and the hardware was not really powerful enough for big worlds. Perhaps even more importantly, the lack of analog controls was a very very serious impediment.
Obviously despite this there were a lot of classic PS1 titles. A few games like Gran Turismo even seemed to pull off miracles graphically while other titles like Metal Gear Solid just leaned into the grimy pixelated look.
The N64 was largely a joke to me. You had a standard analog control, but the hardware was clearly a mess. Specifically there was far too little texture memory so every game had these giant low-res smoothed out blurry textures. Again obviously a few games transcended that but in general, man, yikes.
The Dreamcast was the first modern 3D console. The one where things came together. Enough horsepower and texture memory to render actually good looking worlds and the flexibility to do things like cel-shading. You play DOA2 or Soul Calibur and those models still look pretty good today. Lots of games were locked in at 60fps. Etc. Even had the first console MMO.
The Dreamcast really was a wonder and it has a huge place in gaming history.
The Dreamcast wasn't competing against the Playstation 1, the Sega Saturn was. And price and game library aside it had the hardware to back it up. You can see this in gameplay videos of, say, Nights into Dreams or Tomb Raider.
If anything the Dreamcast was competing against the PS2 and Gamecube (despite coming out at an awkward time significantly earlier than the competition)
Dreamcast had terrible timing, in my opinion. That, and the controller was obnoxious. But wrt timing, the Dreamcast launched in between generations. Console generations tend to last at least 5 years. It was harder for people to afford multiple consoles back then, and if you had purchased an N64 or a PS1 in '96-'98, it was probably too soon to buy a second or third console in 1999, when Dreamcast launched. It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2 and Xbox both launched in the following year and a half with better graphics and DVD support, leapfrogging it in the process.
It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2
It didn't matter because Sony had already won the hype war, EA forsook the DC, and the built in DVD player was something of a killer app itself.
BUT If you go back and look at the first year or two of PS2 titles, they were not technically superior to the Dreamcast.
IMO the Dreamcast had 1-2 years as the best hardware on the market, and another 1-2 years on par with the PS2.
PS2 was far superior "on paper" but in reality, the difference was not as large as the numbers suggested at a glance. The Dreamcast did two things the PS2 didn't:
- Hidden face removal, making it vastly more efficient than the PS2 (most polygons in a scene are actually hidden by other polygons, so if you avoid rendering them that's an enormous win [1]
- Free hardware texture decompression, so it needed much less video memory [2]
Those points were subtle, though. The gaming press and internet chatter at the time was largely (and understandably) oblivious to tech subtleties like that.
In the end, obviously, the PS2 actually was superior once developers (and particularly middleware developers) mastered its tricky CPU. But I didn't consider it to really surpass the DC for a while.
That, and the controller was obnoxious.
I liked the controller unlike many, but the failure to include a second analog stick was a real miss. The sad thing is, the DC's controller protocol had support for dual analog inputs. They just didn't forsee the need.
The PS2 was backwards compatible with the PS1, so virtually all PS1 games from their huge library continued to be playable on PS2. And PS1 games were still shipping in 2000, 2001, and 2002.
Meanwhile, PS2 may have had a poor launch lineup but by 2001 it was rapidly improved with Gran Turismo 3, Grand Theft Auto 3 (by itself a killer app), Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Jak and Daxter, every sports franchise you could want, other smaller hits like Devil May Cry, Max Payne, etc. Meanwhile the Dreamcast was discontinued by March of 2001, just 5 months after PS2's North American debut.
I remember the launch being as attractive as you described (I was always lukewarm on Sonic, though). A few years later when the parents finally agreed to buy me that gen's console, I still went for the PS2 because of the catalog and DVD player, after a long streak of only buying Nintendo consoles. I borrowed a few other the years, but never the DC.
Competition was fierce. I like the arcade-Sega style of games and enjoyed the DC titles when I got my hands on them, but that was as far as I went.
The PS5 is a good example, it was announced over a year before it came out and I'm confident first-party developers could already work on games for the platform, but... exclusives were lackluster at best, and for the first year or two it was pretty much all cross-platform titles.
Probably for the best since production couldn't keep up with demand, so the PS5 was a slow burner that didn't yet need exclusives to sell the console.
PS4 wasn't too different. Many people held off on getting one until Bloodborne came out 16 months later.
I think Microsoft is the one in a really weird position ever since they started releasing PC versions of basically all their platform exclusives. Not that I'm complaining, but they've pretty much made it so there's zero reason for PC gamers to buy an Xbox, whereas there's still reasons to buy a Switch or PlayStation for the exclusives.
I wonder if Microsoft does this because gaming has been one of the biggest differentiators for their OS. That's an advantage that is rapidly fading and they want to hold onto it as long as possible.
Not sure if that stance is going to be relevant much longer. I recall Apple releasing a new framework that actually had some substance during their last keynote. I think Linus did a segment, they were running cyberpunk on Mac at 30FPS, not ideal sure, but it's a big step up.
I kind of totally missed the PS1 launch, but it would have had the advantage that most of the titles being worked on didn't have anywhere else to go, really.
It you're working on a maybe PS5 launch title, you can relatively easily decide to release it for PS4 instead.
Most PS1 titles are tied to a cd-rom, and maybe some of the other hardware, and would have been tough to release elsewhere. Sega CD and 3DO didn't have much traction, TG16-CD and Jag-CD even less, Saturn vs PS1 vs PC was the relevant choice, and I think Sony was better at attracting developers at the time.
Although, it should be pointed out Road Rash was widely ported, launching on 3DO, later releasing on Sega CD, PlayStation, Saturn and PC.
As a lifelong fan of turn-based JRPG titles, this rings true. The Saturn (and the SegaCD before it) had some great titles there, but the PS1 had a while lot more to choose from, while the N64 was very light. By the time the PS2 and DC rolled around, “what the kids want” was clearly moving away from what I wanted. Every indie or retro title in the genre was and is a gift since.
While the turn-based aspect had definitely become more niche by the time of the PS2, JRPGs were still abounding on it and (lesser so, but still) the DreamCast. It wasn't until PS3 that they started to wane; and now they're all but dead (outside of Japan).
lol why is this being downvoted? This is the truth.
Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales darling.
Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D games that were becoming less popular.
The result is that they had a system that had lots of good games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars the market was looking for.
If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things would have been different, but that didn't happen.
> Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
One of the best selling games of that generation was a JRPG (FF7), and it was most definitely a popular genre. Interest in it didn't begin waning until the next generation.
> The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
There were hundreds of "tent-pole 3D" games released for the N64 and PS1; yet people only remember a dozen or so. By your previous logic on JRPGs (which, again, were very popular in the "32-bit era"), this is not a mainstream..."genre".
Your memory of the whole era feels super anachronistic. The Saturn didn't fail because of it's games, it failed because it didn't have enough of them (by chasing third party developers away) and (as you touched on), the majority of the best ones never left Japan.
I was a gamer from Atari 2600 to Saturn. My experience was exactly that once I was bored with Virtua Fighter it felt like nothing good was coming out for it. Even Virtua Fighter while fun didn't stay that fun for very long.
I know I had just got it at New Years 1995/96. It was $399, $790 adjusted for inflation.
It is really one of the worst purchases of my life in terms of the excitement of coming home with it to not playing it a few months after. I had no other games but Virtua Fighter for it and it pretty much ruined my interest in gaming.
Why the downvotes? It definitely was a huge reason.
The Dreamcast had great games, most people agree with that. Most notoriously arcade games. But they were all somewhat niche, and Sega struggled to get the big licences necessary to achieve popular success. In particular: no EA, no Square-Enix, and way behind Nintendo when it comes to first party titles.
Optics, price point, word of mouth. Coming from the SNES as a kid, I only wanted the N64 and that's what I got. Very quickly the PSX got popular and games were stocked everywhere. No one talked about the Saturn.
I did get to play it when it was new (the Saturn), and the catalog I encountered was shitty FMV games and a shmup. I was not enamored.
The Dreamcast though, I remember being very attractive. The demos of Sonic Adventure looked absolutely astounding to me. I was late hopping on to that gen of consoles (parents strapped for cash), and still given the choice I went for the PS2, because it had the more attractive catalog and a DVD player. Years went by and I borrowed a GC to play Prime, an XBOX to play Ninja Gaiden and Halo, but I was not that motivated to try the DC.
This is a bad take. Sega actually had incredible advertising campaigns in the 90s. That iconic "SEGA!" yell was addictive and memeable. Advertising/marketing was never a problem for Sega.
Sega also had tons of mindshare. They fumbled the ball and Sony ran with it for a touchdown. End of story.
Very few autuers agree with you. They make blockbuster movies to finance the goodwill and pocketbooks of the films they want to make. This is why the critically "best" movies every year always go under the radar with relatively few ticket sales.
This is all to say, your opinion clearly isn't the universal one.
That’s not really what I was getting at (although it is generally true, and it is the original meaning of the phrase “the customer is always right”). My point was that advertising steers people’s opinions all the time. Better advertising would have ensured that the kids wanted the games that Sega would actually have.
Although I will also say that they must have known that a lot of kids would already want another Sonic game, so not having one at launch was a mistake. No need to steer people’s opinions if they are already in a convenient place.
32/64-bit Nintendo really didn't make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn't always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?).
In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There's something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, "Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we're gonna buy a PlayStation.'