SEGASaturno - Saturn, SEGA y Videojuegos

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Virtua Fighter 3, the third incarnation of Yu Suzuki's groundbreaking 3D fighting game, first hit Japanese arcades on 10 September 1996. It immediately became the standard by which all comers were measured - partly due to the depth of its gameplay, and partly because the game's graphics (generated by the new Sega Model 3 board) shattered all previous records for polygon counts in a videogame. Sega brought over some cabinets for display at that year's Electronics Consumer Trade Show in the U.S., and both vendors and gamers alike were wowed by what they saw. VF3, as it is commonly abbreviated, soon became the topic of much speculation among Saturn owners. A port was inevitable - they just knew it - and rumors were already flying that such a port was well underway. Officially, Sega kept mum, but the hype continued to build through the rest of the year and into 1997. On 28 November, Yu Suzuki himself said in a public interview, "AM2 and myself will take full responsibility for the translation." It was now official - VF3 was coming to a Saturn near you. Or was it? Sega kept promising a Saturn port ... and it kept getting delayed ... and delayed ... and delayed ... until it dropped off the radarscope altogether. Sega of Japan had already started to hint that the port might be canned in early 1997, and its absence in the Saturn software section at E3 1997 seemed only to confirm this. Sega of America did a lot of back-pedalling on these and other reports, but they (as we know) were not the ones running the show by that point. Actually, and this was unknown to everybody until the following year, Yu Suzuki and his staff at AM2 had finished a considerably scaled-down Saturn port of VF3 by 03 July 1998, but by time Sega of Japan was dead set against releasing it. Why? As it was later revealed, Sega of Japan executives felt that a port of VF3 for the dying Saturn might hurt the superior port already in development for Sega's newest console - the Dreamcast. Instead, they just kept on tweaking the game and refused to release it. VF3 for Saturn was officially cancelled on 17 September 1998 even though Sega of Japan had the completed game ready to send to the pressing plants. In the meantime, however, gamers got tired of Sega putting them on hold yet again and went to PlayStation for Tekken 3 instead.