this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
83 points (96.6% liked)
Games
32371 readers
2124 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn't access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.
Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.
PlayStation's killer app was likely Crash Bandicoot as that game paved the way for Sony (games like Wipeout, Ridge Racer and Tekken helped too) and gave them some real momentum, it just got better from there. I still remember playing the Demo of Crash and being absolutely blown away.
By the time FF7 released, the Nintendo 64 had launched so that probably contributed to the Saturn's downfall as well.
Funny, I thought of mentioning Crash Bandicoot, but when I put myself into the shoes of 12-year-old me, the single game that came to mind when I thought PlayStation was Final Fantasy 7 more than anything else.
Oh I definitely don't disagree, FF7, Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid all cemented PlayStation as a force to be reckoned with for suren and can be considered killer apps. I just remember for me getting a PlayStation personally being just wowed by the likes of Crash Bandicoot and Tekken. Fond memories for sure!