A recent Sega of America leak from way back in 1996 reveals that the company believed that its 1995 console, the Sega Saturn, was handily winning the console wars over Sony's original PlayStation. Ultimately, Sega would stop making consoles after the market failure of both the Saturn and its 1999 follow-up, the Dreamcast.Sega has been out of the console game for a while now. The company announced back in 2001 that it would only be focusing on its software moving forward in light of its multiple recent hardware failures between the Dreamcast, the Saturn, and also handhelds like the Game Gear and Nomad. Apparently, though, that's not what Sega thought at first. A recently leaked document from the company shows a surprising amount of confidence in the Saturn in its fight against Sony's behemoth console debut, the PlayStation.The leaked document is a massive 272-page PDF that began circulating around the internet recently. It reveals a lot of information about Sega and the Saturn at the time, including sales, email correspondence, and the poor retail margins that many stores were having to deal with. The strangest detail of the leak is some of the talk about how well the Sega Saturn was doing in comparison to the PlayStation. An email from Tom Kalinske, former CEO of Sega of America, to other major Sega execs at the time reads, "We are killing Sony. In every store, Saturn hardware is sold out and there are stacks of PlayStation." Kalinske then asks the email group how best that success can be shown at E3 so that more people would grow confident in the Saturn's eventual success in the US.
That success in the US never came, of course. The most liberal estimate of Sega Saturn sales comes in at around 17 million units sold. The PlayStation 1 is estimated to have sold more than 102 million units worldwide. Sony's console remained in production until 2006, a full five years after the Saturn's successor the Sega Dreamcast went out of production. If there was ever a case for legitimate competition between the Saturn and the PlayStation, the retrospective sales numbers certainly put it to bed.
Tom Kalinske ultimately resigned from Sega following the failure of the Saturn. His time as CEO saw the company become a juggernaut in the industry, and virtually the only competition to Nintendo during its SNES days. There's been a lot of drama and discussion about the failure of the Saturn in the years since, as it effectively marked the beginning of Sega's fall from video game hardware stardom, and this new document leak gives adamant fans and historians a surprising amount of new details to study and consider.
Source: Sega Retro
