Racketboy

Sega seems to have gotten out of its rut of producing not-so-creative new games and has focused on republishing many of its old-school classics via the Wii’s Virtual Console, the PSP and PS2 Genesis Collection, and possibly even the XBox Live Arcade and the PS3’s upcoming online service.

This topic leads me to a juicy little tidbit of information leaked by Dave Karraker (Sony’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications) in a recent interview with Gamasutra.

Once you skip though the first four pages of Sony hype, you find this side-conversation on page 5…

“Gamasutra: This is a bit of a stretch, but I know there’’s a very good Saturn emulator for the PSP [the GiriGiri emulator has been officially licensed for PSP, and was used for Atlus'portable version of Princess Crown]

Dave Karraker: Ah, Saturn,– that takes me back!

GS: As an ex-Saturn person, do you think there’’s any chance of that downloadable content there?

DK: Oh, absolutely! Don’’t say that I said you’re going to be able to download Saturn games though. The cool thing about Sony and about the platforms we’’re working on is that it does open itself up to allow a lot of downloadable content from other catalogues, and you heard Ken talk about how we could do something like the entire Turbo Grafx 16 catalogue, pulling that over. So that’s what’s possible, but we haven’’t announced anything.

GS: I’’m an old Saturn fan, so….

DK: Panzer Dragoon, man, that was the game.”

As you can see, Karraker sure as heck did not deny the possibility. Those of you that are not big Sega fans may be wondering why this is such a big deal. While a number of systems like the NES, Sega Genesis, and Playstation have been emulated well for years, both the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast have yet to have rock-solid emulators — even on the PC. In fact, because of its complex dual-processor architecture, some would argue that the Saturn is actually more of a challenge to emulate than the Dreamcast. (The Dreamcast would need more CPU speed, but the Saturn is just a nightmare overall). Combine this with the fact that there are a large number of great Sega Saturn games that still haven’t been ported to newer consoles, it is a very big step to bring these classics to modern hardware.

You may have also noticed that emulating a Saturn game has already been done on the PSP. For those of you that haven’t heard of Giri Giri, it was an emulator project like any other for the very-hard-to-emulate Sega Saturn. Considering the complexity of the console and the troubles other Saturn emulators were running into, GiriGiri had surprisingly high compatibility early on. The project quickly died down after a while before being picked up by Sega themselves.

Sega originally used GiriGiri as a Saturn component in a Japanese online service for downloading and playing old-school Sega games on a PC (think a pure-Sega GameTap). Fast forward a few years and, as mentioned above, Princess Crown (an obscure, but fun Japanese game) was released on the PSP via the emulator. (This isn’t the first time a enthusiast-grown emulator wcommercial commericial purposes).

Anyway, if the PSP does have some steam left in it, it would be incredible to see the Saturn emulated commercially (on a portable, no less). And if that does occur, I would imagine it would be likely that the ability to play the purchased Saturn games on the PS3 would be a possiblity as well, much like their PS1 counterparts.

Similar Posts From These Categories:
Sega, Saturn, PSP