Sega's much
maligned 32 bit games console, the
Saturn came out a little before
Sony's
Playstation. Crushed by Sony's superior
marketing, and largely ignored by consumers who had been stung by Sega's poor support for their
Mega-CD and
32X expansions for the
Megadrive (AKA
Genesis), the Saturn is widely considered to have been a failure.
However, the Saturn boasts a number of excellent games, personal favourites being NiGHTS into Dreams, Sega Rally and Saturn Bomberman. The Saturn was also the first console to boast a Tomb Raider game. It was marketing and lack of third-party support that killed the Saturn, and not technical inferiority.
Until the arrival of the Dreamcast, the Saturn remained the platform of choice for sprite-heavy 2D fighting games, with their strong following in Japan -- at least for those who could not afford a Neo-Geo.