I'm not sure. The rumor that Sega changed the Saturn's design after learning about the PSone's specs are just that; a rumor. I haven't been able to find a real source for it, besides a quote on Wikipedia that even Wikipedia itself didn't trust. My feeling is that even the original Saturn was capable of 3D graphics beyond what was possible in generation 5, and even the enhanced Saturn of our timeline would have had a lot more 2D backgrounds and stuff incorporated into games that were fully 3D in our timeline.

As for sales fighures, here's the preliminary figures I have for my timeline.

First, with the Saturn arriving a few months later and the PSOne never existing, I estime that about another 5 million 4th generation consoles would have been sold. Note how The Super Nintendo decisively wins in Japan, is somewhat ahead in America, and is on par with the Genesis in the rest of the world.

The fifth generation is not a good one for Nintendo, much like in real life. Indeed, the Sega Saturn, despite its weaker 3D and/or more complicated design matter little compared to the expense and limits of cartridges compared to CDs. The only major 3rd parties that are strongly pro-Nintendo are Square and Enix, who even in our timeline initially designed their Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games for the N64. Therefore, on the back of Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot, DDR, niche JRPGs, Metal Gear Solid, and real-life Saturn games like Virtua Fighter and arcade ports, the Saturn sells somewhat better than the N64 in Japan.

In America, things remain largely unchanged from the 4th generation. Nintendo still has Mario, Zelda, and the RPGs that Westerners care about, and Sega has fighters, arcade games, and sports games. And what the Saturn lacks in Sonic it makes up for in 3rd party support. Thus, the market expands only slightly.

In Europe and various other parts of the world, the situation is similar to America, except smaller. Remember, console gaming only really grew in popularity there after the PSone. In real life, the N64 grew in proportion to the Saturn, so I'm giving it the grrowth that does occur in this timeline, but there's not much.

Thus, generation 5 sells about 90 million systems, compared to over 140 million in our timeline. The lack of a PlayStation generation with its low development costs and wider appeal hurts gaming a lot.

Let's face it; neither Sega nor Nintendo did anything to expand gaming in the 6th generation either. Console Gaming is particularly hurt by a weird thing; disc size. The GameCube and Dreamcast discs held a maximum of under 1.5 GB of data, compared to the PS2's 4.7 GB DVDs. This greatly discourages porting PC games over and also disencourages experimenting with open world games. Also, because the Dreamcaast only has one analog stick, that just hurts games that require extensive camera controls even more.

As for individual regions, there is little change. None of the 1st party games of this era blew anybody away, and the neo-Dreamcast and GameCube are similar enough to encourage a lot of multiplatform titles. The Dreamcast had the advantage of online play, which helped it gain ground in America, but without a shooter culture on the consoles from a game like Halo, this matters little.

Finally, some real growth! Well, outside of Japan. Note that that this data is as of alternate 2011, so numbers may still increase.

First thing you'll notice in the chart is that Nintendo wins. This is because of strong first party efforts and the continued sharing of 3rd party support. Of particular note are games like Wii Fit, a New Super Mario Bros, and an online Mario Kart. The second thing you'll note is how most of the growth came from Nintendo outside of Japan and America. I believe that Nintendo would use their handhelds as a Trojan horse to build a prescence in these parts of the world, and would eventually be able to sell games in far more countries than Sega could. Nintendo's emphasis on games that require little localization effort during the 7th generation, as opposed to, say, Valkyria Chronicles and Sonic the Hedgehog, also helps.

Next post, I'll do some software sales figures.

Note that the following figures, even more than the ones above, are preliminary. In other words, they WILL change. You can help by telling me how to do so.

Anyhow, let's look at the new Saturn's lineup!

The thing you should notice first is that the chart is headed by a lot of the same games that sold the Saturn in real life. For instance, Virtua Fighter 2, which is this timeline's Tekken 3 by default. Also note though, that in lieu of Sonic, Crash Bandicoot becomes the platforming mascot of the Saturn, despite being a third party title not even published by Sega! Next, we should remember that although this version of the Saturn has a few multi-million sellers, most of even the more sucessful games sold modestly. This is partially due to Sega of America's policy against localizing 2D or particularly Japanese games unless under extreme pressure. Which is not to say they were never exported; look how Ubisoft was able to slip in Rayman.

N64

Other than the prescence of some very nice RPGs, this chart is similar to ourt timeline's N64 top sellers, only bigger thanks to the lack of competition. Honestly, there isn't much to talk about. Just please note how popular the most influential 3D platformer ever is, and the fact that like on the GameCube and Wii, Mario Kart sells to 1/3 of owners. Also note that the big JRPGs sell somewhat less, thanks to the smaller platform.

Dreamcast Games

Somehow, I hear a Sega fan gasping with joy. Anyway, the first thing to mention is how the list is headed by Sonic games. Sonic Adventure, like in our timeline, leads the Dreamcast. Metal Gear Solid is another big game, especially since it sells for most of the Dreamcast's life. Sports games are also popular, Super Monkey Ball becomes one of Sega's key casual/middlecore franchises, and many popular PS2 games appear on this list instead.

GameCube Games

The prescence of two Final Fantasy games right after Wind Waker should tell you all you really need to know. The GameCube is essentially what Nintendo wanted it to be in real life, with a lot of multiplatform games, 3D incarnations of Nintendo franchises, the ocassional new thing like Animal Crossing and Pikmin, and an exclusive 3rd party game or three. Once again, Mario Kart sells to about 1/3 of GameCube owners, while Sunshine and Melee sell between what they did in real life and what Galaxy and Brawl do. One more thing of note is how Resident Evil 4 is an exclusive game in this timeline. I'm sorry, but the Dreamcast doesn't have what it takes.

Estimated System Specs are next.

One other question is why didnt saturn have a sonic game? I know why it didnt in real life but with its extended life u dont think one would ever come out? But other than that its an awesome piece of work

First of all, here are real life's system specs.

The N64, GameCube, and possibly the Saturn will remain constant in my timeline, although as mentioned above, the rumor about Sega changing the Saturn in response to the PlayStation remains a possibility.

The easiest question to answer was "What should the new Dreamcast's specs look like?" The answer had to do with the Dreamcast's origins: NAOMI. Basically, the Dreamcast was the consolized version of an arcade system that has since become one of the most popular ever, housing games like Marvel vs Capcom 2, Dead or Alive 2, Crazy Taxi, Guilty Gear X, The House of the Dead 2, Power Stone, Samba de Amigo, and Virtua Tennis 1 and 2. My guess was that with an extra two years, Sega would pick hardware as similar as it as possible to create an army of easy ports. This would be especially important since arcades last longer in this timeline.

And so, the new Dreamcast's specs... are essentially the Vanila Dreamcast's specs with an extra 30 MB of RAM.

Crude, I know. But entirley possible IMO, especially since that would make the Dreamcast behind the GameCube in all areas but one, to match its coming out a year earlier.

Now, the strength of the 7th generation consoles! A lot of it was guesswork. Ultimately, I decided a couple of things.

1. They would be stronger than the Wii, since the Wii was made as a matter of last resort by a desperate company.

2. They would be weaker than the PS360, since neither company would be willing to release consoles that cost $800 to make.

3. They would likely aim for the middle ground of $300, the upper range of what consumers accept from a pure gaming machine. However, more expensive skus could exist.

4. Neither system would have a true DVD or Blue Ray player, since that sort of thing only happened after Sony entered the market. They would likely use DVD technology, so your typical disc would hold about 4.7 GB, maybe 8.5 GB if you splurged.

So, what we were looking for was a machine that, in 2006, could be sold for $300 with, say, 512 MB of internal memory and a controller. In other words, the cost of a Wii in 2006 plus $140, if you factor in the cost of a Wiimote/Nunchuck combo and Wii Sports versus that of a standard controler.

In other words, the system would have to be closer to a Wii than a PS360. So the next step was to look at real life data again.

RAM: Wii has 91 MB, the HD twins have 512ish. Therefore, let's try 256 MB of RAM.

CPU: Wii is at 729 MB, HD twins at 3200ish. Therefore, about 1800 to 2000. Incidentally, this is as much as the Vita has.

GPU: Wii has 243 MB, HD systems about 500. So anything in the 300 to 400 range is acceptable. Once again, the Vita falls in this range.

File sizes: As mentioned above, probably 4.7 GB for a standard disc, compared to the Vita's 4.

That's right. We're talking about home console versions of the Vita in 2006!

This is actually a neat piece of info, since we can look at Vita games to figure out what alternate timeline 7th generation games would have been like. For example, Assassin's Creed would have been a lot like Liberation for the Vita, Action Adventure shooters would be similar to Golden Abyss, 2D platformers would be like Rayman Origins, etc, etc.

Last off, an overview of this alternate universe's handhelds.

Sonic Adventure got starteed in April 1997. By the time they finished it, late 1998, it would have been the twilight years of the Saturn's life. Imagine if Nintendo released their first Mario platformer for the Wii in 2010! I personally think they would have pulled a Twilight Princess/Pikmin 3 with it and changed systems halfway through as the possibilities of the new hardware became available and the likelihood of the game selling well on the system decreased.Besides, if they had finished the game for the Saturn, they'd lack a killer app to launch the Dreamcast with.

Which is not to say another Sonic spinoff was impossible. Hell, there could even have been another Sonic platformer. Sonic Team released Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure for the Neo Geo Pocket Color after all; maybe they could have instead made a 2D Sonic for the Saturn's latter years.

But by that time, the platforming niche on the Dreamcast was already defined by Crash and Spyro. Sonic would have to compete with 3rd party mascots in their heydays.

Still, good point. I guess this is the sort of question people in this timeline would talk about.

Oh, and thanks!

Oh how I wish that timeline was true :)

Anyways, I have to correct you on Tekken. Viruta Fighter 2 has technically better graphics than all the Tekkens except 3 (where the lighting is the differentiating factor) and Yu Suzuki said that Sega had a version of Viruta Fighter 3 running on Saturn that looked better than that (but We'll never know how it looked because they scrapped it and made the game for Dreamcast instead.)

Ironically, I'm glad it isn't. Sad as it is that Sega is dead, I've come to appreciate what Sony and Microsoft have done for the industry over the past 17 and 11 years.

What if nintendo consoles came out on time? Ive seen that SNES was originally planned for 1990, N64 in 1995 and Gamecube in 2000. In this timeline Nintendo releases Super Mario 3 in 1989 which would take away any hype for the Genesis and SNES releasing in Nov 90 with Super Mario World would make Sonic have less of an impact although i still see it selling well. Genesis sales would be mostly unaffected in Europe(6.5million) and Japan(3.5million) but take a hit in NA(10million) compared to Eu-7.5million, Jap-17million, NA-28million. Sega never releases the Sega CD or 32x and instead launches the Giga Drive Nov. 93 in Japan and Aug 9418 in the west.

Giga Drive is the rumored original specs for saturn, a 2D powerhouse with moderate 3D abilities and uses cd's. Launch price is $249 and top games include Sonic 3(includes sonic&knuckles) and Mortal Kombat 2. It had a tough first holiday going against Donkey Kong Country whose graphics were better than Giga's initial games. SNES continued to be the best selling console until summer of 95 when Virtua Fighter and Daytona released. These games showed off just about the full power of Giga but its momentum was halted in Sept when Playstation released and came with top games like Toshinden and Ridge Racer. Both these games were far superior to the games Giga had released to this point. In Nov Nintendo.llaunched the Ultra 64 with Super Mario 64. By march U64 had outsold Giga and was also outselling PS. Around this time Sega dropped gigas price to $179 compared to $299 for PS and

$249 for U64. Sega realized they couldnt compete with there rivals in terms of 3D graphics so they started focusing on 2D games like Burning Rangers and Sonic 4 with the occasional 3D game like Nights and Panzer Dragoon. With its lower price and still a market for 2D games, giga started to sell better. PS and 64 started getting quality games like Tekken, Resident Evil (PS) and Turok, Mario Kart (64). At the end of 96 U64 was still outselling PS. In June of 97 Nintendo released Zelda:OoT and Square released Final Fantasy 7 for PS these games sold massive amounts and sales were pretty even for U64 and PS in 97. In 98 PS started to outsellU64 thanks to its continued 3rd party support while Nintendo relied heavily on 1st party games