The growing pains of the games industry as it transitioned from a 2D medium to a 3D one are well documented. Sega’s Saturn was at the heart of this story, and designer Kats Sato’s early 2D/3D Saturn title Clockwork Knight reflected these times.
Arguably, everything changed when Sega received word of the impressive 3D tech powering Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation. 3D Saturn games then suddenly became Sega’s top priority, as the designer of Clockwork Knight remembers. “We had heard a rumour that the PlayStation could display a lot of polygons, but we couldn’t believe it, because technically that was quite difficult to do,” Sato observes. “Our hardware architect hadn’t designed the Saturn like that, because Sega had a history of making games with big sprites and background images. However, the Saturn could display some polygons, so we could make 3D games, and that became Sega’s mission.”
Subsequent revisions to the Saturn’s hardware enhanced its 3D capabilities, and around the same time Sega asked some of its coin-op staff to develop for the console, which resulted in Sato changing departments and disciplines. “When Sega decided to start the major project of developing the Saturn, I was working in the AM1 Department as an artist and my boss was the department head,” Sato notes. “He then moved to the consumer department, and he personally assigned me to join him was my first game design.”
