The History of Sega Fighting Games
Page 18 of 19
 
By early 1997, though, things were starting to look troublesome for Sega and the Saturn. Word from insiders had it that Sega was working feverishly to complete a new game console that would be able to do better translations of Sega's arcade games, and Sega executives started to quietly state that Virtua Fighter 3 was not going to come out for the Saturn, with or without the upgrade (which had been canceled because of low Saturn sales). The game's home release date in Japan was unclear, as was that for Sonic the Fighters, and speculation about when the new Sega console would premiere with VF3 as its flagship title took off.


Fighter's Megamix comes to the U.S.
Fighters Megamix was released in the United States, where poor sales of the Saturn hardware had so crippled Sega that the company had to act proud of the game's number three overall ranking on the Electronics Boutique sales chart. Then word from Japan came that Sega was working on a second new console, codenamed Dural after Virtua Fighter's chrome-covered final boss character, and would be choosing between the American and Japanese developed machines for a single worldwide release.


Last Bronx on the Sega Saturn
At the third E3 trade show, Sega appeared with only Last Bronx for the Saturn on hand (and later releases it in Japan two months later) and no press announcements about Virtua Fighter 3. People who once said that the game was never coming out for the Saturn were now claiming that the game had only been "delayed" in development but was still coming out. Whether Sega changed its mind is presently unknown, and whether VF3 for the new Sega console will be a launch title is also unclear.

The only fact that remains is that Sega, through five years of hard development work, many failures, and a number of growing successes, managed to climb to the top of the fighting game world by early 1997 - in Japan at the very least. Even Virtua Fighter series detractors admit that the game's graphics are the best at the present time - though Konami's Fighting Wu-Shu may well take that crown in days to come - and that Sega has formulated a more successful strategy than its competitors for bringing old and new players to each successive VF sequel. By comparison, Capcom was forced to swallow a tremendous defeat with the releases of its Street Fighter EX fighting game, which was judged using VF3 as a benchmark, and Street Fighter III, which has similarly been rated as underpowered and unoriginal by comparison to its 2-D peers. Sega's Virtua Fighter 3 has outperformed all competitors in Japan for months now, remaining at number one despite the subsequent releases of Tekken 3, Street Fighter III, SF EX, and others, and ranks above a number of prominent comers in the dedicated video arcade machine market in the United States as well. What Sega's future is, no one can know, but its emergence as a powerhouse in the field of one-on-one fighting games is a certainty.

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