On November 22nd, 1994, the Sega Saturn was released in Japan, making the classic Sega console twenty years old today. Our friends over at Segabits have covered the anniversary in an article called SEGA Saturn’s 20th Anniversary: Celebrating Decades of Arcade Perfection.
Panzer Dragoon was originally planned as a launch title, however Team Andromedia missed the deadline. In a NowGamer article on the making of the Panzer Dragoon series, Kentaro Yoshida (who was an artist on the original Panzer), explains:
“The schedule we were working to was really tight,” Kentaro says. “We actually ended up missing our deadline, which was set as the Japanese launch day of the Saturn hardware. At first we were on the same schedule as the team producing Clockwork Knight, but no matter how hard we worked there was no way we were going to be able to meet that deadline, so Sega ended up putting Clockwork Knight out first and releasing Panzer Dragoon some months later. Sega had wanted a launch line-up of Clockwork Knight, Virtua Fighter and Panzer Dragoon…”
The delay was not surprising considering that Team Andromeda didn’t even have a Saturn to test the game on until late in development. Kentaro elaborates:
At the beginning of Panzer Dragoon’s development, the Saturn hardware wasn’t finalised and we didn’t have any prototype consoles to test with. The artists were using Silicon Graphics’ SoftImage, and the 3D graphics were programmed on workstations using OpenGL. After a while, we were finally able to send things across to the [debug] Saturn we’d received, but the transition was really difficult for the programmers. Of all of us, I’d say the programmers probably had the most difficult job, because of the volume of 3D work they had to get through. They used both of the Saturn’s GPUs in tandem, but I’m not sure how well that really worked out… [laughs]. Early on, the frame rate was terribly low, but eventually they got it up to 20fps.
The development of the Panzer Dragoon series was riddled with challenges and it’s quite amazing that we got the three high quality titles during the Saturn’s lifetime. If you had to ask me to pick one console that I have the fondest memories of, it would be the Sega Saturn: games such as NiGHTS, Shining Force III, and of course Panzer Dragoon Saga stand out as some of the greatest games ever made.