We were surprised by Sega announcing the Mega Drive Mini 2 in Japan last week, based on what in America we were introduced as the Sega Genesis 32X and Sega CD. But actually, Sega wanted to go beyond that.

As per the proper media tour that followed the announcement, Sega's Yosuke Okunari confirmed to Famitsu, that the company was researching on how it was possible to make a Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast mini and YES you have read right so far.

Unfortunately, we are not bound for news anytime soon as Okunari revealed that there were many roadblocks and not only the semiconductor shortage, but practically the power of both consoles are just too big to be put on a smaller scale.

Sega Saturn was originally launched in 1995, four months earlier than anticipated as Sega wanted to leap forward with whatever Sony got in store for the gaming industry as a turn at E3 that year was already taken as an imminent announcement.

In Sega' fashion, the console was ahead of its time and had a great first year thanks to the success of Sega Genesis and gamers eager to see what's next with franchises like Into The Nights, Panzer Dragoon & Virtua Fighter.

Unfortunately, lack of support from third party studios with notable exceptions and the success of Nintendo 64 in 1996 derailed the sales of Saturn.

Which brings us to Sega Dreamcast, launched on November 1998 at Japan and 10 months later in our market, while being a success it is first years, emulated the problems with the Saturn as being unsupported heavily due being way ahead of time (despite that Playstation 2, Nintendo Gamecube and Xbox ended being their proper competitor and successor for the 6th generation of video games) and being too much of a niche.

Dreamcast is well remembered for having titles like  Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, Shenmue, and Sonic Adventure.

Unfortunately the detail of both Saturn and Dreamcast at the time provoked so much loss for Sega that the company could no longer afford being a hardware company and to save itself, restructured as a third party publisher for Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft in much of the disbelief of people.

Honestly I am surprised BIG TIME that Sega Saturn could not be sintetize enough to be put on "small scale" to consider "Mini", despite that Sony could do on its side with the Playstation, but let's remember that Sega no longer have a direct Hardware R&D and most of hardware stuff post Dreamcast is being licensed or subsidized which means NO direct control.

For the Dreamcast Mini on the contrary, I am not surprised that Sega failed which also means that we should not expect a Playstation 2 anytime soon.

Let's hope that Sega resumes in due time and hopefully, current technology improves to physically allow harness both console's power to be "minimized".

Vía: TechRadar