a fun hypothetical i came up with: if you could release any game made after 1990 5 years earlier, which would make the most impact?

[nintara]

NOTE: THIS IS ASSUMING THE GAME GETS DOWNGRADED TO THE HARDWARE OF IT'S TIME AND LOOKS AS DETAILED COMPARED TO IT'S NEW PEERS AS IT DOES COMPARED TO IT'S OLD ONES, ALSO NOTHING THAT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE LIKE WII SPORTS

my pick would be sonic adventure. having a fully 3d mainline sonic game right at the start of the saturn's lifespan would be HUGE for the console. it could possibly extend sega's hardware efforts by at least a generation. hell, it might even match the psx in terms of commercial success at least in the beginning. though i still feel like the playstation would come out on top overall considering how much better it was at handling polygonal 3d and the hype it already accrued from developers.

still at the very least it would have put nintendo in a really bad spot. a big part of the reason why mario 64 was so beloved was because of the new standard it set for 3d platformers, as well as for being one of the first 3d platformers that people knew about. so sonic adventure's existence in 1994 would knock a lot of wind out of it's sails i feel, especially if sonic team reused the engine for some sequels. hell, i could even see them muscling nintendo out of the home console market altogether considering how crowded it would be if microsoft, sony, nintendo, and sega were all major players simultaneously.

feel free to also make it about which game would make the best/worst change.

 

[Ferik]

I don't think a downgraded Sonic Adventure would have even been possible. The Saturn frankly doesn't have remotely enough RAM to handle levels that large and can't stream them anywhere near fast enough, not to mention the water effects, including the main antagonist, being completely impossible on hardware prior to the Dreamcast which is precisely why so much water is featured in the game.

A 3D Sonic game of some sort? Sure, but Adventure at its core simply wouldn't have been possible even with a lower polycount. The game was simply designed as such.

 

[nintara]

oops

 

[fake-kun]

Mega Man & Bass. I firmly believe that it would make a better Mega Man 7 than the actual Mega Man 7.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Sonic would have people flipping the heck out.

 

[Ferik]

I think an interesting game to consider would be Pokemon Red/Blue. The Game Boy was actually a dying product before Pokemon breathed new life into it and Nintendo was planning on releasing a 16 bit handheld around 98 that got delayed due to technical issues and ended up getting reworked into the 32 bit GBA. Could the Wonderswan or NeoGeo Pocket actually have gained some sort of momentum had Pokemon already run its initial hype half a decade earlier?

Post automatically merged: Jul 21, 2025

Sonic would have people flipping the heck out.

I mean it had people flipping out in 98. People seem to forget that game launched in Japan in the same window as Ocarina of Time and Crash Bandicoot Warped. Sonic Adventure was absolutely mental.

I've heard people in more recent times try to argue that Sonic doing 6 characters was already old hat and a dumb idea since DK64 had 5 characters and was bad, which Sega should have learned from. Which is an absurd claim on two counts. First DK64 was pretty highly regarded at launch, and second it came out a year after Sonic Adventure.

 

[Ezri_Muldoon]

Specifically 5 years?
Damn, that rules out Sonic Adventure appearing as a launch title on the Saturn.
If that has happened it could have wound up being the foundational bedrock for narrative presentation in gaming instead of Half-Life.
I'm hard pressed to even think of a modern AAA game that isn't partily a Half-Life derivative.
Unless its a Nintendo game lol They're just derivative of themselves or Rareware.

hmm...

 

[dropsmegamega]

Super Mario RPG releasing basically as a super famicom launch title would have been insane

 

[Bakuma1997]

Simcity, already revolutionary to have a "whole" PC game in SNES, now imagine all that in the NES