segata sanshiro

Segata Sanshiro is none other then the person who managed to keep the Sega Saturn in business even up to the end of 1998, all by himself. Sadly, only in Japan - The Saturn was dead by '97 in Europe and America. Most likely because of the poor marketing, as the Saturn ads in America (for example) were crap, especially compared to Sony's Playstation. The game support was horrible too, while the Playstation pushed 3D titles, the Saturn was more of a 2D machine, and those games clearly did not sell well outside Japan - Just how many of us know about the Puyo Puyo or Puzzle Bobble series for example? Or Keio Flying Squadron? Also, even though the Saturn was clearly more powerful in many aspects over the Playstation, it was very hard to program to due to the many different CPUs in it. This made Playtation - Saturn ports hard to do, as the programmers had to recode the whole game to the Saturn enviroment. Just porting the whole game (which many developers did) resulted in horrible choppiness, slowdown, worse graphics, and an overally worse gameplay (think about Castlevania for example). This gave the Saturn an even worse image. Not in Japan tho. The developers here released quality 2D titles as well as some breathtaking 3d games - over 800 Saturn games were released here, while only around 200-300 titles hit the stores in Europe and America. But that was not what made the Saturn a hit that it was. It was Segata Sanshiro. Segata Sanshiro was played by the actor named Hiroshi Fujioka (born: 19th February, 1946) he was also the voice of Ryo's father in the Shenmue series but probably more well known for his performance in Kamen Rider. The idea for Segata's character come from a Kurosawa movie, "Sanshiro Sugata", a story of a guy struggling to learn judo (I have not personally seen the movie, but most sites say it's from there. With a name like that, I could hardly disagree). Segata is quite a bit hyped up compared to that though, he doesn't seem to be struggling at all. In fact, he has a superhuman power at his will, the power of the Sega Saturn. Being the best marketing campaign SEGA ever made, and possibly the best Video Game marketing campaign ever done, Segata proceeded to kick the ass of EVERYONE who weren't playing quality Sega Saturn games. Later he won Soccer World Cups for Japan, saved people from burning houses, and showed off his vast superhuman power and knowledge, all powered by his devotion to SEGA and the Sega Saturn. His battle cry, "Sega Saturn, Shiro!" became more or less the anthem of the Sega Saturn itself. Also note the pun in it, as "Shiro" can mean both "play (with something, in this case the Sega Saturn)" and "white" which was the color of many Japanese Saturns, including the ones that appear on every one of Segata's commercials. These commercials started airing from the end of 1997 and they were up for about a year. For more info on them, check out the Videos page. Segata Sanshiro was a true gaming idol, a one-and-only legend in gaming history, a videogame mascot who literally died for the company (in his last commercial, the finale), and the console he loved. His success was so huge that it spawned many things aside from his famous commercials, namely his own theme song (later released on a soundtrack), REMIXED soundtracks, a whole game devoted enterily to him (named "Segata Sanshiro Shinkenyugi"), action figures, and god knows how many other things, he even makes cameos in some of todays video games (namely "Rent-a-hero No. 1" - on the Dreamcast and Xbox.) He also spawned many small and hardly noticed fansites across the internet - which brings us to this site, which I intend to be the ultimate Segata Sanshiro resource.