May 1995, the first E3 in Los Angeles. Sega has just announced its new console at $399 when a Sony executive walks to the podium, says $299, and walks off. This episode explains how Sega handed Sony that sledgehammer, and treats the Sega Saturn as a master class in organizational failure: an internal civil war, panicked engineering, alienated retailers, and a mascot that never showed up.

We look at a 2D machine hastily rebuilt to chase the PlayStation, ending up with eight processors, two Hitachi SH-2 CPUs sharing one bus, and quadrilaterals instead of triangles that forced developers into custom assembly code. Then the boardroom: Sega of Japan vetoing Tom Kalinske’s proposed partnerships with Sony and Silicon Graphics, the 32X stopgap released months before the Saturn, the surprise launch that shipped units to only four retailers and prompted a KB Toys boycott, six launch titles, the cancelled Sonic X-treme, Bernie Stolar declaring the Saturn is not our future, and the decision to block Japanese RPGs like Sakura Wars and Grandia from the West.

• Why two world-class processors sharing the same memory bus spent their time waiting in line behind each other
• How the Silicon Graphics chip Sega rejected became the foundation of the Nintendo 64
• Why a shadow drop that works for digital releases today broke physical retail supply chains in 1995
• The turf war over the Nights into Dreams engine and the crunch that made Sonic X-treme developers physically ill
• How 9.26 million units, fewer than 20,000 copies of Panzer Dragoon Saga, and the analog 3D pad define the Saturn’s legacy