SEGA’s producer was pessimistic about the possibilities, although he did admit that the Japanese company had thought about such a…

Yosuke Okunari, SEGA’s classic hardware producer, told Japan’s Famitsu that he had considered “minis” for the post-SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis generations but that the cost of producing the parts would be too high if a mini console release of the SEGA Saturn or SEGA Dreamcast were made.

After all, SEGA announced the Mega Drive/Genesis Mini 2 a few days ago (and we wrote about it). Okunari said, “Some of you may say ‘this isn’t a Sega Saturn Mini’ or ‘I wanted a Dreamcast mini’, it’s not that we didn’t think about that direction. The development of new boards has been stagnant due to the Coronavirus and, of course, it would be a fairly expensive product in terms of cost.” The Dreamcast launched earlier than the PlayStation 2, which quickly wiped SEGA from the console market.

Although the SEGA Dreamcast didn’t last long, it still released many outstanding games (or franchises). Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Rez, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, and Phantasy Star Online launched on it. The PlayStation 2’s success (which had a massive part of doing with the fact that it was available at a bargain price compared to desktop DVD players, and the PS2 was capable of being used as a DVD player, too…) quickly put the Dreamcast on the back foot, but it was still a decent platform. (The GD-ROM format with 1 GB of storage was a drawback, and piracy was relatively easy.)

SEGA Mega Drive Mini 2 launches in Japan on October 27, but no word yet on a Western release. The first model was released in 2019, and the game list of forty-two titles varies by region. New was a previously unreleased new port for Darius and Tetris. Such an expansion can rightly be expected from the second-generation Mega Drive Mini.

Source: VGC