Announcing the SegaXtreme Sega Saturn 31st Anniversary Homebrew Showcase

The SEGA Saturn released in Japan on November 22, 1994. Alongside it came Virtua Fighter as a pack in title, and a selection of four additional launch titles available for purchase. By Y2K, 1,028 pieces of software had been released in Japan, only a quarter of which made their way to the North American market, and Bernie Stolar had long since declared that “Saturn’s not our future.”

To me, the North American SEGA Saturn always came off as wasted potential with a neglected fan base. That’s why I started working on Saturn homebrew projects in 2019. In that same year, I resumed an old annual tradition from the earlier days of the SegaXtreme community, a contest to demonstrate new software for the Saturn . Despite a rocky start, we’ve managed to get the community together for an annual competition culminating in last year’s 30th anniversary competition .

While organizing the big 3-0, I felt that the community had grown past the point of competition. Teams were starting to pop up, including for my own Seniriu , and the logistics for distributing prizes and numerically ranking entries was becoming onerous. So I decided that the 30th anniversary was the last year of the competition format. I wanted our annual event to be more of a celebration.

So now, we start a new tradition: an annual showcase . Creators will, as always, submit their entries during the review period, starting on November 22 (the Japanese Saturn anniversary) and ending on May 11 (the North American Saturn anniversary). A panel of reviewers will write reviews for entries, with each entry receiving two to three reviews. The reviews will be organized into a ‘zine and released as a PDF on July 8 (the European Saturn anniversary). If there’s enough interest, we may even do a printing.

As in previous years, the reviewers are a mixture of new and old faces from the Supreme Court of Saturn. We have returning: Christa Lee , David Gámiz Jiménez , PandaMonium , and TraynoCo . New to the panel are Melenuumshane90 of Shane’s Starcade and our very own Peter_ and Danthrax .

And yes, there are cash prizes. The prize pool rolled over from last year and donated to this year will be split evenly between the following awards: Best Original Game, Best Translation Path, Best Non-Translation Patch, Best Utility, Most Creative, and Most Likely Fan Favorite.

The full information page for the SegaXtreme Saturn 31st Anniversary Homebrew Showcase can be found on my website . We still have room for two other reviewers to contribute to the showcase ‘zine. If you are interested, let me know . Donations to the prize pool can be made via Paypal. And of course, if you want to be featured in the upcoming showcase, get to work on your creative vision, and submit it to the showcase .

	Emerald Nova
		Physicist by day, Saturn homebrew game developer in the early AM. Sometimes streams development on Twitch. Personally trying to fix the North American Saturn game library by making the RPGs that no one else bothered to.