Of course, before the announcement were made, many were expecting that the company would announce a Dreamcast Mini, or perhaps even a Saturn Mini, since a mini console version of the Genesis had already been released, and because there’s clear demand for similar treatment for Sega’s other platforms as well. So why is it that the company is sticking with the Genesis?

Well, according to Sega, mini versions of the Dreamcast or the Saturn would be too costly to make right now. Speaking recently with Famitsu, Yosuke Okunari – producer of Sega’s retro hardware re-releases – explained that due to the COVID pandemic and with the global semiconductor shortage, production of a Dreamcast Mini or a Saturn Mini would be too costly right now.

“I had experience with the Mega Drive Mini, so it was easy to make a plan if it was an extension of that,” Okunari said when asked why the Mega Drive Mini 2 was greenlit. “We also know the precedents for production and supply.

“In fact, some of you may say, ‘why isn’t this 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.”

Of course, there’s always the chance that Sega will eventually decide to get around to releasing a Dreamcast Mini or a Saturn Mini, but for now, it doesn’t look like that’ll happen anytime soon.

For now, the Genesis/Mega Drive Mini 2 is launching later this year.

Sega will at last be putting out an honest-to-goodness internally developed Sega Genesis Mini, much in the vein of Nintendo’s NES Classic Mini and SNES Classic Mini consoles. It’s due out this year, and naturally, fans of Sega’s glorious 16-bit days are excited. But is this a one time thing, or might we expect Sega to continue producing these?

For instance, could they not follow this up with a Sega Saturn Mini? The Sega Saturn was famously a failure, thanks to an extremely complicated hardware architecture, high pricing, and lack of third party support, but over the years it’s developed a cult following—not to say anything of Japan, where it actually did better than the N64. So there would be a few people who would want a Sega Saturn Mini, right?

But don’t expect it any time soon, if you are one of those people. Speaking to  IGN Japan, Hiroyuki Miyazaki, who is leading the Genesis Mini project, pointed to the cost of the chips necessary for Saturn emulation as the big roadblock to having it be a reality.

“It may be possible in 10 years. By that time the necessary chips should be cheaper,” he said.

As noted, the Saturn’s architecture was famously complex—it was the Cell of its time, with multi-core CPUs far before multi-core CPUs became a thing, and a bevy of components thrown together in a mad dash to match the PlayStation’s raw hardware power (spoiler: it didn’t). Still, I hope it won’t actually take ten years—like many, I too would love to play Saturn games again, and a Saturn Classic would be a great reason to do so.