Re: So...
Bear in mind that Sega suddenly changed the US launch, bringing it forward by 5(?) months to May '95. The console was out in Japan, and doing pretty well, but many developers were still in the middle of writing games that would sell in the US market. JRPGs aren't really a big thing outside of Japan...
They announced at E3 that it was "out there right now", much to the surprise of everyone including the retailers! That's a bodged bit of marketing to me. They tried to get the jump on Sony and stripped themselves up.
32X wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but it was stillborn with the Saturn coming so close behind it. Devs weren't interested in creating games for it because the Next Big Thing was just months away. As it is, Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter are cracking games on it. I believe that Afterburner and Space Harrier are basically arcade-perfect too, but by that point everyone was clamouring for either 3D or interactive movies. Yes, you might not remember, but the whole CD thing was going to kick off a whole new genre of immersive entertainment that was like being in your own movie. Except that the best we got was stuff like Rebel Assault... So the cartridge systems died a death. N64 came along late enough for everyone to realise that the CD thing was a bit of a crock.
Then there was SOA's idea to release the SVP (from the Megadrive / Genesis Virtua Racing cart) as a separate add-on. An interposer between the console and SVP-enabled games. Sort of a 32X--, if you will. And that could have worked as well, but they clouded their own judgement by juggling too many things. They had, at that point, the Megadrive, Game Gear, Mega CD, 32X (Mars), next-gen cartridge console (Jupiter), next-gen CD console (Saturn), Megadrive with 32X combined (Neptune), the Nomad and the Multi-Mega. That's from memory, at least. They really needed to prune that product tree!
Still, it's easy (and enjoyable) to look back at these days and point out where Sega went wrong (and Atari, Commodore, 3DO, Philips...), but it's difficult to understate just how much of a leap it was to the original PlayStation. I remember when Sony released some polygon and sprite specs they were so far ahead of Sega's that they basically said "oh, and we're shoving another graphics processor in, by the way". And that made it a sod to program well.
Ah, good times!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
