The year was 1996, and Full Motion Video in video games was essentially dead. From a certain point of view, the same could be said of the Sega Saturn, which had found an impossible rival in the PlayStation. However, the folks at SegaSoft (a union of Sega and CSK at the time) bet three million dollars on an FMV game "for adults", seeking to save the platform and themselves. Its name was The Sacred Pools... and it turned out to be so bad that it was canceled before its release. Would you like to play it?
A Desperate Bet to Save the Saturn
In the first half of 1996, PlayStation sales surpassed the Sega Saturn by a ratio of 2 to 1. The 16-bit market was falling apart, and Nintendo was about to enter the fray with its (already delayed) Nintendo 64. In other words, Sega was in trouble, and so was its Saturn console.
However, the world couldn't stop talking about the World Wide Web and its giant potential, which led to the formation of SegaSoft. This studio decided to bet on a more adult audience to conquer that new market and "revive" the Saturn... with the return of FMV as the key to its success. With a budget of three million dollars and one of the most extravagant parties on record at E3 1996, SegaSoft presented The Sacred Pools... and then stored it in a box.
The press response was... poor at best. The death of FMV had not been exaggerated, and even the promise of launching the game beyond the Saturn (read: PlayStation and Windows 95) failed to rescue it from the abyss. Now, the game isn't even "erotic". Yes, there are many female characters with generous cleavage and revealing costumes, but the rest is incomprehensible. A mystical island, an alleged civil war, women, claustrophobic corridors, crystals, more women, enemies that electrocute out of nowhere... and Michael Berryman?
The copies available on the Internet Archive are nothing more than dumps based on a prototype of the game. That means you'll have better chances of running it with an emulator, and even then there are aspects that simply don't work. The second video includes almost an hour of gameplay, and its description mentions crashes, a very tedious disc swap, audio skipping, and puzzles that can't be completed. In any case, I imagine that platform fans will tear The Sacred Pools apart piece by piece. After remaining in the dark for more than 25 years, the challenge is irresistible...
Download the images: Click here
Source: Gaming Alexandria
