
On Panzer Dragoon Saga's 20th Anniversary, We Remember Sega's Worst Ad Ever
"We have this great game, and you can't play it. Sucker."
Happy saddest birthday to Panzer Dragoon Saga. On this day in 1998, the Sega Saturn's most ambitious game came to North America and promptly became impossible to find. That's because an extremely limited print of 20,000 copies were shooed out onto the marketplace, followed by another run of somewhere between 2,000 to 5,000 copies. After that: Nothing.
The Saturn was regarded as a lost cause for North America and Europe by April 30, 1998, but the system wasn't lacking for game-starved owners at that point in time. Ben Lindbergh's excellent retrospective about Panzer Dragon Saga's development, reception, and launch across Asia, Europe, and North America goes into detail about how Western execs and merchants turned their backs on Saga despite the RPG's stellar reception.
The higher-ups' dismissal of Panzer Dragoon Saga was a hard knock for Western Sega fans who'd invested their time and money into Saturn up until that point. To add dragonfire to the wound, Sega of America's extremely limited advertising budget for the game went to printing cut-out masks for Saturn owners who couldn't find a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga. The idea was to attach a rubber band to the mask and run around pretending to be the game's protagonist, Edge, in real-life, since playing Edge in-game was nigh impossible by that point.

"Run around your neighborhood flapping your arms imagining you're riding a morphing dragon…and your journey has begun!" the ad joshed. "Hey look! That's not a fire-hydrant, it's a power-up! That's not a rock, it's Azel! Watch the magic unfold as you become a master of make-believe!"
Ha ha! It's funny because Western Saturn fans got royally hosed for sticking by Sega during the company's roughest years! What, you freaks wanted to play the system's magnum opus? Psht. Save that money for the Dreamcast, nerds.
Additional hilarity: Outside of paying up to a grand on the secondary market, there's no legal way to play Panzer Dragoon Saga—and one isn't forthcoming. In February, we talked about the tragedy of Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Axe of the Blood God RPG podcast with Ben Lindbergh himself. Give it a listen, then pour one out for Sega's tragically underutilized stable of bioengineered dragon-weapons.
Related articles
PlayStation 5 Update Lets You Know If You're About to Play the PS4 Version of Game
Check yourself before you last-gen yourself.
Stardew Valley Just Got Beaches, Fish Tanks, Swimming Ducks, and a Whole Lot More
Nearly five years on, Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone just pushed what he says is Stardew's "biggest update yet."
Alien: Isolation Is Free on Epic and Just As Good as It Was in 2014
Get the motion tracker and don't go in the vents.
Shigeru Miyamoto Expresses Confidence in the Younger Generation of Nintendo
The legendary creator says the spirit will stay alive.
You may also like
USgamer Staff Past and Present Say Goodbye (Clone)
End of an era.
USgamer Staff Past and Present Say Goodbye
End of an era.
Press Start to Continue
A look back on what we tried to accomplish at USgamer, and the work still to be done.
Mat's Farewell | The Truth Has Not Vanished Into Darkness
This isn't the real ending, is it? Can't be.