The Mega Drive no... the Mega Drive with the 32X maybe given the Mega Drive did had some 3D games thanks to the 32X. SOme argue that the 32X version of Virtua Fighter is more smoother and better than the Saturn version.
32X was also a nightmare to program with due it's using a special chip in it, it had less homebrews than Saturn.
The difference back then was Saturn version of Virtua Fighter was a rush release with a tight deadline while 32X version wasn't.
That's why 32X Virtua Fighter (and also later Virtua Fighter Remix for Saturn) was more polished.
Oh wow! Its as if someone sabotaged Sonic X-Treme over it. I mean, why would someone on Sega of either Japan or America not want what's best for Sonic?
There's another version about SEGA internal war.
They said it's not SoA vs SoJ, it's more Hayao Nakayama's group vs Hideki Sato's group vs Shoichiro Irijimari's group.
Before Saturn, Kalinske and SoA was always being backed up by Nakayama so they always viewed as Nakayama's group.
And SoA's success (especially Sonic related) was usually connected to Nakayama and SoJ's success was usually connected to Sato or Irijimari.
But not just success, failure too. Sonic wasn't gaining success in Japan.
The internal battle was becoming pretty intense when Sato's group wanted SEGA Saturn to make the system the best 2D sprite machine possible (for Japanese market) while Nakayama, Irijimari, and Kalinske wanted the Saturn to output 3D polygons (for worlwide market) and Kalinske went as far as trying to work with Silicon Graphics.
In the end due to
the decline of 16-bit console era was high and Sato's design was ready to use, Nakayama decided to use Sato's design.
Saturn became a hit in Japan and ended Nintendo's dominance, though sadly it never gain even a half of its local success overseas.
Still for a compromise, a second graphics chip was added to the Saturn to be able to generate 3D polygons but it's a lot harder to use for developer compared to PS and N64.
The second internal battle was Black Belt (with 3Dfx) led by Irimajiri vs Dural/Katana (with PowerVR) led by Sato.
Black Belt was based on 3dfx technology, and Irimajiri had even gone as far as having SOA buy a 16% stake in 3dfx.
But the fact that Irimajiri had personally bought stock in 3dfx proved to be fatal since it was used against him by Sato's group saying that he just want trying to profit off of it.
In the end, Nakayama decided to use Sato's design (again) which led Irimajiri angry and saying "Nakayama was the tyrant of Sega".
