After announcing a Mega Drive Mini 2 console last week, Sega has now explained why we’re not getting a Saturn Mini or Dreamcast Mini console.

The Sega Mega Drive Mini 2 will launch on October 27 in Japan for $75 with 50 games preloaded, and will no doubt eventually arrive in Western markets. The new Mini console was a surprise, mostly because it was more or less the same after the Sega Genesis Mini in 2019. However, Sega is well aware that gamers want these other consoles to get the Mini treatment, but has a very good reason why they are not made.

As NintedoLife reports(Opens in a new window), Sega creative producer Yosuke Okunari gave an interview to Japanese publication Famitsu where he addressed the question of why there was no Satrun/Dreamcast Mini. Turns out the pandemic is to blame.

His explanation, thanks to a translation by a Twitter user @gosokkyu(Opens in a new window)explained the reason:

“He is sure [people] will be like “what about Saturn/Dreamcast Mini?” [and] it’s not like them [Sega] didn’t explore the idea – the MD Mini’s internals can’t handle Saturn games properly, and developing and manufacturing new chipsets during the pandemic is a difficult and expensive process… so even if they had moved forward with a Saturn Mini anyway, maybe it was extremely expensive – he jokes that he might like to release a mini that costs as much as a genuine modern console.”

With that in mind, the Mega Drive Mini 2 comes into its own. The chipset was already designed and ready to be remanufactured, and the 1988 console still had plenty of highly desirable games to include as part of a second hardware release.

The positive takeaway from this is the fact that Sega knows there’s a demand for its other game consoles to get the Mini reissue treatment, and that’s something the company has thought about. Hopefully that will eventually happen, but we’ll have to wait a few years before it’s viable to start thinking about designing and manufacturing the necessary chipsets.