The Sega Saturn is well known for being a commercial failure, but the console and games maintain a cult following to this day. The technically impressive Burning Rangers is one such game with its unique and tense firefighting gameplay, and a recent writeup reveals it would have been far ahead of its time if a large amount of content was not cut.
Burning Rangers is a Sega Saturn game developed by Sonic Team, and it is set in the far future where fires are still a common threat in major cities. Initially released in 1998 toward the end of the Saturn's lifespan, the game follows the eponymous Burning Rangers, a group of firefighters dedicated to extinguishing burning buildings and rescuing anyone trapped inside.
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The Hidden Palace, a community organization dedicated to the preservation of video game development history, released a writeup on an alpha version of Burning Rangers today that shows the game's original ambition. As it turns out, the title's early builds featured a two-player co-operative mode, very uncommon in 3D games on the system. Perhaps most ahead of its time, though, would be the networking mode; another early build of the title was planned to include a local networked multiplayer mode with two connected Sega Saturn systems running the game in parallel. This would have been an unprecedented feature for consoles at the time, and closely mirrors how Xbox System Link worked in the next generation.
Only the first level of the Burning Rangers prototype is playable from start to finish, but it provides an interesting look into the early development of the game. Instead of loading the smaller segments that the final version uses to save RAM, the game loads half of the level at a time into RAM, necessitating simplification of game assets to make it run properly. With Burning Rangers being one of the longest Sega Saturn games, it makes sense that this resource-saving approach would have to be used.
Interestingly, many of the developers of Burning Rangers went on to work on the Phantasy Star Online series, bringing, to at least some extent, the removed networking features of Burning Rangers full circle. Despite the prestige of the developers at Sonic Team, Burning Rangers has never seen a re-release or been remade, besides being referenced in Sonic And All-Stars Racing Transformed. The game's release itself is something of a miracle, as it launched less than a year before Sega's next console, the Dreamcast, launched.
Knowing that many Sega Saturn games were cancelled even before the system's final year, Burning Rangers is a strange yet iconic game for the Sega Saturn. Its premise of playing as firefighters is not often explored in gaming, and its impressive technical achievements made for a worthy sendoff for the Saturn. Looking back at what could have been, though, it is strange that Sonic Team has never revisited the series besides in passing reference.