Minecraft just joined ray tracing on the weird list of things the Sega Saturn was never meant to do and is now doing anyway. A new homebrew project by Saturn wizard Frogbull has the classic Mojang block-builder running on Sega’s mid-’90s polygon anxiety machine, complete with mining, building, and shambling around in chunky 3D.
The footage shows a surprisingly faithful take on early Minecraft: blocky terrain, breakable cubes, inventory, and a proper first-person view all running directly on Saturn hardware. It’s not some pre-rendered tech flex, either: Frogbull calls it “another wild little project,” and if you’ve followed his Shenmue-on-Saturn and GTA-on-Dreamcast antics, you know that undersell is part of the bit. Performance isn’t going to blow anyone away, but considering the Saturn’s notoriously awkward dual-CPU, quad-based rendering setup, getting a fully interactive voxel world up and running is borderline magic.
Right now, this looks more like a proof-of-concept sandbox than a full survival port, but even in prototype form, it’s exactly the kind of nonsense that keeps these old machines feeling alive. For handheld enjoyers who are used to firing up Minecraft on basically anything with a screen, the Saturn version is the opposite: difficult, impractical, and absolutely irresistible as a flex. You just know someone’s going to shove this onto an ODE, pipe it through a USB capture, and play “Saturn Minecraft” on a modern portable just because they can.
Consoles we grew up with keep getting new, impossible experiences years after their supposed “end of life,” mostly because a handful of stubborn people refuse to accept what these systems were supposed to be for. Minecraft on Saturn isn’t about the best way to play Minecraft; it’s about the best way to make the Saturn feel like it’s still cracking its knuckles before picking fights way outside its weight class.
Source: Frogbull YouTube via Time Extension
