A strange curiosity buried by the sands of time, The Sacred POOLS was an attempt by SegaSoft to revive the long dying format of FMV games by incorporating adult themes, nudity and slapping a mature rating on the box… Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), there really wasn’t anything that could be done to save FMV-based games from their inevitable demise…
This was 1996 (not ’93), and consumers were no longer fooled by the infamous claims that the marriage of full motion video and interactive 3D computer graphics would offer “revolutionary“ gameplay. By 1996, gamers and games journalists wanted nothing to do with FMV, and it’s mere presence in some games was often enough to negatively influence game magazine reviews…
However, SegaSoft was in the process of looking for new markets beyond the usual grade-schooler or teenage boy… This was the dawn of the commercial internet and the world wide web, and SegaSoft wanted to create “edgy” content for a more mature and sophisticated consumer.
They would farm development for the game out to Code Monkeys, which would take place between 1994 to 1995. A demo of the game seems to have been shown off at the 1996 E3 Expo, though it received negative feedback by much of the games press, which is likely part of the reason it did not see a release.
It seems (based on the few news clippings available – shown below) that it was meant to be the first of many adult-only “erotic thrillers” for the Sega Saturn, complete with explicit sex, nudity and violence. However, it is not clear exactly what was to be shown in the game outside of the demo footage (shown above).
Segasoft had a few other planned but never released games as well, including G.I. Ant, Heat Warz, Ragged Earth and Skies.
We have the following additional information care of Unseen64 regarding an old Assembler Games forum thread by an anonymous user, claiming to own a playable beta of the game:
“SEGASOFT paid over $3mil to develop the game. The company is called CodeMonkeys now. Not sure if they had a different name back then. But SegaSoft pretty much entirely funded the company during that period. […] My knowledge is limited. They spent a bunch of money developing this game that was supposed to be “revolutionary”. The game missed milestones and went way over budget. I have never played that far through the game but what I’ve seen is that it is basically a FMV game where you can sort of move around the world. You have choices of which direction to go and what to do, but they are limited and (obviously) on tracks.” -(anonymous – Assembler Games)
UPDATE 1 (05/11/2021):
We now have confirmation (below) from Dr. Eric Ameres of Duck Corporation & TrueMotion Video that he “worked on the FMV engine for it” and “also evaluated what would be necessary to port the whole thing to the PlayStation and wrote an alpha decoder for the PlayStation as a proof of concept.” He also confirmed that “Sega threw a ridiculous announcement party for it at E3 with aerialists performing and a VIP lounge”.
UPDATE 2 (05/11/2021):
Twitter user @Priz also confirmed (below) the story of SEGA’s extravagant E3 event, saying “I remember going to the E3 party for this in 1996… they were really lax and we got like 20 people in on one invite. lol”.
Probably didn’t help that the fire looks like vomit.