During the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1994, Sega of America research and development head Joe Miller took a phone call in his Las Vegas hotel suite from Sega president Hayao Nakayama, in which Nakayama stressed the importance of coming up with a quick response to the Atari Jaguar. Included on this call were Bayless, Sega hardware team head Hideki Sato, and Sega of America vice president of technology Marty Franz. One potential idea for this came from a concept from the Japanese team. This concept, later known as "Project Jupiter" and referred to by former Sega of America producer Michael Latham as "Genesis 2", was an entirely new independent console. Project Jupiter was initially slated to be a new version of the Genesis, with an upgraded color palette and a lower cost than the upcoming Saturn, as well as with some limited 3D capabilities thanks to integration of ideas from the development of the Sega Virtua Processor chip. Miller pushed for a different strategy — according to Latham, Miller dismissed Project Jupiter as "just a horrible idea. If all you're going to do is enhance the system, you should make it an add-on. If it's a new system with legitimate new software, great. But if the only thing it does is double the colors..." Miller said his idea was to leverage the existing Genesis as a way to keep from alienating Sega customers, who would otherwise be required to discard their Genesis systems entirely to play 32-bit games, and to control the cost of the new system in the form of an add-on. From these discussions, Project Jupiter was discontinued and the new add-on, codenamed "Project Mars", was advanced.