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The Dreamcast's Eulogy

Greg Dewar
The Commuter

Monday, February 9, 2009

I’d like to start this off by saying that I have had a long and storied love affair with the Sega Dreamcast. The story, to put it shortly, goes like this: I never really enjoyed Sega products or games, though I knew of no one growing up who had them, all of my friends had Nintendo Entertainment Systems and the lucky ones Super NESs. I remember playing Sonic 3 once when I was 9 and thinking the controllers sucked for about 10 minutes before my friend unplugged his Sega and plugged in his SNES and we went about our usual routine. I also vaguely remember a Game Gear…but not really. I never really thought about Sega, the Dreamcast came and went, I waited for the PS2 and played my PSX and N64 in the meantime. Finally, in 2002, I began to really get into the history of video games, where Sega plays a prominent role for many reasons. And I needed a new fix. I was sick of the PS2, and the X-box wasn’t doing anything for me. Nothing made me want a GameCube. I began to take a long and hard look at the Dreamcast after reading many game reviews and participating in a Dreamcast-only forum.

The rub was in and I found myself at an EB Games buying a used Dreamcast bundle less than one week after SegaNET went offline and the Dreamcast was pronounced dead by the internet. The games were so cheap I’d picked up ten. All in all, I’d spend $50.

I started off with a single-player RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy featuring ship-to-ship air battles. I was in love, and it’s still one of my favorite games of all time. Then I ventured into the arcade realm with Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi: (both of which I’d played before but never had enough quarters to enjoy them like this) it was totally amazing. I got Space Station 5, a bizarre dancing game. And Chu-Chu rocket, what I still contend is one of the best 4-player experiences out there. I tried Seaman, I tried Ecco, I tried it all: I came to one conclusion: the Dreamcast had the most innovative and creative gaming experiences I have ever known. And it is for this major reason that I still contend that the Dreamcast is the best gaming system every created. Sega gave its developers a creative freedom to really explore what gaming is and what gaming could potentially be. And the legacy it left is a series of games that when mentioned in a group of gamers still bring cheers and delight (in fact the weekend before last, I off-handedly mentioned just how much I loved the Dreamcast at our weekly multiplayer gaming session to which someone shouted “Soul Calibur!” and there were general nods of agreement. Except for Gary. Gary doesn’t like anything).

1997: it was apparent that the Saturn was dead. 1998: The Dreamcast launches. And the world takes notice. It was the first console to include a built-in modem and an Ethernet attachment was made available. Its GD-ROM held 1.2 GB of data eliminating the need for as many discs and read at 12X (fast for the times). Its VMUs (Visual Memory Units) were capable of displaying information in real-time about the game being played as well as being readable when not plugged into the console due to an internal watch battery (which only had about a 3 month life) and were capable of exchanging information between each other without ever needing a Dreamcast. They could also play mini-games and allowed custom designs for the game title displays and custom content to be created on them. The Dreamcast also debuted with a whopping four controller ports taking a nod from Nintendo, something Sony didn’t do until the PlayStation 3. It came with a web browser and Sega launched SegaNET, its online gaming and Internet service provider. It even included a version of Microsoft Windows CE: pretty impressive for 1998.

1999: The Dreamcast hits the U.S. Market and things seem to be going well for Sega. Unfortunately, it cannot compete with the release of the Sony PlayStation 2 in 2000 or the popularity of the Sony PlayStation one during its lifespan. The PlayStation 2 was just too powerful compared to the already aging Dreamcast and programmers never seemed to learn to tap the Dreamcast’s potential.

With the release of the X-box and the GameCube merely one year away, an air of doom started to spread over the ultimately failed console. By 2001, many game publishers had abandoned the Dreamcast. And that era of pristine gaming began to come to a close. After all, it isn’t uniqueness of creativity that sells the most units, it’s market juggernauts like Halo that bring home the bacon.

Sega released its last in-house game in 2004 and sold its last units in 2006. Third party games continued to be created in Japan (the source of most of the Dreamcast’s popularity) until 2008. Games are still in development for 2009.

The Dreamcast still employs a fleet of homebrew hackers converting games and versions of Linux to the system. And you can still go online with the modem. Once, I routed it through a computer of mine that had a DSL connection through two networked modems with my PC acting as the router. I owned the keyboard and mouse. And spend many hours hacking away using the Dreamcast like a computer with entire 3D GUI’d operating systems on it, after its timing in my gaming heart had ended.

It seems Sega had straddled a developmental ridge and, released too early, was seemingly overpowered compared to the old crop of consoles, but unable to compete with the up-and-comers. Their market strategy had been to take the market first, had they only waited and included a DVD-ROM and more current technologies for the time, it may still be alive and we may be looking at a Dreamcast 2 right now.

The tale of the Dreamcast is one that lives in infamy. It’s a tale about a company with a dream that seemed to mismanage itself with lawsuits from the get-go, and to incorrectly assess a still-developing market. Evolution will always take its toll, with a special quickness and voracity toward technology.

I still contend that the Dreamcast was the greatest console to ever grace our world, with so many new and interesting hardware ideas and a plethora of creative and intuitive software that challenged the mind and the senses. The dream was to revolutionize the industry, something Nintendo has seen fit to do in later years.

Above my doorway hangs a sign from GameStop that still reads “Sega Dreamcast”. In 2004, I found it in a garbage can and took it home. When the Dreamcast officially died, I lost all interest in console games and became solely a PC gamer. After purchasing the Dreamcast, the library of games kept me going for another two years before I was finally forced to concede defeat and build a new gaming rig.

Though the world may have forgotten you for bigger and better things, I’ll always remember you as the cute little white box that rekindled my love of gaming, and well, kept me in the game.

Perhaps Rick is right about me being a ’90s anachronism: the Dreamcast was the last console of the ’90s and the last one I liked.

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