A Dream Ahead of Its Time — Remembering the Sega Dreamcast (9.9.99)
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since we first heard the tagline “Its Thinking” which was used to promote the now ill-fated Sega Dreamcast. The Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive if you purchased one outside of North America) was my first video game console. I still have memories of my Dad coming home on a Saturday after visiting Futureshop and asking me to decide between the Genesis and Super Nintendo.
I went back and forth ultimately landing on the Genesis partly because a childhood friend kept pressing me to get the Super Nintendo and partly due to the Genesis offering 3 free games as opposed to only 1 for the Super Nintendo. In hindsight, I would have definitely bought the Super Nintendo if I had a do over but that’s a topic for another article.
Although the Sega Genesis enjoyed commercial success and proved to be a worthy rival to the gaming giant Nintendo in the early 1990’s, Sega’s success in the video game home console business was short lived despite many ahead of its time functionality. The Sega Saturn was unable to build upon the success of the Genesis and was a short lived commercial failure. The Sega Game Gear that rivaled the Nintendo GameBoy in the early 1990’s had moderate success and despite being a well-built portable system with colour it never overtook the GameBoy as the de facto portable console of its generation.
My earliest exposure to the Sega Dreamcast was at a local Ebgames (then called Electronics Boutique) in the summer of 1999. As a then 13 year old who was thoroughly enjoying his Nintendo 64, seeing the Sega Dreamcast enclosed in a case in the corner of the store with a demo of Sonic Adventure instantly drew me in. Sonic the Hedgehog was my favourite childhood game having been a Genesis kid.
I remember playing the first level Emerald Coast and not wanting to leave the store. Playing Sonic in 3D was like nothing I had ever experienced. Everything looked visually stunning and I loved being able to traverse the city of Station Square. I gave my Mom a look of approval and happily took the small paper flyer detailing the release information for the Dreamcast on September 9, 1999.
Selling parents on a new $300 video game console when you already have one is never an easy task. I must have spent the entire summer stealthily placing that flyer in and around where my Dad would be sitting or in between his wallet as necessary. I even purchased the first official Sega Dreamcast magazine to help sell the consoles features and was thrilled when I was able to purchase one ahead of my 14th birthday just days after the consoles release. Although I sold the Dreamcast about 5 months later because I wasn’t convinced of its longevity, I did buy one again 5 years later that I still have with me to this day.
When I look back on the history of Sega, I can’t help but remember it as a company that was indeed ahead of its time in certain regards but just could never quite make a place for itself in people’s hearts the way newcomers Sony and Microsoft did many years later. Sega actually has a very interesting history and one that not many people know of. In anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast, a two-part documentary series called “A Dream Cast” was released on YouTube that shares many interesting insights from the early days of the console.
For one, Sega is originally an American company. It was part of the Paramount Group and named Service Games abbreviated as Sega. At that time, the company managed jukeboxes and slot machines — items that you would find in local bars. Sega wasn’t doing well during this time and was eventually sold to a Japanese company.
Sega began work on the Dreamcast project in the mid-nineties and at the time, it was rare for any ground floor employees to have much information about the project. Information was usually passed through acquaintances. The Dreamcast went through several code name iterations and at one point was code named Katana. Sega’s president at the time, Mr. Okawa had a vison of a ubiquitous society — one that harnessed arcades, consoles and network compatibility.
Sega always had its core fans from the Genesis era but with the Dreamcast, Mr. Okawa had a vision of appealing to casual gamers as well. Looking back at some of the Dreamcast’s games, it’s clear that Mr. Okawa’s vision had a strong influence on the Dreamcast. Games such as Seaman, Samba de Amigo, Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5 and Rez among others were meant to capture the casual gamer market.
This is exactly the vision that Nintendo had when they released the Nintendo Wii back in 2006. The Wii is Nintendo’s most successful home console not including portable devices such as the GameBoy and DS. The success of the Nintendo Wii was in part attributed to its ability to bring in casual gamers with games such as Wii Sports, Wii Play and Wii Fit among other games.
The Dreamcast unfortunately was never able to reach anywhere near the success of the Wii. In fairness to the Dreamcast, the Wii was a completely reinvented way of playing games with motion controls but the vision for both consoles was the same. It’s a reminder of how ahead of its time the Dreamcast was. Even games such as Shenmue that were praised for its graphics, realism, story and overall ambition at the time of its release are not widely recognized the way other gaming franchises are. The development costs largely outweighed the sales and so the game was viewed as a commercial failure.
Think back to The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. The Wind Waker is well known for its cel-shading art style but Jet Set Radio employed the same cel-shading art style long before the Wind Waker in the year 2000. The development teams at Sega were obligated to take advantage of the Dreamcast’s hardware and many of the teams pushed themselves to over deliver on their projects to ensure the Dreamcast became a success.
Watching interviews from various developers during the Dreamcast era showed how passionate the developers were about their projects. In some instances, development teams were almost living at the studio switching between working on one game during the day and another during the night. It was a common occurrence to have meetings at 1 or 2 am.
The Dreamcast’s hardware itself was a marvel of engineering for the mid-late nineties. No current generation console had a build in 56k modem to access the Internet, the graphics were 128 bit — the highest at the time, there was the earliest form of downloadable content (DLC) with games such as Phantasy Star Online and a special visual memory unit (VMU) that served as both a memory card and a handheld game device that allows players to play fully built mini games.
The more I’ve gotten deeper into the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek; I’ve been giving a lot of thought to why the Dreamcast failed. Was it because of a lack of games that appealed to the more hardcore gamer audience? The Dreamcast had around 18 launch titles including games such as Sonic Adventure, Power Stone, NFL 2K and Soul Calibur but never had the third-party support it needed for long term success the way the original Sony Playstation did. Did it fail because it didn’t have a dedicated DVD player like the Playstation 2? That probably played a role given the rising popularity of DVD players at the time.
Or was it because of Sega’s previous history of failures and disappointments with other consoles such as the Sega Saturn and the Sega 32X? It’s hard to point to an exact cause. The immense popularity of the original Sony Playstation and excitement for the Playstation 2 may have had an impact on gamer’s decision to purchase a Dreamcast or wait a year for the Playstation 2. Sega also relied too heavily on its in-house team which put a lot of pressure to create great games that needed to sell well in order for the Dreamcast to be a viable product.
The Nintendo 64 didn’t have much third-party support but did very well off it’s first-party offerings with iconic titles such as Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time to name a few. The Wii had many games that were exclusively tailored to the casual game market and was one of the hardest consoles to find during its early release.
Could Sega’s failures be attributed to focusing too much on what it was offering but not why? If the belief that people buy why you do something as opposed to what you do is true then Sega failed to communicate to its audience why the Dreamcast was built. Why was it important for Sega to create a ubiquitous society and a connected console that could access the Internet, download updates to games and play mini games on its new visual memory unit? What you do serves as tangible proof of your why.
Ultimately we may never know exactly why the Dreamcast failed to reach its true potential but its spirit lives on to this day. Many of the most popular Dreamcast games such as Sonic Adventure and Skies of Arcadia were ported to the Nintendo GameCube and even Shenmue 2 was ported to the original Microsoft Xbox. The original Xbox itself is considered by many to be the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.
The Dreamcast will always be remembered as a console with huge potential that never truly got the opportunity to shine. Its innovations and spirit for trying something new will live on in the memories of those who experienced it from the beginning and for paving the way for its spiritual successors. Happy 20th Birthday Dreamcast!
