David Hayward looks back at one of the best consoles ever made
By the late 90s, the console had well and truly taken over as the dominant gaming platform of the living room, while the PC was relegated to the corner of the bedroom or some other smaller room in the house.
After the magnificent success of the Master System, followed by the record beating popularity of the Mega Drive, Sega had a little blip. The poor Saturn, despite being well ahead of its time in terms of processing power, failed to warm to the buying public, who instead opted for the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation.
The poor sales of the Saturn hurt Sega, and as a last ditch effort it launched what I believe as one of the finest consoles ever, the Sega Dreamcast.
The Sega Dreamcast was an immensely impressive machine. It looked cool, you could go online with it, and the controller was as futuristic as you could possibly get. Sega created the perfect console, in almost every way. It had a GD ROM drive, arcade like graphics, a 32-bit processor and a 33K modem. The controller had the VMU Memory Card, a builtin LCD screen that could play mini-games, show extra info in-game (like what your inventory held), and you could swap cards with friends for multiplayer gaming. Everything, I might add, that the Wii-U now does nearly 16 years later.
The games too were beyond anything we as gamers had seen on our humble TVs. The likes of Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Skies of Arcadia (remember that awful music?,) Power Stone 2, Jet Set Radio and Sega GT. Of course the legendary Shenmue shouldn’t be left out either, but it’s one I sadly never played.
Its History
It’s a strange sequence of events that both created and killed off the Dreamcast. The Saturn was just far too expensive to make, compared to the PlayStation. Despite dropping the cost of the Saturn significantly, Sega just couldn’t recoup its losses on the Saturn.
The Dreamcast, therefore, was to be engineered with off-the-shelf components, most notably 3dfx Voodoo Banshee GPUs. However, 3dfx jumped the gun and, without prior permission, announced its partnership with Sega on this new console, resulting in the company losing favour with Sega, which then dropped 3dfx for PowerVR2 and Hitachi SH-4 RISC processors.
When Dreamcast hit the shelves in the West, it made Sega a whopping $100 million on its first day on sale. Mere months later, sales of the console were well over a million, and Sega was close to becoming the crowned king of the home console once more.
Then, less than a year after the Dreamcast was winning new audiences, Sony released the console that killed off pretty much everything in its path: the Playstation 2. The PS2 was more expensive, but it was a pure gaming system that spoke to the masses in a language they could understand.
The result was Sega losing money by the second and the final swansong of the company as a console developer. Then Microsoft announced the impending launch of the Xbox, Nintendo the Gamecube and there were countless more advances in PC gaming and faster online content. The Dreamcast was dead, and Sega announced it was leaving the console market for good.
The Good
Amazing graphics, online via the modem, the VMU Memory Card
The Bad
The laser had the nasty habit of going off target, and you often had to take the console apart to fix it. Although it looks great when new, it doesn’t age too well.
Conclusion
The Dreamcast was a splendid console and one we’ll miss.
Did You Know…
• Microsoft helped designs elements of the Dreamcast, which it incorporated into the original Xbox. It even made a version of Windows CE that was compatible with the Dreamcast.
• Shenmue 2 cost over $70 million dollars to make for the Dreamcast.
• The logo of the Dreamcast means Origin of Power.
• Homebrew developers are still making games for the Dreamcast.
• It was the first console to use a camera, the Dreameye.