When Apple recently showed off that they’d be having a press conference, presumably to announce the next iPhone, today on 9.9.14, I had flashes back to the Sega Dreamcast. The ad campaign in the United States was centered around its release date: 9.9.99. The Y2K scare was upon everyone. Might as well have some fun in the last few months.
Fifteen years ago today, Sega unleashed the Dreamcast.
And it was an anomaly. Sandwiched between two whole console generations, it was a perfectly capable and technically sound console that had quite the library of innovative games, but its own lack of technical innovation to demand itself be placed in every living room eventually brought down one of the biggest gaming giants to its knees. Sega prided itself on a cool image in the early 90’s, and with the Dreamcast that cool guy was all grown up. His frat days were behind him, and now he was working on Wall Street. But he was still the coolest guy in the office. A real shark.
The Dreamcast began when the Sega Saturn failed. Sega, who went to battle against Nintendo in the early 1990’s, had suffered too many blows. The collateral damage between Sega and Nintendo went all the way to Washington D.C., and their fight can still be felt to this day with the ESRB ratings system. Sega needed another hit console, and so they went back to the drawing board. Seeking to regain public trust, Sega hid their name from the console as much as possible. Its logo, an orange swirl (blue in Europe), “symbolized the universe, and the infinite power of human beings.” I don’t see it, but OK.
In the early 1990’s, Sega sought to expand its brand by giving it branded “sub genres,” and the first one created was Sega Sports. Sega pushed Sega Sports into overdrive during the Dreamcast, mainly because they lost support of one of the biggest gaming companies even still today: Electronic Arts. A combination of technical frustrations with the Dreamcast and knowing Sega couldn’t really pay for the EA license, EA thus never supported the Sega Dreamcast. A gigantic library and franchise powerhouse not on the Sega Dreamcast? Trouble was already brewing.
The Sega Dreamcast launched in 1998 in Japan and infamously on 9.9.1999 in North America. It had a whopping 17 games at launch and many of them are fondly remembered hits. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, Power Stone, arcade staple Hydro Thunder, NFL Blitz 2000, Sonic Adventure, and the epic weapons-based fighter Soul Calibur.
More hits would come in the later months. Crazy Taxi. Jet Grind Radio. Dead or Alive 2. Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
Shenmue.
The Sega Dreamcast had innovations that modern gaming enjoys today. Online console gaming, which would show up in the next console generation but become a full force in the one after that, it started gaining ground with the Sega Dreamcast. It was the first console — that I remembered seeing in person — that had a strange ethernet port. I wondered why my game console had that same hole that was in the modem we just installed.
The VMU was strange. A memory card storage unit, it of course saved your game progress but it had a tiny LCD screen. You could see it through the controller. I can hear the bleeps and beeps and immediately I’m back in my old living room. It added weight to your controller. After awhile, if you remove it you can chuck the controller across the room with your newly developed strength. We were on the verge of hard drive storage not unlike our actual computers, but the VMU was memory storage at its final form. You can play with it on its own and it came complete with mini-games unique to particular console games you’ve saved on it.
Ultimately, the Dreamcast failed to stay in living rooms. Today gaming companies like Microsoft want to be your living room entertainment center. But a little under twenty years ago, they were still considering themselves some form of expensive toy. Behind the scenes, the gaming giants aspired to be what gaming is today, but the public wasn’t ready for it. Attitudes changed by the next console generation when the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox had DVD and home theater compatibility. But when the Sega Dreamcast was out into the world, that prospect of a home theater in every home seemed so absurd.
The Sega Dreamcast died when Sony released the PlayStation 2 in 2000. While it had a measly six titles at launch, it wowed with its technical prowess and being a cheap DVD player, consumers immediately swayed. These events would echo again in some form when Blu-ray became a part of the PlayStation 3.
Whenever I feel the need to reminisce on the era, I zero in on several things. Eminem’s performance at the MTV VMAs in 2000 perfectly embodies these years and is now pop culture legend. I’ll think of MTV and TRL, and my sister’s obsession with the Backstreet Boys. I’ll remember Celebrity Deathmatch. ABC’s TGIF block. American Pie. Glimpses of the now-fabled Attitude Era of WWE (then-WWF). And then, I remember Dreamcast. My sister dated some asshole at the time, her first boyfriend, but he introduced me to hardcore gaming. I still don’t quite know how I feel fond about the Dreamcast despite immediate associations with it coming from some misogynistic fuck. But that was in 1999-2000. We were just a year away from the country having its heart broken.
But the summer of 1999 and 2000, I spent my days playing the Dreamcast. I can barely hear the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 character select music (“I wanna take you for a ride…”) over Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP playing at an ear-bleeding high volume on our stereo. I can still feel the burning summer heat sitting in the back of my sister’s boyfriend’s car, wishing I could get my license already and have a souped up import like I saw in The Fast & The Furious. My neighbors did and I was jealous. They also had abs. I was 8.
Console support officially ceased in 2001. For years, a corporate civil war brewed betweeen Sega of Japan and Sega of America (you can read about that more in the recently released book, Console Wars), and the Dreamcast brought their rivalry to a breaking point. Peter Moore, then President and COO of Sega of America, said:
We had a tremendous 18 months. Dreamcast was on fire – we really thought that we could do it. But then we had a target from Japan that said we had to make x hundreds of millions of dollars by the holiday season and shift x millions of units of hardware, otherwise we just couldn’t sustain the business. So on January 31st 2001 we said Sega is leaving hardware. We were selling 50,000 units a day, then 60,000, then 100,000, but it was just not going to be enough to get the critical mass to take on the launch of PS2. Somehow I got to make that call, not the Japanese. I had to fire a lot of people; it was not a pleasant day.
The console died in early 2001, but games still in development were officially released throughout the next year. The last official game in any capacity was released in 2004. Unofficially, games have still been made for the Dreamcast! Largely by independent studios with no license from Sega, it’s like seeing an abandoned building overtaken by wanderers and squatters and finding out they are rather self-sufficient. I know almost nothing about these games, but I’d be interested to try them out sometime soon.
About Shenmue.
A modern epic of a classic martial arts revenge story. It was about manhood, family, and revenge. It was a story too ambitious for its time. It was haunting and beautiful. It was corny sometimes too. But Shenmue remains one of the greatest stories in all of video games that has been left unfinished. One day I’ll write something about Shenmue all on its own, but if there is one thing I remember the Sega Dreamcast fondly for, the one thing I thank the lucky stars I had the good fortune of playing it when I was very, very impressionable, it will be for Shenmue. Lan Di is still out there, and I still wish for the day our fists cross paths.
The Sega Dreamcast is like a fling with someone who was almost too perfect, but the timing just wasn’t right. Even if you met just a year before, it would have been something truly long-term. The Dreamcast, like this theoretical person, was beautiful, a little elegant, but absolute fun. They had the spirit of an innocent with the mind and body of an adult. Rampant fun could be had as just the simplest pleasure. You didn’t need anything else. Enthusiasm was its sex appeal. Holding them in your hands, things felt good. The fifteen years since may have colored nostalgia’s glasses a little rosy, but there was something about the turn of the century’s zeitgeist — its attitudes, values, pop culture diet — that just made the Dreamcast, for a time, feel so right. If only it could have stayed just a bit longer.
YouTube is full of mini-documentaries and segments that reminisce on the console. Indulge on a time gone by.
http://youtu.be/zO14x2x1mDc