Please welcome our second new writer this week, my good friend and co-worker, Cameron Brian Saunders! Cameron has years of experience working in various areas of nerd-dom, and has worked extremely hard on this article, celebrating his favorite console. Take it away, Cameron…
Part one of a two part look back—and forward—at one of gaming’s most cherished consoles.
By Cameron Brian Saunders
Sixteen years ago today (yep, 9/9/99), gamers lined up all across North America to get their hands on Sega’s newest and boldest console: the Dreamcast. In a way I’m still standing in that line, awaiting my genre redefining next-gen experience. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.
By September of 1999, Japanese Sega fans had already spent nine months with the console, while Europe and Australia still had about a month left to gnash their teeth in anticipation. Preceded by the Saturn, Sega CD, Genesis, and the Master System, the Dreamcast was released with a dubious promise of “up to six billion players,” and the vaguely menacing tag line, “it’s thinking.”
Sega already had a reputation for pushing the limits of their hardware, and they had gambled big on their latest release with frontier gaming technologies like online play, motion controls, and voice commands. Shoichiro Irimajiri—then president of Sega—believed the company’s previous successes were the result of similar ambitious planning, and that this new gambit would make up for the losses incurred by the Sega Saturn, a commercial flop. At one point Sega’s share of the market was roughly fifty percent, but before the release of the Dreamcast, it had fallen to nearly one percent.
This exciting and potentially groundbreaking machine would only be produced for twenty eight months. From the moment it was released, Dreamcast was destined to be Sega’s swan song.
It is not uncommon to hear hardcore gamers and retro collectors call the Dreamcast their favorite video game console of all time. Some of that can probably be credited to pure nostalgia. Just the mention of the system is enough to recall legendary fighters like Soul Calibur, Power Stone, Dead or Alive 2, and Street Fighter 3, high concept racing games such as San Francisco Rush 2049, Speed Devils, and Hydro Thunder, and countless other classics including Sonic Adventure, Skies of Arcadia, House of the Dead 2, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind for us in North America), and the oddly enchanting Sega Bass Fishing. Even games available on other consoles like Legacy of Cain: Soul Reaver, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, and the Resident Evil series enjoyed healthy reputations as essential titles. To this day, all it takes is a glimpse of the console’s familiar spiral logo to drop the needle in my mind on Crazy Taxi’s opening “Hey, hey, hey, it’s time to make some ca-razy money are ya ready? Here. WE. GO!” bleeding right into the, “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” of The Offspring’s “All I Want.”
With so much love for the console, many have questioned Sega’s decision to pull the plug in 2001. The company has drawn criticized for mis-marketing, overreacting to competition, and for abandoning the fanbase. But Sega’s strength has always come from their ability to seize an opportunity.
Originally started in 1940 by a group of American businessmen, the company that would go on to become Sega began as a distributor of slots and other electronic gambling machines. When the United States government decided to outlaw the machines in the early 1950s the company shifted their focus to US military bases within Japan, and Standard Games became Service Games, or “SEGA.” Sega didn’t manufacture their own hardware until 1966, when Periscope, their first arcade cabinet, was released. It wasn’t until 1983 that Sega became known as a first party console developer, a move that inspired heated debate within the company. They ultimately exited the home console market and became a third party software developer after Isao Okawa replaced Irimajiri as president of Sega in 2000. Okawa viewed hardware as an unnecessary risk, and he was not entirely wrong. Franchises like Sonic the Hedgehog, Jet Set Radio, and Shenmue all went on to find homes on other Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony systems.
This corporate autopsy may seem somewhat damning, even cynical. But it could just as easily be said that the life of the Dreamcast didn’t really begin until Sega gave up on production and let the console, and its fate, turn over to the fans. In their hands, the Dreamcast would not only survive, but thrive.
During its two year reign, over six hundred games were released for the Dreamcast, dozens of which had online capabilities. Some of them, including the hugely popular MMO Phantasy Star Online (the first game of its kind to be released on a home console), are still playable through private servers. PSO was also one of several games which allowed for additional content to be downloaded over the internet using the console’s built-in modem, another first for the gaming industry. All in a day’s work for this decades-ahead-of-its-time dream machine.
When Shenmue III was announced for the Playstation 4 at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, it quickly became the most successful crowdfunding campaign in video game history. It also sent diehard fans and curious newbies alike scrambling to seek out the originals. Alex Bowness of Level Up Games in Canterbury, UK told mcvuk.com that he “sold 20 Dreamcasts in the last week alone… people are asking where they can play the original two Shenmue games.” David James-Turvey of Retrobution in Llanelli, UK has a similar report, saying, “I’ve had more customers hyped about Shenmue III than Call of Duty… what’s exciting now is that young gamers who perhaps didn’t even know what the Dreamcast was are interested in it.”
Shenmue II was released in 2001 for the Dreamcast, but that version was available exclusively in Europe and Japan. The game was only brought to North America in a later port (a transfer of software to hardware which can support it, but which it was not initially designed for) on the Xbox. Released in 1999, the first Shenmue remains a Dreamcast exclusive, never earning a rerelease, despite its status as the most expensive video game produced up to that point, reportedly costing Sega anywhere between forty seven and seventy million dollars. Critically praised for its ambitious setting that included weather effects, day-and-night-cycles, and one of the earliest examples of open world exploration, the original Shenmue featured an insane level of attention to detail, and not just for a game released over fifteen years ago. The game’s director, Yu Suzuki even insisted on collaborating with an experienced architect and interior designer to flesh out the game’s environment. For all its status as gaming royalty, Shenmue couldn’t hope to sell enough copies to recover its budget, ironically contributing to the Dreamcast’s eventual demise as much as its reputation. But now it emerges again, paying off in some small way, as gamers discover once more its unrestrained depth and brilliance.
All of this is tremendously encouraging, but alone it would only be enough to earn the Dreamcast a place among coveted retro consoles like the Nintendo 64, or Dreamcast’s older sibling, the Genesis. Incredibly though, there is more happening right now for the last major console of the twentieth century than is happening for any of its contemporaries. That includes Sony’s Playstation 2, the console that ultimately beat out the Dreamcast. Tomorrow, I will bring you the follow-up to this piece, where I discuss why I’m still waiting to see how Sega’s “sacred device” will affect the industry. You’ll be introduced to modern developers who have pushed the Dreamcast back into the conversation with several recent additions to its catalogue. I can best describe the Dreamcast’s current state by quoting one of its most popular exclusive titles, Soul Calibur: “Seriously wounded, but the soul still burns.”
Cameron is the manager of Pegasus Books of Bend, where he has been immersing himself in comics, books, and boardgames since 2010. He is also an actor, having appeared in over fifty performances of Evil Dead the Musical and the indie drama The Wolfman’s Hammer. He has been featured as a host of the “Geeks Who Drink” Pub Quiz and a co-host on the Central Oregon Comics Outreach Alliance podcast. His future aspirations include writing, cosplay, and being awarded his Pungeon Master badge. You can follow him on Twitter @ColonelCam where he discusses battling depression with rampant consumerism, and on his tumblr page, Cam’s Hard Blog, where he mainly reblogs pictures of black women in Sailor Moon cosplay.
NerdFunk 
September 24, 2015 at 8:35 pm
Pwoar, what a great read!! *Heads over to part 2*
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