Happy (late) anniversary, Dreamcast!

Yep, I know it's a little late, but I still feel the need, as a SEGA fan, to express my happiness. This marks the tenth anniversary of the launch of the bittersweet console, SEGA's last shot at the hardware market, the Dreamcast.

Make whatever jokes about it you want, but the Dreamcast had one of the largest and most successful launch days of the time. Within the first few hours of its launch, the Dreamcast's sales for both hardware and software totaled over 900 million dollars, which more than made up for Sega's failure with the Sega Saturn launch.

This system also had Sonic Adventure, which, in my eyes, is probably the only 3D sonic game that's gotten the closest to getting it right. It feels the closest to the original 2D games that I've played and to this day, I still love that game with all my heart. It was one of the first reasons to own a dreamcast, and add to it, it was the last Sonic game to be designed by the original Sonic team that had developed the original games for the Dreamcast.

Sadly, the console ran into a lot of problems that pretty much kept nailing the coffin shut for SEGA. First of all, the Dreamcast was already in competition with the Nintendo Gamecube. Not only were they competing with their long-standing rival, but the Playstation 2 launch was not very far away, as well as the market newcomer, Microsoft's Xbox.

The second problem was, while the Dreamcast had the support of several top-name third party developers such as Capcom and Konami, Electronic Arts withheld their support for the system, stating that it wouldn't last long. Bear in mind that this was during the time when Madden games were all the rage and EA sports held the licenses for pretty much all the huge sports games. So not having any EA games on their system at all was a huge, HUGE disadvantage at the time.

Third, a lot of the games had huge appeal to hardcore gamers, but they were very... um... Japanese. Games like Space Channel 5, Parapa the Rapper, Power Stone, and Sea Man (GOD what a bad name!) were great, but casual gamers just found them far to strange to get into. So, sales suffered because of that.

Fourth, and probably most tragic, was a game called Shenmu. This game was supposed to be the most realistic of its generation, and it reportedly cost SEGA almost 80 million dollars to create. It was advertised as a game where you would be able to play someone else's life. And to the game's credit, you do exactly that. You play someone else's life... someone else's very, very boring life. the failure of Shenmu was pretty much the final nail in the Dreamcast's coffin, almost driving SEGA to the point of bankrupcy. So, with no alternative, the two-year life of the Dreamcast ended. SEGA withdrew from the console market altogether and became a strictly software developer, which it remains as to this day.

Of course, interest in the dreamcast still remains strong. I still own and maintain my original Dreamcast, with a pretty good library of games for the thing, and I'm not the only one. It seems that the dreamcast has become more popular now that it's no longer on the mainstream market, and there are some people out there who are actually making homebrew Dreamcast games the same way that people make homebrew Atari 2600 and flash games.

The system is one of the biggest comi-tragedies of the gaming world, and I remember it fondly as I remember my original Genesis. I salute this system on its tenth anniversary and I invite any other fans of it to do the same. It might not seem like it now, but it is really a console among consoles.

[RobM]

I too would like to give my wishes to my Dreamcast. It's a console I love, and thats worth something. I may have played my PS2 more (I still play it today, got loads of games left to complete STILL) but I don't really love it. Some of its games I love, but the Dreamcast was a complete package.

I would however wish to note a few differences of opinion I have with Goombasa's otherwise excellent post~

Firstly, I believe the biggest problem for SEGA at the time was market penetration. Since the Megadrive in the last eighties they hadn't actually had a successful console and as a brand had been displaced by Sony. Their principle competion was the N64 and the Playstation, only one of which was a serious contender. Nintendo had shown a weakness in not wishing to be parted from Cartridges which they knew well, SEGA had attempted the CD market twice and been thoroughly kicked in the arse with mutliple expensive disasters. This meant that Nintendo didn't even announce a new console for another two years after the Dreamcast Launch. The word GameCube hadn't even been written back then.
Some satirists (like me) believed that Nintendo had gone so barmy in releasing a cartridge console in a CD era that its next console would play games encoded on toast.

In fact, the Dreamcast was the first of the 'advanced generation' consoles (Or, sixth generation to anyone following the pattern) by more than three years. The PS2 wasn't announced as completed until later than 2000, wasn't released until 2001 and after making every mistake its possible to make on release (They did the same with the PS3, total fuckup on all counts from manufactuirng, hardware problems, PR mistakes and lack of brand saturation) the PS2 just wasn't a serious contender against the dreamcast for its entire lifespan.

Actually, I'd go further, the problem Dreamcast had to overcome... was the Playstation 1. It had attracted a lot of big-name titles and developers, the American distributers who make up about 70% of the english language developers had fully backed it and this was strangling the Japanese game makers wishing to export their games under license.
The europeans are usually the ones who suffer under this arrangement. It's deadly simple.
Japanese developers make games, the biggest companies have an American arm of the company under which they dub/translate the games, encode them for NTSC and release, those that don't have to go by the same method used in Europe. An American-based distributer is chosen to undertake translation and encoding of the game into languages under license. This means giving up a lot of rights to the game, the Japanese only take small cuts of the profits in this and most of the money is taken by the American distributers and although SEGA had a good line-up of launch titles very few of them came from large studios, which means that profits for those companies outside of Japan were smaller. This also reduced the amount of money made on the console.

To digress from this, you also noted the huge commercial success of the console - however the money you quoted as being raised is only profit for the retailers.
What has to be remembered is that all consoles are manufactured and sold at a Loss. SEGA produced the Dreamcast at around $200 US per unit (at 1998 prices) and sold them to the retailers at $60 US per unit. Retail value and revenue from the release didn't go into SEGAs pockets. Games companies make money on game sales and those, while good, weren't as high as they could have been.

900 millions dollars it may have been, but that is revenue, not profit sadly.

In my opinion, the Dreamcast failed to achieve the money SEGA needed because it failed to get the volumes of in-house games released, didn't get the backing of enough American Distributers and didn't manage to maximise international profits. If they had sold big enough numbers to recoup their variable costs (Manufacturing) or negotiated a high price per unit with the retailers (Something closer to $80 per unit would have increased revenue by 30%) they may have achieved more.

Dreamcast had some great titles though, some of the best games of its era. Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Dead or Alive 2, Soul Caliber and Skies of Arcadia are excellent games that really pushed the boat out in terms of what games could deliver. Even in 2001 Sony's PS2 couldn't match what Dreamcast was producing in terms of visuals and game concepts. They had a few fancy/schmanzy pretty looking graphics - but none of what they had was games.

PS: Shenmue was indeed so boring. I never finished it, I barely got started on the second disk. OMG.

I'd certainly appreciate thoughts on my own views.

[greyrain]

Poor Dreamcast. Though you had an awesome launch and were a beautiful console you weren't meant to be. I always did like the DC though. It seemed to have a personality that was very friendly. I mean the blue screen with the ripples and the type of games it got. Everything about it felt different to me in a glorious way. then I get my gamecube, my ps 2, and my Xbox and they're all ugly boxy things. They were never quite the same. Although I guess my PS 2 made it up to me by giving my colossus, okami, and odin sphere....and my gamecube gave me pikmin..But Dreamcast gave me Grandia 2 and Soul Calibur (which never seemed as much fun on another console) so I think it had the last laugh. I still remember the epic magazine adds with the launch date. It probably had the best launch of any console I've seen but it still didn't make it. I blame the Saturn myself but at least I knew how cool it was.

[Dr. Weird]

Originally Posted by RobM

Actually, I'd go further, the problemS the Dreamcast had to overcome... were the Sega CD, Sega CD II, the 32X, the Genesis CDX, and the Saturn.

Fixed that for ya. Me, I liked the Dreamcast. Like actually. I still play mine, and there were several strong titles for it. I suspect though that the biggest single factor in its failure was that gamers were tired of getting burned by Sega. The company released three 'next-gen' systems in three years. That would make anyone gun shy. Peaked early, too. Soul Calibur was a release-title and the system never got anything that looked better because it couldn't support anything that looked better.

[RobM]

I would have listed them all, if I actually knew them all. I confess to not knowing what came between the Sega CD and the Saturn.

One possible thing I'd correct in turn from your post was that Soul Calibur both looks better and plays faster than any beat-em-ups on the PS2.
Same Dead or Alive 2.

The PS2 is slow and clunky, its fast in many ways - but - the more colours on screen the less its able to time its responces and so in my opinion, Soul Calibur on the dreamcast looks better than any PS2 game does even today. Sure Sony got grimey corridors down perfect and every shade of brown and grey you need to play endless Metal Gear games, but there's a noticable lag when playing beat-em-ups and other high-speed games compared to the Dreamcast.

It is true that Sega had a very big reputation at this point for 'vaporware'. Believe it or not, there was actually ANOTHER console planned to be released before the Sega Saturn, called the Neptune, which was scrapped pretty quickly. All it was going to be was a stand-alone 32X, which is what it should have been in the first place.

Another key factor that I think we've overlooked is that, during the Dreamcast's life span was when several key developers began to leave the company. Heck, Sonic Adventure was actually the last game to be designed by the original, de-facto Sonic Team.