Dreamarena

» see dreamarena.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Dreamcast shipped with a modem in the box, which meant the console could dial the telephone on its own. In Europe it dialed a number Sega had chosen for you. Dreamarena was the service on the other end of that call, launched on 14 October 1999 alongside the European Dreamcast, and it was free to use in the United Kingdom and priced by whatever local ISP Sega had signed everywhere else.

Sega Europe did not build it. ICL wrote the websites and the software while BT supplied the dial-up capacity and the network behind it. A separate internet provider was contracted in each country to actually carry the calls. France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK were live at launch, with Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland added in December 2000. Sega spun out a subsidiary called Dreamarena Ltd with around twenty people to run the thing.

It worked well enough. By September 2000 Sega had passed 300,000 European registrations and claimed more than half of those were active or very active. You reached it through DreamKey, the browser burned onto a disc and sometimes into the games themselves, which is why a copy of Sonic Adventure 2 could put you online without any other software. The game servers lived inside the service and were not reachable from the ordinary internet.

Being able to dial the phone by yourself is not a feature I would have wanted in 1999. Home dial-up in Turkey was metered by the minute, so the cost of being online was something you watched the clock over rather than something you paid once a month. A machine in the living room with its own modem and its own opinion about which number to call reads, from that side of the map, less like freedom and more like a bill.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

For about eighteen months Dreamarena was the most complete console online offering in Europe. It gave you a working browser and a set of dedicated game servers out of the box, on a machine that cost less than a graphics card. Nothing on the PlayStation side of the market came close until well into the following generation.

The pitch to the retail buyer was simple. Plug the phone line in and press the button, with no configuration and no separate contract to sign. In 1999 that was a real argument, because getting a PC online still meant hunting for a modem driver and then copying dialer settings off a leaflet.

~ the fall ~

The simplicity was also the trap. The first three versions of DreamKey gave you no field for your own ISP phone number or login, so you used Sega's partner or you did not go online. In the UK the partner was free and nobody minded. Outside the UK the local ISPs set their own prices and conditions, and Dreamarena turned into an expensive way to play a football game against a stranger.

Sega dropped its ISP arrangement in November 2001, which Eurogamer reported at the time, and the fix arrived with DreamKey 3.0 on 1 February 2002. That version finally let you enter any provider you liked. It shipped four weeks before the service it was meant to rescue.

~ the long tail ~

Sega closed Dreamarena on 28 February 2002, a year after leaving the console hardware business. Anyone who wanted DreamKey 3.0 after that date had to go to a PC and order the disc from Sega Europe's website using their service credentials, which is a fairly bleak errand. European owners who had never registered before the closure simply could not get their Dreamcast online at all, ever.

The game servers themselves kept running for one more year and went dark on 28 February 2003, exactly twelve months later. Some references treat that second date as the end of Dreamarena and it is worth separating the two: the portal and the ISP died in 2002, and the last European Dreamcast matches were played in 2003.

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