Sega Dreamcast

» see sega.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

console kids and pc kids in turkey did not overlap much in 1999. i was a pc kid, on a 33.6k modem at home and on counter-strike in the internet cafe, and the dreamcast belonged to a different room of the same hobby. you read about it in level magazine, you saw it sitting behind glass at the electronics shop in kızılay, and that was usually the depth of contact.

the console launched in japan on november 27 1998, in north america on september 9 1999 (the famous 9/9/99 marketing date), and in europe on october 14 1999. it shipped with a 56k modem in the box, which was, depending on your region, either a feature ten years early or a feature that did nothing because your phone line could not hold a session for a saturn-era full-price game. in turkey it was the second.

sega sold 9.13 million dreamcasts worldwide. that number is the part most people forget. it was not a market disaster on any normal yardstick. it was a market disaster against the playstation 2 hype cycle and the institutional memory of the sega 32x. electronic arts staying home did not help. peter moore announced the end of production on january 31 2001, and the last unit rolled out of a factory on march 31 2001. sega never built another console.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the launch lineup was real. sonic adventure shipped on day one and soul calibur was the best fighting game on any home platform at the time. jet set radio invented cel-shaded graphics for a decade, and shenmue dragged 70 million dollars of yu suzuki's budget into a yokosuka simulation that you played for thirty hours and then carried for years as a reference point for what a console could attempt. crazy taxi was the best demo to put on a tv at a store. phantasy star online, when it shipped in december 2000, was the first console mmo most kids ever saw.

the seganet service in the united states bundled isp access with the console for a monthly fee. that pricing math did not really work for anyone, but it produced the first reliable online console multiplayer experience, two years before xbox live. for a window between late 2000 and mid 2001, the dreamcast quietly hosted the most reliable online console multiplayer service in the world.

~ the decline ~

the problems were upstream. ea told sega in 1998 it would not develop for the platform, partly because of the saturn relationship and partly because madden on the next sega box was not going to outsell madden on the ps2. that single decision pulled a whole genre of sports games off the platform. square stayed home too. third-party support was uneven from launch.

sony spent 1999 and 2000 advertising the ps2 as a dvd player and a console at the same time, with the dvd half doing free work for the console half. in march 2000 sony shipped the ps2 in japan and the air came out of the dreamcast's marketing the same week. by mid 2000 anyone watching the numbers knew it was over.

~ the inheritance ~

the dreamcast became the "you were wrong about it" console. ten years after it died, every retrospective made the same point. built-in modem in the box, online play out of the wrapper. every part of the playstation 3 / xbox 360 era was previewed on a sega box in 1999. that does not make it commercially successful. it does make the verdict feel different than the one written in real time.

sega became a third-party publisher and stayed one. sonic still ships sega games every couple of years onto other people's hardware. nobody at sega has the credibility internally to propose a new console anymore, and they probably will not.

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