When I am down in my basement game room organizing my collection for the hundredth time this year (my wife says I have OCD; she may be right), there is one console that always stops me dead in my tracks. That white, curvy beauty on the shelf — my Dreamcast — still catches my eye every single time I look at it. Not because it was the most successful console in the world, by no means, but because it embodied all that I love about gaming in one failed package that Sega managed to mess up despite mostly getting everything right.
September 9, 1999, is a day I will never forget. 9/9/99 — even the launch date was cool. I was 22, had just graduated from college, and was working my first real accounting job, and I finally had some extra cash to spend. So I walked into the local Babbage’s (remember, before GameStop bought everyone) and there it was under those cold, harsh fluorescent lights. The kid working the register, likely younger than I was, but dressed in gamer garb, told me that this was Sega’s last shot. Thanks for the encouragement, pal, I said, and handed him my cash.
I left Babbage’s with my brand new Dreamcast, a copy of Sonic Adventure, and Soul Calibur, and man, that first boot-up was something else. The swirling logo, the iconic startup sound — it felt like the future had landed in my living room. My roommate Mike laughed and told me I was nuts for spending $300 on “yet another Sega system,” considering how poorly the Saturn had done, but I had grown up on the Genesis and Sega had always been my console of choice. Genesis does what Nintendon’t, right? Old habits die hard.
That first night with Sonic Adventure blew my mind. I am not exaggerating when I say I played until my eyes burned. The graphics were amazing for ’99 — smooth, vibrant, fast as hell. Sonic had never looked better, and for once, his transition to 3D felt right. Unlike the travesty that was Sonic 3D Blast on the Saturn, which made me wonder why I had wasted my money on such a disaster. The Dreamcast’s PowerVR graphics chip was doing things that were giving my PC gaming pals a run for their money, which was saying something.
But it was Soul Calibur that ultimately convinced me that the Dreamcast was worth investing in. After spending way too much money on arcade quarters playing the original Soul Calibur, getting an arcade-accurate port at home felt like pure magic. The load times were nearly non-existent, the graphics were arguably better than the arcade versions, and I could finally figure out Mitsuragi’s moves without losing all my quarters. My friends and I spent entire weekends playing Soul Calibur, and nobody complained about the graphics being “bad” like my kids do today.
The controller was strange, but somehow perfect. The VMU — Visual Memory Unit — seemed like a total gimmick at first. A small screen on your controller? What was the point? Then I played some games that utilized the VMU properly, and it clicked. I received secret messages, played minigames while my main game was paused, and had my Chao from Sonic Adventure live in the VMU like a miniature Tamagotchi. This was the kind of forward-thinking innovation that made Sega special, even when they were making poor business decisions.
And then there was Shenmue. Oh, sweet Jesus, Shenyu. Yu Suzuki’s 70 million dollar fever dream that should have never worked but did. I worked overtime that winter to try and afford it, and it was every penny worth it. I would walk around Yokosuka, speak with every single NPC (and I mean every single one — I was obsessed), and play those dreadful QTE sequences that somehow felt revolutionary at the time. My girlfriend thought I had lost my mind when she’d come over to visit and found me playing arcade games within my video game for hours.
The detail in Shenmue was unbelievable. You could open every drawer, study every object, and the day/night cycle affected the game in ways that were never seen before. I would come home from work and boot up the Dreamcast just to see what time it was in Ryo’s world. In retrospect, it was basically what everyone is trying to accomplish with open-world games today, only Yu Suzuki accomplished it in 1999 with a fraction of the processing power of today’s systems. Just thinking about it still gives me chills.
Jet Set Radio came along and just solidified that Sega was working on a different wavelength than everybody else. Cel-shaded graphics that looked like they belonged in a playable anime, a soundtrack that I still listen to while I do my taxes (don’t judge me), and gameplay that was completely new. Cruising around Tokyo-to, tagging walls, dodging police — it was unlike anything else on any console. My friends with PSXs were playing more realistic-looking games, but nothing had anywhere near the personality of JSR.
The Dreamcast’s online features were what truly set it apart from the rest of the consoles at the time, however most people don’t remember this aspect of the Dreamcast. The built-in modem, baby! While PC gamers were struggling through lag and disconnections, I was playing Phantasy Star Online with people from all over the country in my living room. Yes, it tied up my phone line, and my roommate bitched and moaned constantly, but I was living in the future. Console online gaming began right here, in my terrible apartment, while I stayed up until 3AM hunting rare items with strangers who became friends.
Skies of Arcadia hit my RPG sweet spot perfectly. After years of dark, angsty Final Fantasy games, here was this bright, happy adventure about sky pirates that just made me smile. Vyse was the type of hero I wanted to be — confident, loyal, always seeking the next adventure. The ship battles were incredible, the world was huge and actually fun to explore, and the story never took itself too seriously. It’s a crime that more people have not played this game.
However, here’s the thing about the Dreamcast that still makes me mad to this day — Sega had a winning formula and screwed up the marketing and business sides. The damage done to the Saturn in the U.S. was so bad that most casual gamers had no idea the Dreamcast existed. I would show up at my friends’ houses with my Dreamcast and they would ask “Did Sega make another console?” Yes, they did, and it was better than your PSX, thank you very much.
The timing was also terrible. Sony was touting the PS2 as a console with DVD playback and “emotion engines” that sounded impressive, even though nobody had a clue what they were. Microsoft was throwing around rumors of the Xbox with PC-level graphics. Nintendo had Pokemon money to throw at the GameCube. And here’s Sega, broke from Saturn losses, trying to compete against companies with much bigger pockets.
Piracy also killed them. Somebody discovered that you could modify regular CDs to play Dreamcast games with minimal alteration, and soon every college dorm had burned copies of games circulating. I’ll admit, I wasn’t completely guilt-free — when you’re making $25k/year and games cost $50 each, sometimes you make concessions. However, every pirated game was money Sega wasn’t earning, and they desperately needed every sale they could get.
March 31, 2001. That’s when Sega officially ended production on the Dreamcast and announced they were abandoning the hardware business. I read about it online at work and felt… flat. My favorite gaming company, the one that gave me so many wonderful memories, was essentially conceding defeat. No more consoles for Sega — just software for other peoples’ systems. It felt like the end of an era, and it was.
It’s also what bothers me — how much of modern gaming has its roots in the Dreamcast innovations that nobody credited Sega for at the time. Online console gaming? The Dreamcast did it first. Reward-style systems? The VMU had that. Digital distribution? They were working on it. Motion controls? The fishing controller, anyone? Sega was always ahead of the curve, they just couldn’t execute the business side to save their lives.
The homebrew community continued to keep the dream alive, however. People are still making games for the Dreamcast today. You can burn them yourself and play them on the original hardware. There’s something beautiful about that — a console that the industry wrote off as a failure is still inspiring people to create for it decades after it ceased to exist. My kids think I’m a nutcase for getting stoked over new Dreamcast releases in 2024, but they don’t get what this system meant to people like me.
I still fire up the Dreamcast occasionally. Not just for nostalgia, although there’s a lot of that, but because the games themselves are still fantastic. Crazy Taxi is still a blast. Rez is still one of the most unusual gaming experiences you can have. Power Stone 2 is still the greatest party fighter that nobody talks about. These aren’t relics — these are excellent games that just happen to reside on a “failed” console.
When I think about the Dreamcast today, I don’t feel sad anymore — I feel appreciation. Appreciation for a company that threw caution to the wind and swung for the fences, and connected on more occasions than they missed. Appreciation for a console that crammed more innovation into its brief existence than most consoles do in a seven-year span. And yeah, maybe a bit of sadness for what might have been if Sega had simply played their cards a little differently.
The Dreamcast taught me that commercial success is not always indicative of quality or significance. Many of the best things in gaming history were commercial flops. The console that “lost” the sixth-generation console wars directly impacted every generation that followed. That’s not a loss — that’s being so far ahead of the pack that none of the other companies saw where you were headed for years to come.
So here’s to the Dreamcast, sitting on my shelf between my Saturn and my original Xbox. Still white, still curved, still looks like it came from the future, even twenty-five years later. Thanks for showing us what gaming could be, even if the world wasn’t ready for it at the time. Some of us were paying attention.
Elena is a librarian in Dublin with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European computer games that most English-language gaming sites completely ignore. She champions forgotten systems—the Commodore 16, the Spectrum 128K, the Atari ST’s untapped potential—with infectious enthusiasm and genuine expertise. Her writing documents regional exclusives and hidden gems that barely made it to print before the companies folded, preserving gaming history that would otherwise disappear entirely. She approaches retro gaming as cultural preservation, not mere nostalgia.
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