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Dream On…

By: Omar (@siegarettes)

Looking at SEGA’s past record, it almost seems to be one of SEGA succeeding despite their hardware. The Genesis was plagued by multiple revisions with parts sourced from several manufacturers, followed by shoddy, unsupported add-ons. The Saturn was rushed out the door with a 3D processor hastily bolted on to compete with the PSOne. Despite that the Genesis became the first real contender with Nintendo, and the Saturn enjoyed success in Japan and a cult following in the US. 

When SEGA finally nailed it, bringing a machine very much ahead of its time, a few poor key decisions and the weight of the company’s history came crashing down upon it. Not even two years into the North American release of the system and it had already been discontinued. 

Its been 15 years since the release of SEGA’s swansong. There was obviously some enigmatic appeal to the system, as it continued to see officially licensed titles until 2007, with independent releases as recent as last year. 

As for me, I got my hands on one just last year. Worth it?

Yes, definitely. I spent the night of my birthday driving myself to a town nearly an hour away to buy one off a now middle aged man. When I arrived home I picked up a pack of CD-Rs and immediately set to the work of catching up with what I missed. The guilt could wait.

It’d been over ten years since I’d laid hands on a Dreamcast. My sole interactions with it were long sessions of neck craning at a local Sears playing San Francisco Rush 2049, a session of Street Fighter IIIand fuzzy memories of a shooter I played at a Barnes & Noble I’m assuming was Quake III. (This was in California, where it is apparently normal to have nooks for videogames in a bookstore).

Since then I’d been slowly coming to covet the device. It was on the few ways to play cult titles like Cannon Spike and Virtual On, and it also proved difficult to emulate with any accuracy. I picked up a few of those titles as they slowly trickled onto digital marketplaces (Virtual On, Ikaruga, Power Stone and other flagship Capcom fighters saw new life thanks to digital storefronts), but there were still a fantastic array of titles left out. 

Shamefully, to this day I’ve only one actual Dreamcast game, the wonderful puzzler Chu Chu Rocket, which I enjoyed quite a bit as a child via the Gameboy Advance version (thanks THQ, RIP). I’m slowly starting to find local haunts to remedy that. I have, however, been able to explore a significant chunk of some of the Dreamcast’s library. I can’t tell you what it the experience of playing the console was like back in the day, with its bizarre innovations and way early online play, but I can tell you this: the Dreamcast was probably the best vertical slice you can get of the creative and experimental peak of SEGA. 

While titles like Virtua Tennis and F355 Challenge held the bar as excellent titles to appeal to the sports fanatic, offbeat titles like Space Channel 5 and Cosmic Smash showed off visual futures that looked straight out of the video for Michael Jackson's Scream. Seriously, watch the damn video and you’ll be damn sure someone at SEGA was an MJ fan. (He also straight up makes appearances in both Space Channel 5 titles).

A lot of titles still feel fresh even today. Pair it up with a Dreamcast VGA cable and you can even get crisp, smooth images that feel sharper than even what the Gamecube would put out under progressive scan. Granted, the poly count and animation isn’t there, but it goes a long way toward pushing the sense that it was ahead of its time.

Sadly, SEGA has been keen to push out dreck like Sonic Adventure onto every system, leaving its more enigmatic titles by the wayside (though to their credit they did rerelease Space Channel 5 Part 2). At this point the Dreamcast has been regulated to an addendum in the book of videogame history, relegated to appearances in fan service delivery systems like Project x Zone and Sonic & All Stars Racing. 

Let’s not be coy, however. After all they did, SEGA basically had it coming. Its failure wasn’t exactly undeserved, and its unlikely that it could have competed with the next generation no matter what speculators may say. It was a system simulateously ahead of, and out of step with its time, burdened by a decade of poor business decisions. SEGA’s hardware collapse was inevitable, but at least it went out with a bang. For those of us who wished we see more of the little box, we’ll just keep dreaming.