I had an entire binder of pirated Dreamcast games back when this came out. I can’t remember if I actually owned a genuine copy of a game (it was too easy to run pirated game discs).
I have good memories of the console though.
Haha I also had a giant binder full of pirated games. The other thing I remember about it was how loud it was reading the discs
We all had binders of pirated Dreamcast games…
I think I’m starting to see why it died.
Didn’t the pirates find out that they could copy the games onto regular CDs using some backdoor from the format of Karaoke CDs? You just need that famous loader CD to swap discs.
I’ve heard the pirates soon optimised the layout of the data on their versions so that there was less strain of the drive.
That was a thing is PS1 I believe. The Dreamcast out of the box just worked with pirated CDs.
Louder on pirated games than official ones IIRC. The laser worked harder to read them.
So did many! It was so easy!
“Dreamcast” is probably the single best gaming console name of all time, too.
Retro Sega systems stand out with their cool, mystical/sci-fi sounding names: Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast.
They were unique and felt like they were telling customers that we’d be in awe when using their consoles.
(Master System and Sega CD were pretty boring though)
Most other big systems’ names seem so utilitarian and uninspired:
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GameCube and Xbox are little boxy devices on your shelf that play games.
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The Nintendo Switch can switch between handheld and docked.
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All the PlayStations are stations that you play games on.
Yawn
Turbo Grafx was pretty cool tho.
NEC made an amazing system with the PC Engine/TG16. It would have been great if they followed it up with a next generation system
The PC-FX?
For some reason I thought the pcfx was adjacent to the PCEngine. Now I’m reading the wiki article on it and see i was wrong!
Thank you for the info
Even in the 70s and 80s they were coming up with cooler names for consoles, like the Magnavox Odyssey and the Intellivision. Atari named a bunch of their consoles after big cats, though they didn’t live up to their names. At least there was some imagination.
And yet Atari’s most popular console was just numbers, lol
“Video Computer System” definitely doesn’t sound as appealing lol
All three of those were some newfangled words in the 70’s.
Mega drive would have sounded cool when it came out, though it’s perhaps the most dated sounding name of the bunch.
It always sounded weird to me. The word drive always made me think of a disk drive or something.
I can only assume they were looking at PC Engine and wanted a similar name.
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Sega was already in dire financial straits after the Saturn, so they panicked during the Dreamcast and ended the console’s life cycle very early making developers abandon it within just a couple years.
I’m not sure if there’s anything they could have done differently to be honest. Sony pushed them over the edge with the price war during the Saturn, which was very inefficiently built in comparison making their production costs way higher than that of their competitors. If I remember correctly they were losing about $100 per unit before PSX did its first (very early) $50 price drop and they had to keep up, so that became -$150/ea before the console was even a year old. It was disastrous.
They released 32x, Sega Genesis, then Sega Saturn so freaking close to each other that really left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
Dreamcast came out with Sonic, Shenmue, Power Stone and then the most perfect version of Marvel Vs Capcom 2 and started to become attractive.
Then everyone discovered how to pirate Dreamcast games. Like it was so stupidly easy. People in my campus started giving copied Dreamcast games away.
No one is saying Dreamcast didn’t have a great library. The problem was Sega was on the brink of financial ruin when it launched and it simply didn’t move units due to its price point, awkward timing between consoles, and as you said prior saturation with their consoles.
It was actually the opposite problem… they sold plenty of hardware. But they lost money on every sale and didn’t make it back on software purchases as was the plan.
In fact, the Dreamcast had sold more than the Xbox and Gamecube combined for the first several years of their lifespan.
There was also the playstation 2 releasing about 6 months after the dreamcast, with dvd capabilities, when dvd players were expensive as fuck. People were using them as a DVD player. Basically the same reason the playstation 3 sold decently at all in it’s first years.
I’ve heard stories of people buying or being encouraged to buy a PS1 because it also played CDs.
Never heard of that. Audio cd’s have been around for a while by then. And cd players weren’t expensive. But I could be wrong. I was not really in to consoles at that point.
I wasn’t around then but i think the stories I heard was “kid wants his own cd player and gaming console so he buys a PS1”
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the Xbox was a financial disaster that was basically a massive loss leader by a larger company that could absorb it just to tee themselves up for next generation. Microsoft’s Xbox division was $2bill in the red when it was all said and done.
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the GameCube sold the worst of all the big 3 consoles (Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo) at 21 mill total. Xbox 24mill. The Dreamcast sold just 9mill. That’s less than half of the 3rd worst selling system.
You’re cherry picking your numbers it seems to ignore Dreamcast’s count at 9mill units sold. First years are only part of the story. The story is they did very poorly.
Your comparisons are not propping up the Dreamcast. The fact that it did worse than GameCube and Xbox despite the fact that both did not do well at all just further indicates how disastrous it was.
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I remember nobody trusting Sega to not abandon yet another console after a year like all the others so a lot of people stopped buying their brand.
Sega was too early with several innovations like online game downloads, which meant they weren’t profitable enough. Technically however they were ages ahead of the competition who later gladly absorbed their knowledge.
The Sega Saturn is a prime example of how that was not the case. They brute forced it and it cost a fortune as a result. Sony essentially matched it with generic parts for cheaper and developed it in a shorter amount of time along side them, the Saturn build did not directly inform its development.
Edit: in one of the books I read on this subject - I think it was either Replay or Console Wars, there is a great account of how when the Saturn dropped somy was very nervous because it was out well before the PlayStation was released. They immediately grabbed one and disassembled it, only to discover the monstrosity under the hood that made them feel very secure in their decisions. The two dedicated chips getting 3D to work right out the gate drove the cost up immensely. They knew they didn’t need to beat Sega to market because they were bleeding cash at an unbelievable rate. The game sales would never cover that.
Wasn’t the deeper story on this a bit more sad? I thought Sega made a bunch of rash idiotic decisions with their product lines, not originally because of Nintendo and Sony, but because of NeoGeo?
They were so convinced NeoGeo was going to be the be all end all of gaming, both home and arcade, so they shotgunned a bunch of ideas out then panic killed several of them?
Only decision Sega made in direct response to their competitors was the price drop after Sony kind of forced them to. I didn’t really say anything beyond that.
As for NeoGeo yeah big missteps/misinterpreting of the home gaming market’s direction
wtf did happen w neogeo
Ahh no, not saying you were wrong, just checking my decrepit old memory.
Word
Wii U too. Two consoles with a whole extra screen on your controller. Brilliant and cool features. Misunderstood or poorly timed?
Misunderstood for sure, I think. The Wii U suffered from what was probably the worst marketing campaign of any game console, ever. I didn’t even know it was a new console and not yet-another-Wii-addon until halfway through it’s life cycle and I think that was a pretty common misunderstanding.
And no compelling games library. What do you buy a Wii U to play? Bayonetta 2?
Rayman Legends, Pikmin 3, Super Mario 3D World, Smash Bros off the top of my head. It had plenty of excellent games
Yeah, which of those would you say “Oh boy, I’m going to spend several hundred dollars on a new console so that I can play THIS game”?
The Wii U had no killer app. The Gamecube had a stronger library throughout its life than the Wii U did. The Wii U was the thing they were also making during the 3DS era. Hell, the big game that was developed for the Wii U, Breath of the Wild, became a killer app for the Switch.
Given a Wii U and a collection of games for it, you can have some fun, certainly. It also has access to the Wii’s library, being essentially a Wii with an HDMI port, and it can access a lot of the older Nintendo library in a way that the Switch stubbornly doesn’t. A modded Wii U is a pretty cool thing to have. The Wii U had an abysmal career but it lived so it could retire.
Mario Kart 8 was probably the “killer app” (in my opinion), fortunately the switch also gave that a second lease of life!
Mario Kart 8 didn’t sell Wii Us the way Breath of the Wild sold Switches or Halo sold Xboxen.
Or the way MK8 sold Switches!
The way I felt about the Wii U was probably similar to how adults felt about the Dreamcast back then.
It seemed really cool, but it didn’t feel worth the money while there were other great consoles already. I was still getting a ton of use out of my original Wii.
I liked this console more than everything else that was around at that time. I still have one, too… I just don’t have the AV or power cables for it. 😩
Best graphics, very unique games for the library even though it didn’t live very long at all, free online multiplayer, the VMU was just dope as shit being able to play games directly on it (not good games but as a kid that didn’t matter lol), first system to do the speaker in the controller (technically it was on the VMU but the VMU plugged into the controller and provided sounds as well as a screen for certain menus functions)…
On the vmu, you could pick your plays on football games. So your cheating friend couldn’t see what you were doing.
Sure beats the other method where I also don’t know what I’m picking lol
And all because the PS2 could play DVDs and the Dreamcast couldn’t. Fucking DVDs. As ridiculous as that sounds today, people went apeshit over DVD playback capabilities back in the early 2000s.
But to be fair I also think Sega was their own worst enemy. In the 90s alone they released the Sega CD, 32X, the Saturn and the Dreamcast. Not to mention the Genesis 3 and CDX as well. If they would have slowed their roll and stopped cannibalizing their own sales, they might have done alright. The addon idea could have worked out better if done right. Hindsight is 20/20, so if they had a crystal ball they should have done something like this, and they’d still be making consoles today:
- Delay the Sega/Mega CD to allow themselves more time to rewrite the graphics ASIC to include 3D rendering capabilities.
- Cancel the 32X and Saturn; they were never even announced. The Sega CD is the next gen console.
- Sell it as an addon for $199, and cut the price of the base Genesis to $50. Release in 1994, along with bundle deals for $249 with an included game (for people who don’t already own a Genesis), and proceed wipe the floor with Sony before they even get a chance to compete.
Sega was their own worst enemy
Arguably they still are today. Can’t stop being a fan though!
But to be fair I also think Sega was their own worst enemy.
More true than you might realize. A lot of the missteps of the Sega CD/32X were from fights between Japan and US divisions. There was a push for the next console to be simply a Genesis/CD/32X melded together in one box.
Sony is also incredibly good at taking advantage of its competitors mistakes.
I personally don’t think that would have worked. We’ve seen repeatedly from multiple companies that selling anything as an “addon” just results in failure because developers can’t assume that people will have it. You have to bake the function in the lowest SKU or it ends up a novelty.
Perhaps if they rolled out the canceled Neptune as the half-step between Mega Drive and a delayed Saturn. It would have been the an excellent base SKU developers could target, with cheaper CD media as a bonus… but I just don’t see an enhanced Sega CD/32X going up against the PS1 and coming out any better than the Saturn did. I guess they wouldn’t have hemorrhaged all that money on wasted hardware though.
This motherfucker right here had ONLINE PLAY. You could spin up Phantasy Star Online: Episode 1 & 2 and actually have other people join your game, drop duplicated items, and destroy your droprate. It was fucken sicc.
Pipe me bro.
Pso2 was my high school jam. There’s still running private servers on pc but it ain’t the same when your homies are no longer around to play it.
I bought 2, my German Shepherd peed on the first one and killed it… RIP
Maybe he was more of a Sony dog.
Definitely a Nintendog
Nicely done.
Also PS Vita. It was better than anyone (even Sony) realized. And the few who DID like it obsessed with the memory cards and the actual insanely amazing console it is was forgotten and overlooked.
I still play mine today. And yes there are tons of great games on it beyond Persona, even though you wouldn’t know it among the usual Vita fans.
I never gave the vita a chance but I miss my modded psp
I had buttons get stuck on mine that I tried to fix but couldn’t.
That damn thing had some of the most fun games ever.
at some point “retro” consoles got popular on GameStops website and I invested in a Dreamcast, 3 controllers, and memory cards. it was all under around $80. so god damn worth it since I can just “find” games online for it. I didn’t grow up with it but it’s definitely been a fun console
You know, I haven’t thought about burning CDs for my Dreamcast before. Is it pretty simple these days?
It was easy like 15 years ago, now you just get a expansion card to hook up a usb thumb drive and have the entire catalog on it.
AliExpress has a part that replaces the disc reader. Let’s you play games on the console from SD card.
For others without a console, redream works pretty well for most games, even on a fairly old PC.
I remember being blown away by some of the games back then, and also disappointed that it wasn’t a more popular console.
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I used to play the maze puzzles for quake 3 arena to unlock cool shit like unlimited ammo, low gravity. My dreamcast was in use for many years being taken to parties where we played quake 4 player with crazy game options like that. That vmu got passed around to the point we were mapping out the maze on paper. Those were great times.
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Be me, not allowed to have pets, and having a VMU with a Chao on it
Do you know where the sailors are? I’m looking for some sailors.
Lots of people feel the same about the TurboGrafx-16.
I mean the PC Engine lived a full, and popular life. It’s a shame they couldn’t replicate the same success with the turbo. But at least there’s tons of games to go back and play.
The Dreamcast on the other hand was so short lived, even in Japan. We never got to see it’s full potential.
TurboGrapfx was cool because you could play on the console AND they had a game oh-like portable that could also play the games. It was BADASS!
*cries softly into Seaman microphone
My Friend: Did you hear? Sega cancelled the Dreamcast.
Me: …
Me: … (still waiting for the punchline)
