I guess Dreamcast has been around a while.

[SackAttack]

I fired up NFL2k1 earlier today, and discovered that Barry Sanders and Dan Marino both are in the free agent pool with default rosters.

[MikeVic]

I need to try this again, but a few years ago I tried a Bomberman game for DC and used my university's dial-up to connect online... and there were still people playing. This was a few years after the DC was dead, so that kind of freaked me out. Who was still playing dialup Bomberman on the DC, and why were servers still up??

[SackAttack]

There's a broadband adapter out there for the DC, although I don't know how easy it is to come by.

I was toying with the idea of tracking it down and seeing if anybody's still got servers up for the original Phantasy Star Online.

[Anthony]

[Easy Mac]

First, Catherine Keener would not fuck him.

Second, that is way too many dolls.

Third, I did not see any sports games.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by SackAttack

There's a broadband adapter out there for the DC, although I don't know how easy it is to come by.

I was toying with the idea of tracking it down and seeing if anybody's still got servers up for the original Phantasy Star Online.

I believe I remember seeing they were down for good a few years ago but I could be wrong.

The internet adapter looks like it can be had for $5 on ebay

SI

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

I believe I remember seeing they were down for good a few years ago but I could be wrong.

I don't mean Sega's servers. I mean private servers.

[Logan]

Hard to forget that it launched on 9/9/99.

[SackAttack]

Yeah, I remember the launch date easily enough. I just don't THINK about it all that often. So when I realize that Barry Sanders and Dan Marino were in its earliest football games, that's the part that gives me pause.

[Logan]

Sorry, didn't mean it from a "you should've known" perspective.

[Oilers9911]

My DC is still hooked up to the TV in the basement. Still fire it up for a few games now and then.

[albionmoonlight]

I'm sure that this has been discussed over and over and over in the gaming community. But why did the DC fail? It was a good system at a good price. I liked mine, anyway.

[bob]

I thought it came down to no EA games and easy to pirate games (burn to a blank CD).

[Chubby]

and their stupid stealth launch

[Big Fo]

Originally Posted by Chubby

and their stupid stealth launch

That was the Saturn.

[Mustang]

Found an old Toys R Us ad yesterday from 1990. Had the Turbo Grafix 16 on sale for $149.99 with CD add on for $399.99.

[Sun Tzu]

It's all about Panasonic's 3DO!

I remember renting one from Blockbuster for a week and playing the Madden game non-stop. It was pretty much the same thing as Madden for Genesis, only with better graphics.

[Logan]

I owned an Atari Jaguar, thanks to a raffle put on by a video store that was opening up. My sister's best friend was working there and rigged it for me.

After buying a couple games, I think I was the ultimate loser.

[cthomer5000]

Jet Grind Radio is one of my all-time favorite games. That alone should have carried that system to success.

My hazy recollection from the time was that the Dreamcast was more or less D.O.A. when it was released. I think the Saturn was a total disaster, and Playstation had come along and basically eaten up their market share.

It seemed like Sega pulled the plug really fast when Dreamcast came out of the gate with poor sales.

Didnt it do really well in Japan though?

[thesloppy]

I had 80 bajillion Dreamcast games, and don't think I ever used the weird LCD-screened memory-card that you plugged into your controller....but I sure wanted to. Was there any game that used that thing properly?

...now, the fishing rod controller? That thing was beautiful.

[cthomer5000]

Originally Posted by thesloppy

I had 80 bajillion Dreamcast games, and don't think I ever used the weird LCD-screened memory-card that you plugged into your controller....but I sure wanted to. Was there any game that used that thing properly?

I think it maybe displayed plays during the football games? So you could covertly look through your playbook?

I mostly remember weird little mini-games you could play with the memory card alone.

[Logan]

Crazy Taxi was fantastic on Dreamcast. My thumbs almost broke.

[cthomer5000]

Originally Posted by Logan

Crazy Taxi was fantastic on Dreamcast. My thumbs almost broke.

I could have down without the "YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH" offspring song every 3 minutes.

[lungs]

32x bitches

[Anthony]

i called all my plays on that memory card display thing.

[CU Tiger]

I remember buying a turbo grfix 16 at a local toy shop (tons o toys I think or something similar) about a year after it had gone away for like literally $19...and all the games they had were $1 each...

There was one flight sim game that sucked and a few other non memorable ones...ultimately sold it all to a friend for more than I paid for it

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by albionmoonlight

I'm sure that this has been discussed over and over and over in the gaming community. But why did the DC fail? It was a good system at a good price. I liked mine, anyway.

All kinds of reasons, but...

Originally Posted by bob

I thought it came down to no EA games and easy to pirate games (burn to a blank CD).

This is a good start. Later models removed the ability to read CD-Rs, but models released in the first year or two had that capacity.

The lack of EA software scared off some smaller publishers/developers, since EA's stated reason was "we can't be profitable on your platform." Others took a "we'll develop software when the install base is there," forgetting that end users frequently look at a system and say "I'll buy it when there's more games to play." Catch-22.

Chubby mentioned the "stealth launch" which is more appropriately attributed to the Saturn. Sega tried to steal a march on Nintendo and Sony by releasing the Saturn six months before the previously announced launch date. As a result, they had an atrocious software selection, and the system turned out to be fairly difficult to develop for in the first place, which didn't help Saturn attract people with quality and quantity of software. PlayStation was easier to develop for, by comparison and had much less restrictive licensing than either Nintendo or Sega's systems.

Finally, you've got the fact that Sega was bleeding money at the time. They were still suffering financially from the decision to invest time and money in 32X (pulling the plug basically six months after launch to say "never mind, Saturn!"), followed by the abortion of a launch Saturn got. Basically, they squandered all the momentum Genesis built up, and they pissed away a shitload of money in the process.

Dreamcast should have been what saved them, but they didn't have the money to really promote it right. Even so, the system still sold pretty well (even with the rumors of Sony threatening retailers to try and plow the road for PS2 sales), and it probably would have survived if Xbox hadn't entered the marketplace. Once it did, though, Sega was in the position of being probably the 4th in terms of prominence and name recognition, going up against two juggernauts and a well-heeled new competitor that, while it might lose money the way Sega had been, could actually *afford* to lose that money.

They figured there was more money in platform-agnostic game development at that point, and the rest is history.

And, yeah, agreed. It was a fantastic system - I bought mine with the first paycheck I ever earned - and it broke my heart when Sega of America pulled the plug.

I'd love to know what caused the breakdown in relationships between Sega and Electronic Arts; EA's diversification from floppy-based games to the console marketplace took them from a small-but-profitable PC house into a worldwide brand, and the Genesis was what gave them the leverage to get into both the Nintendo and Sega marketplaces on reasonable terms. Likewise, EA support probably did more for the growth of the Genesis marketplace than any other single developer. It was a perfectly symbiotic relationship, and somewhere along the line, one of them fucked it up. I wish I knew how, and why.

Originally Posted by cthomer5000

Jet Grind Radio is one of my all-time favorite games. That alone should have carried that system to success.

My hazy recollection from the time was that the Dreamcast was more or less D.O.A. when it was released. I think the Saturn was a total disaster, and Playstation had come along and basically eaten up their market share.

It seemed like Sega pulled the plug really fast when Dreamcast came out of the gate with poor sales.

Didnt it do really well in Japan though?

Alas, quirky-yet-awesome games seldom resonate with the marketplace the way they deserve to. Hell, look at Okami on the PlayStation 2 - a system that had sold 100 million units worldwide by then. It didn't get nearly the retail reception it deserved, and it caused Capcom to break up the studio that developed it (same studio that did Viewtiful Joe, if I'm not mistaken).

Dreamcast wasn't DOA, but it was definitely overshadowed. Partly by Sega's own mistakes and past hubris, but partly also by the impending launch of the PlayStation 2. It's possible to take market share from an established leader with a strong product and strong marketing. Sega proved that themselves in eating something like 40-45% of Nintendo's market share in the 16-bit generation.

It's not possible to do that, on the other hand, if you lack critical licensee support and have a public image problem based on previous products. I mean...imagine if BP were to come back to market in a couple of years with a product that revolutionized the energy industry, and attempted to sell that product domestically as...BP. I dare say we'd see that revolution eventually, but it wouldn't be BP that ultimately caused its spread. The bad juju associated with the company's name would probably sink that particular product, and we might see the innovations get picked up by the competition.

In a way, that's kind of what happened. The Dreamcast did a few things that no console before had even tried to do, and now we think of those things as staples of the industry.

The Visual Memory Units, for example, were one of the first efforts at connectivity between the console space and the handheld space. The NFL2k series of games allowed you to call your plays with it. Sonic Adventure had the Chao Garden - a little minigame that you could take on the go with you and then upload back to your console when you got home.

Nintendo took that a step further with the use of the GBA/SP as controllers for the GameCube with titles like The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, and even Sony was showing off how the PlayStation Portable could be used as an extra mirror of sorts with the upcoming Gran Turismo 5. Those are obviously more advanced than what the VMU did, but the VMU planted the seeds for future exploration in that space.

It was the first commercially successful console with four-player multiplayer capability as an out-of-the-box option.

It was the first console which included built-in hardware for internet connectivity. Now, of course, all three consoles have built in networking functionality of one kind or another.

So you've got three revolutions of varying impact within one piece of hardware, and it was being marketed by a company that had shot itself in the foot several times in the previous five years. They probably wouldn't have done much better than 3rd in a four-way race had they stayed in the race...but I agree that Sega of America was way too quick to pull the plug. They announced their departure from the scene six months before Xbox even shipped, and the hardware had been discontinued by around four months after Xbox hit the scene. If you look at the numbers, Sega sold close to 11 million units in just under 2.5 years - with from June 2001 through February 2002 the console was "dead man walking," while Microsoft shifted around 24 million Xboxes in five years or so.

No, the Dreamcast wasn't DOA, and it didn't have to die as quickly as it did. Sega of America was broke, and couldn't sustain the platform any longer. As you pointed out, it did enjoy a longer lifespan in Japan, and there are still occasional Dreamcast releases over there.

Originally Posted by thesloppy

I had 80 bajillion Dreamcast games, and don't think I ever used the weird LCD-screened memory-card that you plugged into your controller....but I sure wanted to. Was there any game that used that thing properly?

...now, the fishing rod controller? That thing was beautiful.

No love for Samba de Amigo and the maracas?

Originally Posted by cthomer5000

I think it maybe displayed plays during the football games? So you could covertly look through your playbook?

I mostly remember weird little mini-games you could play with the memory card alone.

Yeah, playbook functionality from Visual Concepts, the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure, Resident Evil 2 put the health bar down there, there were a couple others. But most of the games that did use it did so for trivial uses.

[k0ruptr]

Still my favorite system ever, hell I even stil have one that I burn games for (and no I don't feel bad about it) And if I get the urge to play Seaman it will be a bitch to track one down so Ill just burn it and play those. Yes the DC did lots of things right, I remember playing NFL 2k, 2k1, and 2k2 . The former two on Dricas Ladder , an amazing in its own right ranking/ladder system. I even got ranked up as high as 9th out of the USA on 2k1 online. the only football game online I ever been good at! amazing game and amazing features on an equally amazing system. But the game of them all was PSO - Phantasy star online, my best game ever. damn the dreamcast did online play right, and it was perfect even on my 56k modem. no LAG. no Idea how they pulled it off but it was fucking wonderful. ahh I miss those days so.


also - Back then I always bought my DC games, I only burn the, currently. it was sad how many pirates were back in the day, but it was super easy to pirate - download and burn and play. no crazy mod chips or bios flashes or flash carts or anything of the like , like now days. another good thing about the DC was developers really enjoyed programming for it. The ones that did make games that is.

[SackAttack]

Happy 11th birthday, Dreamcast! Only two years to surly teenagerhood!