¡Greetings, fellow Steemians! Today I'm starting a series of posts called Console Wars. On these articles, we are going to discuss, one by one, all of those videogame consoles that had importance in the market: those consoles that made us love the video gaming world and left a mark in our childhood, teenage years and even our adulthood with their power, their awesome games and that massive nostalgia we all videogame fans adore.
To start with these posts, I chose a console that was designed ahead of its own time. A misunderstood one, and also maybe victim of poor merchandising strategies. We are talking today about the mythical Sega Dreamcast.
Sega Dreamcast is a 128-bit console launched on September 28th, 1998 in Japan, being part of the sixth generation of gaming consoles. Dreamcast, at launch, faced a massive challenge: To defeat the famous Nintendo 64, take back the market lost to Sony with their PlayStation, and help Sega to recover from the huge damage Sega Saturn console left behind. The main advantage Sega had at this point, market-wise was the release date: it was the first console of its generation, being released several months before its rivals: PlayStation 2 from Sony, XBOX from Microsoft and GameCube from Nintendo.
This early release allowed Sega to enjoy a virtual monopoly of the market. During this phase, Sega sold about 500000 units of Dreamcast, ¡Only in North America, and only within 2 weeks! Another record Dreamcast set was to sell 225000 Dreamcast units in the United States ¡within the first 24 hours after launch! After some time, Sega announced that they got from Dreamcast sales, only in the United States, more than 100 million dollars. ¡Not bad at all!
Sega Dreamcast had some killer features, being a true pioneer in some of them, winning our hearts in the process. It was the first videogame console to have its own modem, to surf the web and online gaming, having for this purposes its own platform: Sega.net. Certainly, other systems before Dreamcast had some kind of connectivity to internet and basic forms of online gaming, but that was possible trough non-dedicated servers, something more oriented to homebrew and still on early stages.
Sega, being even more innovative, made a strategical alliance with the powerful Microsoft, to create a special software for Dreamcast, based on Windows CE operating system, as an alternative for the software used on PC. Compatibility was so extreme, that the programming crew was able to make a perfect port of the famous game Quake for Dreamcast, ¡within a week!
Dreamcast also used its own optical disc format to publish its software, called GD – ROM. GD – ROM featured a 1,2 GB disc capacity, allowing to make bigger games, having almost half a gigabyte to spare, if compared with the standard 700 MB CD – ROM. However, the main objective of the GD – Rom technology was not the extra capacity, but being an anti-piracy system; however, ¡Sega failed miserably with such system! it was found out that those discs had some structural errors, easily used by hackers. On top pf that, Dreamcast featured compatibility with the MIL – CD format, ¡what basically meant it had full compatibility with standard CD–R discs! That caused an uproar on internet, with LOADS of websites that allowed to download Dreamcast game ISOs. People simply started to download them, burning them on common CD-R discs and play directly on their consoles. However, Sega fixed it partially by releasing Dreamcast consoles, after October 2000, without the MIL – CD compatibility. Was a good move, but was executed too late: the damage was already done.
Sega Dreamcast is a powerful machine, equipped with the following components:
CPU: SH-4 RISC - 128 bits with vectorial FPU unit (operation frequency 200 MHz 360 MIPS/1,4 GFLOPS).
RAM Memory: 16 Megabytes.
Graphic chipset: PowerVR2DC (modified PowerVR2 CLX2) running at 100 MHz, 8 MB VRAM. 17,77 million colors, 24 bit color depth.
Audio chipset: Super Intelligent, made by Yamaha, sound processor CPU RISC ARM 32 bit (64 PCM/ADPCM channels) with 2 MB memory.
Disc unit: GD – ROM 12x speed.
Modem/connectivity: Removable 56 Kbps modem (33,6 Kbps in Europe).
Although Dreamcast had a powerful hardware, awesome features, and was in a selling spree, it meant death for Sega in the end. Something pretty sad and unfair in many ways: a series of external factors happened at the same time, Murphy’s Law style, dealing massive damage to Sega, forcing it to close its operations in home consoles department, and focusing only on arcade systems and software development.
But, ¿what happened exactly? Let’s see some of the main problems Sega had at that time:
1) The announcement of Sony’s PlayStation 2: PlayStation 2 wasn’t launched until march 2000 in Japan and October of the same year in America, but was announced since april 1999. Even with Dreamcast already in the market at that time, a lot of possible buyers decided to wait for the PlayStation 2, due basically to the huge success PlayStation (1) had.
2) Internal issues: Sega was suffering a massive restructuring process. Some of the changes they made didn´t work at all, and a lot of projects they had failed, losing loads of money as result. Sega was weakened, unable to fight in the same conditions with real merchandising titans as Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony itself, that was possibly the official killer of our beloved Dreamcast.
3) Massive damage left by its predecessor, Sega Saturn: Sega Saturn, for us gamers, was a brilliant console. For Sega accountants, ¡worst failure ever! In a world where all players wanted to play in the recently created 3D worlds, with real-time rendered graphics, Saturn kept focused on 2D software. That policy obviously affect the sales, not to mention the complicated structure Saturn had, that caused that making games for it to be hard and expensive.
4) Japanese economic crisis: Japan had a very complicated economic scenery back then. That obviously had a negative impact in every business, every market, and videogames were no exception whatsoever.
¡Dreamcast was a beautiful console! It was definitely misunderstood, also victim of the extremely effective merchandising strategies of Sega’s rivals, and highly affected by financial problems of its creator. A real shame, because that in the brightest Dreamcast days, it was already mentioned the possibility of making a Dreamcast 2. It’s very sad and frustrating to see quality is not the only key to success, and poor management decisions can destroy a huge potential, potential Dreamcast certainly had.
It is still possible to turn on our Dreamcast and play true gems like Shenmue, and dream about what could have been. Thanks a lot for reading me, Steemians. ¡Until next post!