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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Did you know Gaming? runs through the Sega Dreamcast

VMUs! Windows CE! Dreameye!

YouTube channel Did you know Gaming? has taken on the Dreamcast, Sega's ill-fated late 90s console.

A young Nicolas Anelka looking thrilled to be holding a Dreamcast.

The video runs through the creation of the much-loved console, its well-documented problems, its memorable peripherals (the Dreameye is not what it sounds like) and its games.

We discover Microsoft played a role in Dreamcast's development, and Sega returned the favour when it pledged a number of games for the original Xbox. Sega apparently sounded Microsoft out about the possibility of the Xbox playing Dreamcast games, too.

Did you know, for example, that the first Fable game was intended to be released on the Dreamcast? Why did Europe get a different-coloured swirl than Japan and North America? And who can forget those Visual Memory Units?

Another interesting tidbit: Dreamcast games came on 1GB GD-ROMs. If you tried to play one in something other than a Dreamcast that could read it, you'd get an interesting audio warning message.

Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in early 2001 after poor sales and competition from Sony's incredibly successful PlayStation 2. It proved to be the Japanese company's final console.

Oh well. At least Sega still makes Sonic. Wait...

Watch on YouTube