Dreamcast: A Forensic Retrospective Comments by Dan Whitehead

Widge

The PS2 had no class, it was the lowest common denominator in the video game world. If the PS2 was LIDL, the Dreamcast was Waitrose ;-)

To whoever mentioned the Saturn, your not the only one. I love my Dreamcast but overall I preferred the Saturn as it coincided with a golden selection of Sega coin-ops like VF2, Sega Rally etc. Plus it had the likes of the Panzer Dragoon series and the best versions of all those Capcom fighters.

I think there were alot of things going against SEGA at that time here is the order Id place the most affecting factors in though:

* Sony hype(worked a treat for them, alot of gamers bought every last soundbite and the mags repeated it for those who missed any of them) and Sony loyalty coupled with the Backwards Compatibility... all of this made for a deadly blow to SEGA and a mass resistance of the DC even though they could see the DC was good, they held out in alot of cases in the hopes that PS2 really would do their laundry.

* DVD, its true it was a really huge factor for the new gamers Sony attracted(these werent even considered by SEGA I dont think, expanding the market wasnt the plan they just wanted success in the current market again) one of the first things I remember about the PS2 was watching a DVD on it at a friends house.

*Bad marketing decisions, but this was probably mostly Europe that was affected by that, apparently Japan and America did quite well on the advertising.

*Lack of EA support not so much in Europe but the US is the biggest market out there so it was pretty darn important.

*"Dreamcast is already dead" talk long before it was certain, this is FUD and it works well... I do wonder if Sony pays for people to generate this kind of thing for their competitors sometimes(could just be how gamers are really but it wouldnt suprise me). Remember the "Xbox will scratch all your Disks" talk around the Xbox launch too? The RROD will be heavily relied upon by MS haters for years to come even in this time of reliable Jasper 360s. It also amuses me how people like Les sulk about the repair bill write off because they can no longer use it to pretend 360 isnt steadily making its own profit(which it is) and also spin it into a tale of doom for the Xbox devision(suprised to see Rob hint about it too in his article)... it's the main reason these people/gamers take such a keen(understatement) interest in sales looking for anything bad they can spin in the good and vice versa for the competition(Hype, FUD all seem like desperate moves that I could gladly do without in gaming, yet they have proven to be effective).

All of us who had to deal with Sega Europe at the time knew the machine was doomed. Not because of the games - the launch line-up was brilliant - but because the marketeers were trying to one-up Sony in terms of 'mainstream' PR and rapidly disappeared into their collective rear-ends.

Not only that, but there was a genuine, conscious decision at Sega Europe to turn its back on its heritage, particularly its Japanese output. Anything that could be linked back to the Saturn days - anything - was seen as an embarrassment. This did lead to some great second party development, but they simply didn't know what to do with the majority of the Japanese stuff they had to deal with.

The fact that the ads had no game footage or screenshots spoke volumes. The machine's key advantage at launch was that the games looked so much better than the PS1's... but you'd never have been able to tell from the marketing.

Sad, sad days - so much optimism after the Japanese launch and the early reveals of stuff like MSR - but the bottom line is that it wasn't Sony that killed the Dreamcast, it was Sega trying to copy them.

@N.A.T.O.

Yes it was (is) actualy popular, if that was what you were trying to say:-(

The PS2 was and is a great console, one of the best of all time.

I know its terribly fashionable to beat up on Sony right now, but history I think will judge them very kindly. They did a huge amount to break gaming out of its bedroom/geek-pit ghetto and provided a fertile ground for an enormous number of classic gaming franchises and genres to grow from.

i loved the dreamcast! it did more in two years than the ps2 did in four!
such a shame brand loyalty is such a factor in the games market.

I still play on both my Dreamcasts. I always laughed at how poor my friends' PS2 games looked and played by comparison.

I know its terribly fashionable to beat up on Sony right now, but history I think will judge them very kindly. They did a huge amount to break gaming out of its bedroom/geek-pit ghetto

Couldn't much the same be said of the Wii now? It's massively derided here on EG, yet has found a massive audience and potentially will open gaming up to even more people than the PS2 did.

I actually preferred the saturn too. Same great line-up of shmups (Radiant Silvergun) and Capcom's golden years in 2d fighters imo (marvel super heroes). Then they had the ridiculously brilliant Nights, panzer dragoon series, Shining Force 3, Virtua Fighter 2, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally. So so good.
Dreamcast was great too
I miss sega. The PS2 only started to catch up to the DC with ICO and God of War etc. being released if you ask me.

@Secombe

Absolutely true. And its a development that should be welcomed.

Its easy I think to judge the Wii as something completely different to what Sony and MS are offering, in that their primary audience is people who generally aren't videogame afficionados, but realistically its still a games console and if people like what they see, they may feel inclined to look into what else the market offers.

Which is great, I think.

The DC is sadly missed but during it's short life it delivered more moments of greatness than any other console in a similar time frame.

Rev. Stuart Campbell (comment on first page) is spot on. It was Sega's marketing which killed the Dreamcast. Shame.

Sony had a HUGE impact on Dreamcast, nearly every gamer I knew was waiting. "You should get a dreamcast it's f**king wicked!" I'd say only to hear the reply "nah, I'm waiting for PS2 that's gonna be much better".

I absolutely agree with Bad09 here. Some of you can ignore this fact if you like, but many of us saw this first hand with almost every single interested party. Almost every person I spoke to was waiting for the PS2 for either the DVD, because the PS2 will be much more powerful or because there was no Fifa. I had non-gamers coming up to me and telling me that The Sun has said it will have gigaflops of bandwidth or some such bollocks.

Most (not all) of the people who say it was Sega themselves are either the very Sony loyalists that caused the problem or never owned a DC and thus didn't hear the comments that Bad09, myself and others heard when showcasing the DC.

EA definitely also had an impact in Europe too. I've got mates that aren't really into general gaming but do like a game of fifa or pes. They waited for a PS2 too.

Finally the 32x and MegaCD had fuck all to do with it. You can't say that it only sold 250k and then suggest that it pissed people off so they didn't by a DC. Most of the people gaming by the time the DC came out didn't even know what a 32X was let alone make it affect their buying decision!

So yeah, I do think the DC was probably, per year, the best console ever....and I'll always resent Sony (even though I own Playstations) for bullshitting the way they did and playing the largest part in killing off a gaming stalwart.

They tried it again this time but... some of us saw through it and MS are a darn sight richer than Sega. Some fucking idiots still fell for it - every one of the people that spent over £600 on the bundle only PS3 launch at play.com etc. ;)

"y'up it is true sony did pretty much kill sega off.

but i always felt the 360 is the re-incarnation of the dreamcast,
back from the grave to kick sonys ass

- vey similar colour console boxes.
- very very similar colour schemes on the control pads.
- the same man Peter Moore behind both projets"

I always felt that too, mainly because SEGA seemed to cozy up to MS a bit for a while after they went software only.

Collymilad

Unfortunately I don't agree that the 360 is the natural successor to the DC (for what it's worth).

If the DC was stacked full of derivative first and third person shooters then i'd agree with you. Don't get me wrong, the 360 is a great machine with cool features (XBLA etc), it's just too much like a PC though.

The DC was home to Videogames not wannabe PC games (except Quake 3,UT, oh and Soldier of Fortune).

Videogames in this generation can only mean the Wii. No joke.

(Quickly dons flame suit)

Great article!

Thanks for the Dreamcast love EG. A fine console indeed.

And you're right; Sega killed it with their crazy antics in the latter half of the 90s.

Ironically, SEGA kind of killed themselves. Sad, but true. I still have my Dreamcast and a box full of awesome games though. Jet Set Radio, Shenmue 1 and 2, Sonic Adventure 2, Marvel vs Capcom, Code Veronica, Rayman 2... bliss.

"GT3 and MGS2 looked better than anything on the market at the time."

Shenmue was and is aesthetically the best game of its generation by a mile. Nothing on PS2 or GC comes remotely close to it, certainly not MGS2. There's just no grain of truth in the claim that the PS2 was technically better than the DC.

@SpaceMidget75

So, hang on a second. How can being loyal to something be a "problem" ? If Sega's marketing department weren't able to present a strong enough case to sway people its their fault surely?

The historical fact of the matter is that Sega were extremely cash-strapped by the time of the DC's launch as a result of a series of failed hardware launches going back all the way to the end of the Megadrive/Genesis era. This is not debatable.

Everybody knew at the time that the DC was Sega's last attempt at cracking the hardware market, and very few expected them to succeed based on their track record at that point.

This lack of confidence extended to a lot of third-party publishers, particularly EA. Again, in the previous generation it wasn't just Sony eating Sega's lunch. The N64 wasn't a PS1 troubling success, but it sold solidly (~33m lifetime) and thanks to Nintendo's first and second party hits was the critical darling of its time.

Worse for Sega was that its mainstay, its arcade games, were fading out of sight and its chief competitors (Namco, Konami, etc) had aligned themselves strongly with Sony over the last generation. It was only Capcom who showed any faith in them by bringing across Res Evil, although they traded that off with Sony by giving them the DMC and Onimusha franchises to soften the blow.

Sega were out on a limb with few friends to watch their back. I remember at the time wondering if MS were going to step in, having tentatively aligned themselves with Sega by supplying them the Win CE OS/Toolkit. But no. When the crunch came MS turned their backs and started their own venture instead.

Most of all though, Sega chronically misjudged the software market at that time. Not a single enduring franchise was created during the Dreamcasts short life. Good as a lot of titles were, they were either too niche or badly marketed to make much of an impact. Shenmue being a classic example of Sega spending a metric fuckton of money and resources on a game that had minimal mainstream appeal.

The nub of the problem I think was that a lot of Sega's best titles were very closely affiliated with the arcade experience, and that was way out of fashion at the time. I suppose if you consider the Playstation as the home console that killed the arcades once and for all, then you have grounds for blaming Sony for Sega's demise. But that still leaves Sega's execs as being the major culprits in that they had failed to disassociate themselves from their past (and fading) glories.

For those of us who were around at the time, this article sounds like it tells barely half the story. Piracy was a big deal that left SEGA helpless to do anything about it. And many of the games for the DC were terrible "filler" titles. Gamers quite rightly looked to the PS2 for more varied titles to play.

"i loved the dreamcast! it did more in two years than the ps2 did in four!"

Bollocks! Like what?

I bought a Panasonic 3DO and never had the money to get a DreamCast. I wish i did. Man i love all the old machines.
Wonder if they will ever re make Jet Force Gemini for the N64

\o/

£30 has got me a DC, pad, LE green VMU, VF3tb, SR2, F355, Daytona 2001 and a steering wheel, just 3-4 days to wait!

Thanks EG, when I woke this morning I didn't think I'd be buying a console - Bastards!!

Shenmue I'm coming home!

ALL the stuff I put on a Dreamcast looked decided a grade below what I'd been playing on the PS2. I was seriously expecting some wonderbox and was really chuffed when I got my hands on one, only to really feel a bit disappointed by it all.

In comparing power of consoles, someone please tell how long it took to get a PS2 fighter which was as stunning as soul calibre? did it ever happen?

I think it was shemue which sunk the DC, they put everything into it and it didn't sell like it needed.

Looks like the faithful have finally turned up.

and @Greybeard, there's too many things I don't agree with in your post for me to be bothered to reply to each one.

Simple fact is...
...no one I knew bought a DC because it didn't have a DVD player, didn't have Fifa or they thought the PS2 was gonna produce that FF8 ballroom scene in real-time.

No amount of marketing can fix that.

I dont think anyone can really say that piracy had a hand in killing the Dreamcast. If that was the case the original Playstation would have been dead in the water as that was probably the first console to bring piracy to the mass market.

There was a massive group of people that only bought a PS1 because it could be chipped and copied games were very easy to aquire. I am sure most PS1's bought from mail order distributers such as Skill and the like were pre-chipped versions.

At the end of the day the Dreamcast wasn't cool enough for the mass market because it didnt have a Sony logo in the corner.. Sega knew this would be a problem, why do you think the machine was white and didnt even have a promenant Sega logo to be seen..

I agree darrenb.

The piracy argument is a hypocritical as the 32x argument. You still need to buy the console to play your pirates on. The DC was selling less once it had been hacked!

Piracy never really hurts the hardware but devs may decide to chuck the software in if it gets too much (like psp). DC fell so quickly and easily (like PSP again oddly) I'm sure it was a contributing factor to it's eventual downfall.

We'll I might be hazy on the subject but I'm sure it wasn't widespread hacked until about a year after the UK launch. By that time it wasn't selling well anyway so it was only existing users in its last year that took advantage.

Your're right it was a little while before it really took hold but I seem to remember the few people I did know who got one did so because of "cheap" games so sales of software must have taken a dive even before hardware started stalling.

>"Shenmue being a classic example of Sega spending a metric fuckton of money and resources on a game that had minimal mainstream appeal."

Shenmue sold over some 1.5mil, even with the crappy marketing and small demographic (being exclusive to the DC).

@Spacemidget

You might not like what I have to say, but what I've written is the truth. Honestly, look into it.

I can't believe you're being so adamant about disregarding what I wrote on the basis of anecdotal evidence of what your friends and acquaintances said at the time. Sega is/was a multinational business, the failure of a single product (the DC in this case) should not be enough to topple such an organization unless there were other, more deeply-seated issues affecting them!

You cannot disregard the state of the business leading up to the time of a launch as it affects every aspect from manufacturing run-size, marketing, strategic alliances etc. Its just common sense that all these factors come into play!

I'm at a loss to tell the truth why you're being so defensive about the subject. Nothing I've written isn't directly verifiable by searching around on the internet. Does holding a grudge against Sony mean that much to you that you have to blot out all the other significant reasons for Sega's collapse?

If so, fine. I really don't mind. But please, show me some courtesy, and don't just tell me I'm wrong without first bothering to justify why you think that's the case.

PS. On the subject of hacks, there were several. The first one was the hot-swap method done by disconnecting the lid-sensor which was known within weeks of launch, later on the discovery of the flaw processing CD+G discs was known and exploited to allow direct booting of backups.

@The bodybuilder

afaik the only solid figure for Shenmue was the 470k in the US as tracked by NPD. It did worse in Japan and Europe but is generally regarded to have sold more than a million. A million five seems a touch high to me. Regardless it lost Sega a lot of money.

GreyBeard: Rubbish. Your point only applies to companies that have their income equally spread out over a series of products. For sega the biggest chunk went into consoles. If that one product would fail, there is always a big chance that the company will go titsup. The percentage of companies that have the luxury of a spread out income is tiny. Most will have to do with one main product.

Oh god the SDF are in now.

Ah well, it's snowing and I'm a DC owner again, SDF can't bring me down today.

i loved my dc until it died last year and playing pso was my first online experience, continued with ep 2 on the GC. imo, i agree that the dc suffered from bad publicity from the saturn era (which i bought as well) and the decision by most people to wait and see what the ps2 would do when it came out.

one game that it was epic!!! ECCO THE DOLPHIN!!!!

@Xerx3s

The Mega-Cd failed... The 32X failed...The Multi-mega failed... The Nomad failed...The Saturn failed...

Guess what happened next?

Lets not forget the abortive merger with Bandai in 1997, or the consecutive years of financial losses culminating in the boardroom reshuffle in May 2000.

Things were rough for a long, long time. Do some research if you doubt me.

And as for consoles being Sega's only business venture, how about their arcade division which exists to this day.

For reasons that may never be fully understood, the Japanese shoot-'em-up fraternity decided that the Dreamcast was the place to be

That reason was probably that the most advanced and accessible arcade board for a long time was the NAOMI, Which is Dreamcast hardware, meaning that porting to and from Dreamcast for a home release was almost trivial.



Sega killed the Dreamcast with poor management and even poorer marketing. A lot of people complain that it was too easy to pirate games for the system. I have to admit that I pirated several games myself, but that was because actually finding legitimate copies of anything aside from crap like Blue Stinger was next to impossible in Australia. I had to seriously go out of my way to find Shenmue and Sonic Adventure II, and finding one of the reputedly about 100 copies of Grandia II released in the country was an epic undertaking. The Dreamcast was terribly badly marketed and poorly managed. Sony's not to blame - Sony didn't really have to do anything except mention that they had a new console, and then sit back and watch Sega fall on their sword.

"Oh god the SDF are in now."

Sega Defense Force?

" it's hard to begrudge Dreamcast fans their lingering resentment that a technologically inferior console with a fairly dire line-up of early titles was able to so easily steamroller their beloved box just on the basis of brand loyalty"

lol your having a laugh right? how was ps2 tencnologically inferior? did dreamcast have dvd? could it have done gran turismo or god of war? dreamcast died because while millions were happily playing resident evils, medal of honours, gran tourismos and wipeouts sega offered us crazi tax! dont get me wrong i was a huge sega fan at one time but i really get sick of this notion that the whole world was somehow duped into buying ps2. ok sony spouted and still spout some outrageous claims but, hey, its called marketing. dreamcast fans...get over it.

'The DC was shit. Hence, the reason it bombed.'


Comments like this depress me! Although it goes some way to explain why this tool seems to hate the 360 so much.

Are people like Zero_cool so dumb to the point they would compare DC games with ps2 games that came some2-3years after the DC died?

Ah, DC, how I miss your online tomfoolery...Q3A, Daytona, Worms World Party and so many more...not to mention Crazy Taxi and F355, which redefined 'arcade-perfect conversions'...so many excellent titles, I would have (at the time) happily sold internal organs to own them all. :D

And rather than point the finger at one particular suspect, they are in fact ALL guilty of causing the DC's demise. SEGA's attitudes towards hardware in the 90s did them no favours, EA's subsequent refusal to develop and publish knocked the props out from under the machine, and Sony's PR was essentially the last nail in the coffin.

Add to that the bizarre blowing of the European marketing budget on sponsoring Arsenal and a couple of other European sides - a deal that even ended up extending past the end of the console's actual lifespan - and Sony reps actively discouraging retaillers from pushing DC stuff as 'it might affect their future relationships with Sony'*, and the end result was in no doubt whatsoever.

*I was in a branch of EB (remember them?) when a Sony rep actually uttered those words to the manager within earshot of about a dozen customers...couldn't believe what I was hearing...

could it have done gran turismo or god of war?

Yes.

TheBodybuilder-
Are people like Zero_cool so dumb to the point they would compare DC games with ps2 games that came some2-3years after the DC died?

+1 You cannot compare games released AFTER the DC died. Did games launched 3-5 years into the PS2's life compare graphically with games released in the first 1 - 2 years? They looked quite a bit better, as with every console. Who knows what the DC could have done had developers had more time to work with it. We would have certaintly seen better looking games. Games like Soul Caliber showed what it was capable of.

"could it have done gran turismo or god of war?

Yes."

Considering that Soul Calibur and MSR looked lightyears ahead of anything on the PS2 at the time they came out (and the fact that devs would only get better at exploiting the hardware as time went on) yes.

The DC was an awesome bit of kit. I vastly preferred it to the PS2 and still do. But, hey the PS2 could play DVDs!

The Dreamcast is the best console I've ever owned, an incredible line up of games, up yours Sony!