Ten Years of Casting the Dream
Chris Zasada September 9, 2009

Does anyone out there realize today is the ten year anniversary of Sega’s final console, the Dreamcast? I sure as hell didn’t until I kept starting at the 9/9/09 date and realized that kind of repetition wasn’t going to happen for another hundred years. And then I remember 9/9/99, and some primitive nerd instincts flared up, reminding me that’s when the Dreamcast was launched in America.

I was a Junior in high school at the time, about to turn seventeen and receive my first kiss from a girl (though this wasn’t on any calendars somehow). My mother wanted to know what I wanted for my birthday, and I remembered half-heartily that the new Sega system had come out a few days before. I decided, why not, I might as well get that, so we marched over to the local Sears and picked one up along with a copy of Sonic Adventure and a VMU.

I’m not sure how many hours I spent on the thing that night, but I was mesmerized. I wasn’t quite blown away by Sonic Adventure as I was when I played Super Mario 64, since Mario’s game was a lot more polished and showcased the power of the Nintendo 64. Yet the Dreamcast was the better system, easily blowing away the N64’s blurry graphics and limited gameplay. Sure, Sega had a couple more years to develop the technology, but the types of games released for it were generally lower budget, and the Dreamcast wasn’t as popular as the N64.

I attribute bad timing to the short life of the Dreamcast. While I wouldn’t trade my Dreamcast memories for anything, Sega should have known they were no match for Sony’s Playstation 2 if they released their system too early. Apparently learning nothing from the Saturn debacle, Sega had to be first to the market and was overlooked due to the growing excitement of the next Playstation, which had over a year more development time. The fact Sega had a history of abandoning their consoles for the next one on a weekly basis didn’t help either.

Yet the Dreamcast was Sega’s best system. It was solidly built, looked attractive, had some nice horsepower for the time, and was wrought with innovation. The Visual Memory Unit (VMU) was a memory card that doubled as an extra heads up display via a built-in screen and could be used to independently of the main system to play mini games or trade saved games with other cards by connecting the two. It was a pretty slick idea and really showed Sega knew what it was doing this time. The Dreamcast also had a built-in dial-up modem for online play out-of-the-box, another console first.

I’ll admit I wouldn’t pick most Dreamcast games over those of many other systems, but there were some solid titles that kept the controller clenched in my hand. Sonic Adventure provided an exciting adventure that compelled me to complete all of it with every character. Shenmue was an adventure like none other and to this day I still haven’t played anything with the same spirit, not even the sequel. Sword of the Berserk was the ultimate anime-based game, providing an experience my friends and I still talk about today, even though we had no idea how much greater the manga the game was based off of truly was until years later when it was released here (it also reminds us how screwed we were that the Playstation 2 Berserk game never saw the states). Seaman, in addition to it’s chuckle-inducing name (I now live near a read called Seaman, so the humor is lost on me), is also remembered for it’s innovative voice recognition gameplay and humor. I also wasted hours on my guiltiest pleasure, Blue Stinger, a poorly-made action game that was somehow compelling.

Sadly, once the Playstation 2 appeared, the Dreamcast couldn’t compete with the new kid on the block, and when the Xbox and GameCube moved in, there was no room for the little white console. The Dream was dead.

I’ve noted with some irony that the Dreamcast did live on in the Xbox and GameCube. If you look at the Xbox controller, you’ll see the buttons share the same button labels and colors, and the controller has a dual-memory card slot built in for multiple functions. It also has a built-in modem for out-of-the-box network play and a pay-for-play gaming network. The GameCube ended up with a couple of Dreamcast ports and basically is Nintendo’s version of the Dreamcast because it just didn’t take off like it contemporaries, though I honestly like a lot more GameCube games than Dreamcast games myself.

Despite its faults, the Dreamcast was ahead of its time. You can score one for around thirty bucks, so I recommend dropping to cash and reliving the experience of the 20^th century’s last great game console.