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Dreamcast = Dodo =Dead

© Dan Caines

Dreamcast is dead. Sega have announced recently that they will cease making “the Console that will revolutionise gaming” around March of this year and that they will become in essence just another third-party software provider for primarily the PlayStation 2 and the Game Boy Advance. This announcement is both significant and surprising, especially in terms of timing, and it makes you (if you are anything like me anyway, look at the forthcoming battle between the next-generation consoles in a whole new light). First, the surprise: what makes me slightly curious is the timing. The Dreamcast just appears to be catching on globally as consumers finally realise that the sheer amount of quality gaming product available for the platform, and the new lowered prices, make Dreamcast an incredibly attractive option for the game player. Metropolis Street Racer and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 piqued American interest, and sales have been rising on a trend basis in the USA for quite a while now. Similarly, after an abysmally slow initial take-up in Europe it is now selling better than ever for many of the same reasons. The biggest factor that surprises me, however, is that the Dreamcast was just starting to seem like “the console that will revolutionise gaming”: it was becoming the first console to have a significant number of its gamers playing online.

Quake III and the soon-to-be-huge (I reckon, anyway) Phantasy Star Online have established Dreamcast as a credible online gaming presence (and Sega have managed to coax remarkably high levels of performance out of its disappointing 33.6kb modem) and this has spurred sales growth worldwide and would, I believe, continue to do so (no-one at Sega was willing to comment at the time of writing so I have no official response).

It has flagged up a number of issues that could be important during the forthcoming battle of supremacy among the “super consoles”, namely:

· That devices should be made to do as much as possible. Dreamcast sales were indubitably damaged by all the pre-release hype about PS2, which was “a console, a CD player and a DVD deck all in one” (Famitsu). The Dreamcast lost out due to its lack of DVD playback, and this is what makes it all the more mystifying that Microsoft are vacillating about including DVD playback with X-Box and Nintendo have already ruled out DVD support for the forthcoming GameCube (a machine which I will wrote on soon – truly mystifying really.