How it felt to watch this awesome console fail back in the day

I had an entire binder of pirated Dreamcast games back when this came out. I can't remember if I actually owned a genuine copy of a game (it was too easy to run pirated game discs).

I have good memories of the console though.

Haha I also had a giant binder full of pirated games. The other thing I remember about it was how loud it was reading the discs
- We all had binders of pirated Dreamcast games...
  
  I think I'm starting to see why it died.
- Didn't the pirates find out that they could copy the games onto regular CDs using some backdoor from the format of Karaoke CDs? You just need that famous loader CD to swap discs.
  
  I've heard the pirates soon optimised the layout of the data on their versions so that there was less strain of the drive.
So did many! It was so easy!

"Dreamcast" is probably the single best gaming console name of all time, too.

Retro Sega systems stand out with their cool, mystical/sci-fi sounding names: Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast.

They were unique and felt like they were telling customers that we'd be in awe when using their consoles.

(Master System and Sega CD were pretty boring though)

Most other big systems' names seem so utilitarian and uninspired:

GameCube and Xbox are little boxy devices on your shelf that play games.

The Nintendo Switch can switch between handheld and docked.

All the PlayStations are stations that you play games on.

Yawn
- Turbo Grafx was pretty cool tho.
- Even in the 70s and 80s they were coming up with cooler names for consoles, like the Magnavox Odyssey and the Intellivision. Atari named a bunch of their consoles after big cats, though they didn't live up to their names. At least there was some imagination.
- Mega drive would have sounded cool when it came out, though it’s perhaps the most dated sounding name of the bunch.

Wii U too. Two consoles with a whole extra screen on your controller. Brilliant and cool features. Misunderstood or poorly timed?

Misunderstood for sure, I think. The Wii U suffered from what was probably the worst marketing campaign of any game console, ever. I didn't even know it was a new console and not yet-another-Wii-addon until halfway through it's life cycle and I think that was a pretty common misunderstanding.
- And no compelling games library. What do you buy a Wii U to play? Bayonetta 2?
The way I felt about the Wii U was probably similar to how adults felt about the Dreamcast back then.

It seemed really cool, but it didn't feel worth the money while there were other great consoles already. I was still getting a ton of use out of my original Wii.

I liked this console more than everything else that was around at that time. I still have one, too... I just don't have the AV or power cables for it. 😩

Best graphics, very unique games for the library even though it didn't live very long at all, free online multiplayer, the VMU was just dope as shit being able to play games directly on it (not good games but as a kid that didn't matter lol), first system to do the speaker in the controller (technically it was on the VMU but the VMU plugged into the controller and provided sounds as well as a screen for certain menus functions)..

On the vmu, you could pick your plays on football games. So your cheating friend couldn't see what you were doing.
- Sure beats the other method where I also don't know what I'm picking lol

And all because the PS2 could play DVDs and the Dreamcast couldn't. Fucking DVDs. As ridiculous as that sounds today, people went apeshit over DVD playback capabilities back in the early 2000s.

But to be fair I also think Sega was their own worst enemy. In the 90s alone they released the Sega CD, 32X, the Saturn and the Dreamcast. Not to mention the Genesis 3 and CDX as well. If they would have slowed their roll and stopped cannibalizing their own sales, they might have done alright. The addon idea could have worked out better if done right. Hindsight is 20/20, so if they had a crystal ball they should have done something like this, and they'd still be making consoles today:

Delay the Sega/Mega CD to allow themselves more time to rewrite the graphics ASIC to include 3D rendering capabilities.
Cancel the 32X and Saturn; they were never even announced. The Sega CD is the next gen console.
Sell it as an addon for $199, and cut the price of the base Genesis to $50. Release in 1994, along with bundle deals for $249 with an included game (for people who don't already own a Genesis), and proceed wipe the floor with Sony before they even get a chance to compete.

Sega was their own worst enemy

Arguably they still are today. Can't stop being a fan though!
But to be fair I also think Sega was their own worst enemy.

More true than you might realize. A lot of the missteps of the Sega CD/32X were from fights between Japan and US divisions. There was a push for the next console to be simply a Genesis/CD/32X melded together in one box.

Sony is also incredibly good at taking advantage of its competitors mistakes.
I personally don't think that would have worked. We've seen repeatedly from multiple companies that selling anything as an "addon" just results in failure because developers can't assume that people will have it. You have to bake the function in the lowest SKU or it ends up a novelty.

Perhaps if they rolled out the canceled Neptune as the half-step between Mega Drive and a delayed Saturn. It would have been the an excellent base SKU developers could target, with cheaper CD media as a bonus... but I just don't see an enhanced Sega CD/32X going up against the PS1 and coming out any better than the Saturn did. I guess they wouldn't have hemorrhaged all that money on wasted hardware though.

This motherfucker right here had ONLINE PLAY. You could spin up Phantasy Star Online: Episode 1 & 2 and actually have other people join your game, drop duplicated items, and destroy your droprate. It was fucken sicc.

Pipe me bro.
Pso2 was my high school jam. There’s still running private servers on pc but it ain’t the same when your homies are no longer around to play it.

I bought 2, my German Shepherd peed on the first one and killed it... RIP

Maybe he was more of a Sony dog.
- Definitely a Nintendog

Also PS Vita. It was better than anyone (even Sony) realized. And the few who DID like it obsessed with the memory cards and the actual insanely amazing console it is was forgotten and overlooked.

I still play mine today. And yes there are tons of great games on it beyond Persona, even though you wouldn't know it among the usual Vita fans.

I never gave the vita a chance but I miss my modded psp
- I had buttons get stuck on mine that I tried to fix but couldn't.
  
  That damn thing had some of the most fun games ever.

at some point "retro" consoles got popular on GameStops website and I invested in a Dreamcast, 3 controllers, and memory cards. it was all under around $80. so god damn worth it since I can just "find" games online for it. I didn't grow up with it but it's definitely been a fun console

You know, I haven't thought about burning CDs for my Dreamcast before. Is it pretty simple these days?
- It was easy like 15 years ago, now you just get a expansion card to hook up a usb thumb drive and have the entire catalog on it.
- AliExpress has a part that replaces the disc reader. Let's you play games on the console from SD card.
  
  For others without a console, redream works pretty well for most games, even on a fairly old PC.

I remember being blown away by some of the games back then, and also disappointed that it wasn't a more popular console.

Lots of people feel the same about the TurboGrafx-16.

I mean the PC Engine lived a full, and popular life. It's a shame they couldn't replicate the same success with the turbo. But at least there's tons of games to go back and play.

The Dreamcast on the other hand was so short lived, even in Japan. We never got to see it's full potential.
TurboGrapfx was cool because you could play on the console AND they had a game oh-like portable that could also play the games. It was BADASS!

*cries softly into Seaman microphone

My Friend: Did you hear? Sega cancelled the Dreamcast.

Me: ...

Me: ... (still waiting for the punchline)

staying up way too late every night playing pso though

Dreamcast was a shit show.

I loved the games things and think it's the greatest system ever released with so many bangers under it's belt. It was Sega's arcade dna distilled into a console. And the home style games were amazing to boot. Jet Grind, Phantasy Star, Sonic Adventure. Plus all the Capcom love.

But I would have never bought one and gotten to experience it if it wasn't discontinued and clearance priced. I wish they gave it a second chance.

Any good write-ups about Sega? I wonder what was happening financially.
- For the Dreamcast, specifically, there was a show on G4 (on cable, before merging w/ TechTV) that I remember casually watching a bajillion years ago that discussed what happened with the Dreamcast. Basically, the PS2 is what happened.
  
  There's this 5 second blip of the program that burned itself into my brain where someone from Sega was talking about how awesome and exciting things were one moment, and then PS2, then *cricket sounds*. They mention how they had to stop production because they literally had warehouses filled with Dreamcasts just sitting there.
  
  It was kinda nuts for them 'cause the Dreamcast actually sold pretty ok until people learned about the PS2's price and the fact you could watch DVDs on it, which alone was huge. Sony just fuckin instantly annihilated everyone so hard with the PS2. It wasn't feasible, timewise or financially, for Sega to iterate on a new system fast enough and somehow dump all the systems they had lying around, and they knew if they wanted to contiue to exist, they had to switch gears to be mostly software/publishing, aside from arcade cabinets.
  
  Though (to me, sadly) Sega shed the last of their arcade board-makin days in 2021, they are the reigning champ and legends of bigass video game machines. They made more than 500 arcade games and produced over 20 arcade system boards that ended up being able to run stuff like huge Unreal Engine 4 games on dual 50" screens. They sold the last of their arcades back in 2022, leaving a pretty dope legacy behind, even though they're still kicking around otherwise. I guess COVID was to their arcades as the PS2 was to the Dreamcast.
Wasn't Dreamcast the second chance to the very unsuccessful Saturn? Not to hate on the Dreamcast, I wish it did better too. Sony's success kind of killed Sega though.
- Oh, Sega was limping along well before the Saturn's failure let Sony finish them off. They completely fractured their market when they botched both the (expensive to manufacture) 32X and SegaCD, canceled the integrated (cheaper) Neptune, then failed to showcase the Saturn as their next generation while simultaneously making it too hard to develop for.
  
  Even when Dreamcast finally became a clean-slate for Sega, it was far too late to serve as a 5th chance.
- Second chance in that the Dreamcast was doing very well in the west, but not in Japan. They elected to kill it because the Japanese side was struggling. I dont think they saw much continued success without them. It was Peter Moore who ultimately made the call to kill the Dreamcast.

Recently tried to get mine working (it's been stowed away for a while) but it's not reading discs at all anymore or even booting to the menu screen.

We used to have to do the turn it on it's side trick but I think it was just stuck in a dark dank basement for too long. Kinda want to rip it apart and try to fix but we shall see.

Could always replace the optical drive with a gdemu (not necessarily the best walkthrough but entertaining)
- Why do most youtubers act like the only target audience is teens? It's cringe.

My college suitemates had one and I loved powerstone and others. First hand experience. Had an Xbox and PS2. Still didn't buy one of these.

Why in the hell did Sega not put up any sort of anti pirating safeguards on this thing? Even my buddy who was always talking about how dreamcast was the best system, had a stack of all the Dreamcast games copied, because the Dreamcast would read and play copied games.

It was killed by its own fan base and lack of anti pirating

I don't think any consoles had decent anti piracy back then. Dreamcast had some, but got beaten. They were routinely being chipped for piracy up to the Xbox 360 era. I remember that well because people at work laughed at me for buying games, and then MS banned them all on one day and they had to buy new ones to be able to carry on playing online.

It was killed by the PS2. That thing was a juggernaut, and Sega just couldn't compete. Xbox and Gamecube hadn't even launched before Sega threw the towel in. They just couldn't get any traction and got out of the console market before they went bankrupt, selling at ever more unsustainable losses.

They're still around, so it was probably the right decision in hindsight.
- I remember original Xbox being the first console that banned people for modding their console. I and everyone I knew had modded PS1 and PS2.
- The PS2, bad third-party relationships, and a limp Western market strategy. Even with competent management it's quite possible, even likely it still would have been the last console Sega produced, but it could have gone a full generation with better support.
Oh but it did, first the GD-ROM that had 1GB and the only way to get the games into a CD was to cut the assets making it a worse experience and... playing recorded CD-ROMs on a Dreamcast was a very efficient way to destroy its drive.
Bernie Stolar was also to blame because he was the reason a majority of the Dreamcast library was not localized outside of Japan