It’s July of 1998, and a young boy walks into a newsagent. “I do remember a particular article which was in Edge, it was that famous one that says, ‘Sega Is Dead, Long Live Dreamcast,’” recalls Daniel Crocker, cofounder of WAVE Game Studios. “I remember it was a real head scratcher as to what that meant at the time, as a ten-year-old kid.” Fast forward to September 1999, and Sega is claiming that its new console was responsible for “the biggest 24 hours in entertainment retail history” after a record North American launch day in which it generated $98.4 million in sales. Fast forward a little over a year to February 2001, and another Edge headline follows a bombshell announcement. “Dreamcast: finished. Sega: unstoppable.” To put it lightly, Dreamcast fans had endured a real roller-coaster ride during its short commercial life. Fast forward just one more time and it becomes clear that some never chose to get off – as we celebrate the Dreamcast’s 25th anniversary, Daniel’s company has published nine Dreamcast games.
The Dreamcast’s eventful lifespan is reflective of the tumultuous circumstances in which the system was conceived. Despite having achieved massive success with the Mega Drive, the mid-Nineties were rough for Sega – its misadventures with the Mega-CD and 32X add-ons had engendered mistrust within its customer base, and the expensive Saturn didn’t experience anything like the success of its predecessor. A disastrous early launch had alienated both retailers and publishers, while developers found the console difficult to work with due to its technical complexity. In 1997, a planned merger with Bandai was humiliatingly called off and 3Dfx sued Sega for $105 million. The Edge headline Daniel mentioned referred to a plan to leave the Sega brand off the Dreamcast – a plan that was eventually abandoned, but one that isn’t entirely ridiculous given these circumstances.
Sega was keen to avoid repeating the mistakes it had made with the Saturn, and created the Dreamcast with a revised hardware strategy that emphasised ease of use. “Dreamcast was a real power step up from PlayStation and Saturn, and most importantly was developer focussed, removing a lot of the complexity of the previous generation, allowing us to be really creative and not just fight against the hardware,” says Martyn Chudley, whose company Bizarre Creations developed for Sega. The console used off-the-shelf parts, with the core components being a single Hitachi SH-4 CPU and NEC Videologic’s PowerVR 2 GPU. The 3Dfx Voodoo 2 was considered but ultimately not chosen, resulting in the aforementioned expensive lawsuit. “Microsoft were also on board at the time (‘powered by Windows CE’) which we were worried about, but we were assured that we would be able to go ‘native’ to the hardware,” Martyn recalls. This
