Eurogamer has an enjoyable, relatively compact “forensic” detailing just why the Sega Dreamcast, a console years ahead of its time, failed. They argue that it wasn’t Sony who defeated Sega; it was Sega.
By November 1998, when the Dreamcast first arrived in Japanese shops, it had been ten long years since the popular Megadrive, a decade punctuated by a triple whammy of high-profile hardware mistakes…the Dreamcast simply came too late in SEGA’s hardware decline to reverse a long-running downward trend. For all its technological innovations and excellent games, SEGA’s misadventures during the 1990s had left both gamers and publishers wary of any new platform bearing its name…Even if it had shipped with a champagne fountain and a nozzle that fired a constant stream of chocolate and diamonds into the player’s lap, it seems likely that many potential owners would still have adopted a “wait and see” attitude.
While we gave away the article’s thesis, it’s still worth heading over to the link and giving the entire cathartic piece a read (before polishing off a sixer in DC’s name and loading up some Shenmue. [Eurogamer via Kotaku]
borogirl
Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 11:20 PMI still sometimes worry about about poor Ryo being stuck in that cave at the end of Shenmue II. Would play a lot of money to play that again.
Mercedes
Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 12:16 PMI just bought a used Dreamcast, $25. I missed the old one, because in my household, the Dreamcast was the center of our world. We would, as a family, get together and play the many games on it. As my sleep schedual changed, though, I started play at night. I got addicted to the game Evolution. As a result, I played and played and played, for hours on end. But the game froze up every time we went up against one of the bosses at the end of the game. I never got to finish it, so I bought the game that went to the Nintendo and found the lack of detail the Dreamcast one had dissapointing. I’m refusing to play it until I finish the original ones, now. ^^
But I would say that, yes, time is what killed the Dreamcast. I always laugh when people who played the Xbox 360 for the first time exclaimed that they were glad a gaming console finally came out where you didn’t need a memory card to save, because the Dreamcast all ready had that.