In the annals of console history, the Dreamcast is often portrayed as a small, square, white plastic JFK. A progressive force in some ways, perhaps misguided in others, but nevertheless a promising life cut tragically short by dark shadowy forces, spawning complex conspiracy theories that endure to this day. So to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its launch, which passed recently, Eurogamer is going all CSI to consider who – or what – killed the Dreamcast.
Was it grinchy old EA, withholding the precious lifeblood of its licensed sports games? Or did the fiendish pirates help to sink the SEGA ship, cracking the GD-ROM format and allowing anyone with a CD burner to brazenly copy Dreamcast games? Or was it that big mean bully Sony, tucked away on the grassy knoll, blowing the head off the competition with a bullet of ruthless PR chicanery?
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 SEGA CD add-on was the first, an over-priced and poorly supported multimedia attachment for the Megadrive that relied on the thankfully short-lived craze for FMV-based “interactive movies”. Customers soon wised up to the fact that beneath the grainy video footage, they really weren’t getting any more gameplay for their money. Following up this clunky bit of kit with the even more pointless 32X add-on merely deepened SEGA’s malaise in 1994.