Long Live the Dreamcast!

Back in September 2000, then-SEGA of America CEO Peter Moore and Vice-President Charles Bellfield announced that SEGA would exit the video game hardware business and become a third-party developer. With that announcement, one of the titans of video gaming in the 90s bowed out. The only company to give Nintendo a bloody nose when Nintendo was EVERYTHING in home video games was now relegated to making games for other people. The SEGA Dreamcast, still on sale at the time, was the last console the company would make. On March 31, 2001, the Dreamcast was officially killed off.

Only the Dreamcast never really died. Its fans never let it die.

This was most evident in Japan at first. Despite the Dreamcast’s axing, titles kept being released for it. I’m not talking about homebrew titles, I mean main releases from big-name studios like SNK, Jaleco, and NEC. The main releases slowed to a trickle over the years, but the last one, Sturmwind, was released on April 24, 2013, TWELVE YEARS after the console was put to pasture. Sturmwind, by the way, is a side-scrolling shoot-‘em-up…and it’s AMAZING!!!

The homebrew scene for the Dreamcast has only weakened a bit in the last year but is still kicking. The homebrew sites I used to frequent have faded away, and very few dedicated sites remain. Of these, Dreamcast Live and The Dreamcast Junkyard are among the best I could find. Homebrew games still keep popping up despite this, available to download and burn freely. You can check out some of these on the Dreamcast Wikia page. Note: there are other unseemly titles there that they classify as “pirate” titles. If you want to stay on the right side of the law, you may wanna stay away from those entries.

Homebrew development isn’t relegated to the Dreamcast itself. There have been several projects for the Dreamcast’s revolutionary (at the time) Visual Memory Unit (VMU). Blue Swirl has a page dedicated to VMU games, including Metal Gear and Metroid games. There’s even development ongoing on a VMU version of Pokemon GO! for 2017.

Even older games for the Dreamcast find their way into the news today. A few days ago, I called my son to tell him that one of his favorite games on the Dreamcast was back in the news. That game, Floigan Bros. Episode 1, had resurfaced thanks to its original developers. The title, released four months after the Dreamcast’s discontinuation, was a pioneer in what we now know as DLC. The game had on-disc content that was to be unlocked for free over the course of 12 months via the internet, which was still pretty novel back then. The content was never fully unlocked, but the developers managed to recently unlock everything for those who still have the game. Dreamcast Live has the skinny on how to access the DLC.

Dreamcast Live has also worked to keep everyone apprised of the revival of one of the Dreamcast’s most novel features at the time: online play. The Dreamcast came out of the box with a 56k modem installed, and a Broadband Adapter with an Ethernet port was released afterward. These devices allowed the console to access the internet, and many games had rudimentary online features. Some Dreamcast games took advantage of this, allowing online play over SEGA’s servers. Those servers are long dead, but Dreamcast Now!, a new server dedicated to Dreamcast gaming has picked up the slack. With a new adapter and a few configuration steps, Dreamcast holdouts can jump online and play games like Alien Front Online, Chu Chu Rocket, and Phantasy Star Online. I am hoping to get my Dreamcast online soon and hope to write about my experiences with Dreamcast Now!

For a system that was long discontinued, the SEGA Dreamcast still has lots of life left in it. The fanbase is very passionate about SEGA’s last console, and there are many people that want to quench their thirst for more games. Even better, there is a dedicated online community that refuses to let the console fade off into memory. As much as I love Chu Chu Rocket for the console, the thought of being able to jump online again and challenge other player sounds great. And the idea of beginning anew in Phantasy Star Online is too much for me to handle. As far as dead consoles go, the SEGA Dreamcast is the most “alive” dead console I have ever seen.