Dreamcast debuted fifteen years ago

Tuesday marks the 15th anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast launch in Europe. The device would prove to be commercially unsuccessful: less than a year and a half later, the production of Sega’s last console was discontinued.

Fifteen years ago, the Dreamcast had already been out in Japan for a year and Americans could already buy the console for a month, but the European introduction was delayed until October 14, 1999. The Dreamcast was, among other things, the first console that made online gameplay possible. and the device was the first to have a built-in modem on board. At the same time, however, there were complaints about the quality of the online functionality.

The Dreamcast’s storage medium was also a mixed blessing: although the so-called GD-ROM had a storage capacity of 1.2 gigabytes, more than CD-ROMs, but again much less than the DVDs used in the Xbox and PlayStation 2. The successor to the Sega Saturn also had a Hitachi processor clocked at no less than 200MHz, as well as 16MB of internal memory and 8MB of memory for the GPU.

The console would eventually sell 10.6 million times, not half as much as the GameCube and Xbox, consoles of the same generation. The biggest competitor turned out to be the PlayStation 2, which came out shortly after the Dreamcast and was sold 155 million times. At the time, the PlayStation 2 was as expensive as a DVD player and had DVD functionality, so consumers only had to make one purchase.

Ultimately, Sega couldn’t sell enough consoles to attract enough developers, which in turn caused them to pay too few royalties to Sega to offset the company’s losses on the production of the Dreamcast. Although the device has not been sold for years, games from indie developers have been released for the console in recent years.