Welcome back, everyone!

Yes, it’s the return of the What If series. I had taken a couple weeks break from it as I have been pretty busy. Things have slowed down now though so I can dedicate the time to the feature.

The topic for today is the much-loved, though oft-ignored while it was still on the shelves, Sega Dreamcast. I myself have never owned one, being more of a PlayStation guy back then, but I was able to play it extensively at a friend’s or the after-school Video Game club. This of course was Sega’s last hurrah in the dedicated console market as they had been bleeding money for years, but they went out with a console that touted an online multiplayer service that pre-dated Xbox Live by several years. So why did this console fail, and what if it hadn’t? Hit the start button to find out!

What If…

What if the Sega Dreamcast had succeeded?

Oh boy, the Sega Dreamcast. I decided to focus squarely on this console as I was originally going to ponder what if Sega had succeeded as a console developer, but after realizing I would need to drum up decades-worth of history, I chose to be more efficient with your, as well as my, time. So what to say about the Sega Dreamcast?

For starters, it was the first of the 6th-generation of consoles, pushing the industry into a realm of realism at a time when muddy textures (Nintendo 64) and pixelation (PlayStation) were the norm. It also boasted the first online-multiplayer of any system, as well as downloadeable content, in-game voice chat, and a, albeit limited, functioning second screen via the Visual Memory Unit, or VMU. It introduced many players, myself included, to the wonderful Soul Calibur series, the critically-acclaimed NFL 2K football series, and Shenmue. Duncan Harris, in the 2010 reference book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die, noted:

One of the reasons that older gamers mourned the loss of the Dreamcast was that it signaled the demise of arcade gaming culture … Sega’s console gave hope that things were not about to change for the worse and that the tenets of fast fun and bright, attractive graphics were not about to sink into a brown and green bog of realistic war games.

Now there are of course exceptions to this quote, but it is often repeated that the last generation of consoles, and to an extent the current gen as well, largely featured a limited color palette. To put it into perspective, here is a graphical comparison of Jet Set Radio and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

If this system was so forward-thinking, how did it fail?

A major culprit was competition. While the Dreamcast was ahead of then last-gen rivals the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, most gamers knew that Sony was set to release the PlayStation 2 a year after the Dreamcast’s western debut in 1999. At the time, Sony dominated the gaming market, and the original PlayStation is one of the best-selling consoles of all time, so when the PS2 announcement came in March 1999, that hefty market share waited patiently. So patient that even when the PS2 hit a manufacturing glitch shortly before launch, shipping roughly half of its planned one million, they would not be deterred. According to then-Sega of America president Peter Moore:

…the PlayStation 2 effect that we were relying upon did not work for us … people will hang on for as long as possible … What effectively happened is the PlayStation 2 lack of availability froze the marketplace.

Added to this anticipation were the specs of the new system, which appeared to render the one year-old Dreamcast obsolete by comparison. Sony had developed the Emotion Engine CPU for the PS2, which boasted a graphics processor with “1,000 times more bandwidth” than then-current PC graphics processors, helping the new machine achieve a higher polygon count than any home console up to that point. And finally, there was the killer app: the PS2 doubled as a functioning DVD player at a time when the technology was still relatively new and players were in the hundreds of dollars range. And while this was working against them, initial sales were hurt as well by a wounded consumer confidence in Sega.

Musical Chairs…

We’ll start in 1988 with the release of the Sega Genesis, by far Sega’s best-selling console. It sold well-enough to take some of the market share away from Nintendo, by far the market leader at the time, and its flagship product, the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. The Genesis had to have been on Nintendo’s mind when they released the Super NES, a console on par with the Genesis’ 16-bit capabilities, but Sega was relentless, unleashing a marketing strategy that many still remember to this day.

This tactic, along with the inception of the company’s mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, led to Sega commanding 65% of the market for a brief period in the early 90’s. The Genesis went on to sell over 30 million units and Sega, emboldened by this success, chose to keep the console running for as long as they could. Not with attractive new games of course, but with a couple of hardware attachments for the Genesis. Beginning in 1991, we have the Sega CD, one of the first ‘consoles’ to support disc-based video games. The appeal was there as by 1991 disc-based media was being largely recognized for its potential for data-storage. Great, expansive games seemed lined up for the Sega CD, but instead what we got were a plethora of full-motion video (FMV) games like this:

Immersive, huh?

Next up is the Sega 32X, a ‘transitional’ device between the Genesis and the Saturn. What eventually happened with the release of the 32X is a microcosm of Sega in the 90’s. The console was initially a response to the Atari Jaguar, a 64-bit misfire that was never a threat to anybody, and was targeted for a late-1994 release in America. The problem with this was that it coincided with the release of the Sega Saturn in Japan, leaving Sega of America scrambling to find a way to market the 32X. They would call it a ‘transitional’ device and would highlight its low price-point as an easy entry into the emerging 32-bit era of games. No matter how hard they tried however, no one, from consumers to third-party developers, wanted to buy into a system that already seemed to be dead in the water, so to speak.

So how about that Saturn?

From the outset, the system seemed doomed to fail. It was initially scheduled to be released in September of 1995, ‘Saturnday,’ but a surprise announcement came at E3 in June of that year. Then-Sega of America president Tom Kalinske let fly that due to a high consumer demand the new Sega Saturn had already been shipped to several retailers. This upset many of the big-box companies such as Best Buy and Walmart, as they were not previously made aware of the console’s release. KB Toys even removed Sega from their lineup in response to the announcement. Also, due to this preemptive release, there were only six games ready at launch, as most third-party games were set for release at the original date in September. 

The rest of the console’s lifespan proceeded accordingly, but it was not until the cancellation of the 3D platformer Sonic Xtreme that the system, as well as Sega itself, truly began to cede market share to Sony and Nintendo. By 1998 these misfires had taken their toll: Sega suffered its first financial losses (roughly $300 million) since it first listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange ten years prior. Sega would release the Dreamcast in Japan in November of that year. 

What Goes Around…

So now we are back to wondering how Sega could have saved the Dreamcast. 

This very question has been pondered ever since Sega stepped out of the console arena nearly fifteen years ago, but looking at their history it seems to me that for the Dreamcast to have succeeded Sega would have had to save them from themselves. Poor decision-making seemed to be par for the course for Sega in the 90s. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but if they had stopped to take a breath, just calm down maybe, they would have seen the Atari Jaguar for the failure that it was, they would have realized that nobody wants this in their home—

 

—and they would have stopped shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to hardware releases. So if they had done this, how might it have played out, and what would Sega as a console manufacturer look like today?

To get an idea, we need only look at Sega’s big rival in the late-80s to early-90s: Nintendo. Both Sega and Nintendo catered to the 10-14 demographic, and when PlayStation came along, both Sega and Nintendo lost their dominance to Sony who instead focused on the 18+ crowd. And while Sega made missteps with their console shenanigans, Nintendo made some of their own as well, chief among them being their reluctance to forego cartridges. At the time, Nintendo was worried about piracy of their games (indeed, as this is why they chose to use those small, proprietary discs for the GameCube), and their logic was sound: PlayStation games at the time were being heavily pirated. But while there was rampant piracy on the PSX, there was also appeal among third-party developers to port their games on a disc. For this reason, Squaresoft (before merging with Enix to become Square Enix), decided to forego development of their next Final Fantasy game on a Nintendo console, which was unheard-of at the time as Square and Nintendo were longtime bedfellows. So what was that game the Nintendo 64 missed out on? Final Fantasy VII of course, one of the biggest games of the decade and likely of the past thirty years. 

So like Sega, Nintendo was ammassing significant third-party fallout (an issue which plagues them to this day) and console failures in the Virtual Boy and N64, and to an extent the GameCube as well. But in the end, instead of trying to spread themselves too thin they stuck to their core game philosophy: make games that are fun for everyone. Enter the DS and the Wii. 

You see, even to this day I believe Sega has gotten away from what made them great in the first place. Look at the Sonic series for example: game after game consistently yields poor reviews and sales, and I feel this is due to Sonic Team trying to go in too many different directions. Why not just make a 2D Sonic platformer? If anything, it’s been shown time and again that Sonic perhaps wasn’t meant for three dimensions. Concurrently, Nintendo has never let Mario get away from his roots, not too much anyway, and the recent Super Mario Maker, itself a collection of 2D offerings, shows that people still enjoy Mario just as he was back in the 80s. 

So if the Dreamcast succeeded, I feel Sega would look a lot like Nintendo today. Not completely, of course, but just enough as they would be going for the same market. Yes, I feel that Sega and Nintendo would still be battling it out for the 10-14 year-olds, leaving Microsoft and Sony to quibble over the older demographic. Who knows, we might have gotten to play something that looks like this—

  
—or not!

Show of the day…

So that’s all for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Retro Sega is a big interest of mine and I truly think it is a shame that we’ve lost them as console developers; who knows, they might have been able to shake things up a little had they stuck around, distracting us from the constant bickering over graphics and sales. But alas…

I want to plug a new show my girlfriend and I have started called Master of None. It’s a Netflix exclusive and stars Aziz Ansari. That’s not all: it even stars Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric fame as a recurring character. I initially wasn’t sold on the show until Eric popped up as one of Aziz’s friends in episode one. I couldn’t believe it. Kidding aside, it truly is a great show and also looks a lot at social issues, a la Amy Schumer. Check it out, eh?

As always, thanks for reading.