42 Facts About Sega Dreamcast

The Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001, as Sega's final console after the company's eighteen years in the console market.

In contrast to the expensive hardware of the unsuccessful Saturn, the Sega Dreamcast was designed to reduce costs with "off-the-shelf" components, including a Hitachi SH-4 CPU and an NEC PowerVR2 GPU.

The Sega Dreamcast was the first console to include a built-in modular modem for Internet access and online play.

In 1988, Sega Dreamcast released the Genesis, in the fourth generation of video game consoles.

Shortly before announcing its financial losses, Sega Dreamcast announced the discontinuation of the Saturn in North America to prepare for the launch of its successor.

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Accounts vary on how an internal team led by Hideki Sato began development on Dreamcast hardware; one account specifies that Sega tasked both teams, and another suggests that Sato was bothered by Irimajiri's choice to begin development externally and had his team start work.

Sega Dreamcast said that Sega's relationship with NEC, a Japanese company, likely influenced the decision to use its hardware rather than the architecture developed in America.

Sega Dreamcast selected the GD-ROM media format; jointly developed by Sega Dreamcast and Yamaha, the GD-Rom could be mass-produced at a similar price to a normal CD-ROM, avoiding the greater expense of DVD-ROM technology.

On November 27, 1998, the Sega Dreamcast launched in Japan at a price of, and the stock sold out by the end of the day.

EA's chief creative officer Bing Gordon said that Sega Dreamcast had "flip-flopped" on the hardware configuration, that EA developers did not want to work on it, and that Sega Dreamcast "was not acting like a competent hardware company".

Eighteen launch games were available in the US Sega set a new sales record by selling more than 225, 132 Dreamcast units in 24 hours, earning in what Moore called "the biggest 24 hours in entertainment retail history".

Sega employed aggressive pricing strategies around online gaming; in Japan, every Dreamcast sold included a free year of internet access, which Okawa personally paid for.

Moore said that the Dreamcast would need to sell 5 million units in the US by the end of 2000 to remain a viable platform; Sega fell short of this goal, with some 3 million units sold.

Sega Dreamcast was on fire - we really thought that we could do it.

Sega Dreamcast had the option of pouring in more money and going bankrupt and they decided they wanted to live to fight another day.

Sega Dreamcast's sentiments were not unique; Sega co-founder David Rosen had "always felt it was a bit of a folly for them to be limiting their potential to Sega hardware", and Stolar had suggested Sega should have sold their company to Microsoft.

Nevertheless, on January 31, 2001, Sega announced the discontinuation of the Dreamcast after March 31 and the restructuring of the company as a "platform-agnostic" third-party developer.

Sega Dreamcast announced a price reduction to to eliminate its unsold inventory, which was estimated at 930, 000 units as of April 2001.

The final Dreamcast unit manufactured was autographed by the heads of all nine of Sega's internal game development studios, plus the heads of Visual Concepts and Sega's sound studio Wave Master, and given away with 55 first-party Dreamcast games through a competition organized by GamePro.

The Sega Dreamcast has 16 MB main RAM, along with an additional 8 MB of RAM for graphic textures and 2 MB of RAM for sound.

The R7, a refurbished Sega Dreamcast, was originally used as a network console in Japanese pachinko parlors.

Sega Dreamcast has four ports for controller inputs, and was sold with one controller.

Sega Dreamcast did not release its official light guns in the US, but some third party light guns were available.

The Sega Dreamcast can connect to SNK's Neo Geo Pocket Color, predating Nintendo's GameCube – Game Boy Advance link cable.

In most regions, the Sega Dreamcast includes a removable modem for online connectivity, which is modular for future upgrades.

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Sega produced the Dreameye, a digital camera that could be connected to the Dreamcast and used to exchange pictures and participate in video chat over the internet.

Sega Dreamcast hoped developers would use the Dreameye for future software, as some later did with Sony's similar EyeToy peripheral.

Sega Dreamcast officials noted that the VMU could be used "as a private viewing area, the absence of which has prevented effective implementation of many types of games in the past".

In what has been called "a brief moment of remarkable creativity", in 2000, Sega Dreamcast restructured its arcade and console development teams into nine semi-autonomous studios headed by their top designers.

AM2 developed what Sega hoped would be the Dreamcast's killer app, Shenmue, a "revenge epic in the tradition of Chinese cinema", with a level of detail considered unprecedented for a video game.

The Sega Dreamcast used parts similar to those found in personal computers with Pentium II and III processors, allowing a handful of ports of PC games.

Sega Dreamcast Europe approached Bizarre Creations to develop the racing game Metropolis Street Racer.

Capcom produced a number of fighting games for the Sega Dreamcast, including the Power Stone series, and a temporarily exclusive entry in the popular Resident Evil series, Resident Evil – Code: Veronica.

The Sega Dreamcast is known for several shoot 'em ups, most notably Treasure's Bangai-O and Ikaruga.

Sega Dreamcast revived franchises from the Genesis era, such as Appaloosa Interactive's Ecco the Dolphin.

Sega Dreamcast concluded that "Sega's misadventures during the 1990s had left both gamers and publishers wary of any new platform bearing its name".

Edge wrote that "Sega Dreamcast's console was undoubtedly ahead of its time, and it suffered at retail for that reason.

The staff of Edge agreed with this assessment of Dreamcast games, including Sega's arcade conversions, stating that the system "delivered the first games that could meaningfully be described as arcade perfect".

Damien McFerran of Retro Gamer praised Sega Dreamcast's NAOMI arcade ports, and wrote: "The thrill of playing Crazy Taxi in the arcade knowing full well that a pixel-perfect conversion was set to arrive on the Sega Dreamcast is an experience gamers are unlikely to witness again.

Fahs noted, "The Sega Dreamcast's life was fleeting, but it was saturated with memorable titles, most of which were completely new properties.

Sega Dreamcast'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.

Sega Dreamcast praised the Dreamcast for its features, saying in 2013, "The seeds we sowed with the Dreamcast are finally bearing fruit at this point in time.