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Your Move: The Dreamcast

In the late 1980s and early 90s, when buying a video game console, it came down to one choice - Nintendo, or Sega? NES or Master System? Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis?

But then when Sony came out with the PlayStation, it was much more attractive than Sega’s competing Saturn console, which didn’t perform well at all outside of Japan. The Playstation could do just about everything the Saturn could, for $100 less, giving few people a compelling reason to buy Sega’s console.

So when Sega started working on the Saturn’s successor, they decided to make it cheaper to manufacture, easier to develop games on, and to give it features unlike any other console out there. What they came up with, they called the Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast was released 17 years ago this month, on 9/9/99, for $199 - half what the Saturn cost when it was released. Compared to the PlayStation, it was far more advanced. The graphics were better than most arcade games at the time, and an order of magnitude better than the PlayStation’s capabilities.

But every new console has better graphics than what came before. What was really remarkable about the Dreamcast was how it innovated. The console had a modem built-in, which enabled online gaming for the first time in a home console. Games like Phantasy Star Online defined a genre, and were among the first massively multiplayer games for consoles.

The system also had an innovative memory card - the card plugged into the controller, and instead of just having memory, the card also had a screen and buttons. This gave the controller a screen of its own, and also enabled you to take it from the console, and play minigames on the go.

The Dreamcast sold well for its first year, but when the PlayStation 2 was released, interest plummeted. In January of 2001, Sega discontinued the Dreamcast, and became strictly a software company - making games for consoles that once were bitter rivals. The Dreamcast was something of a victim of being stuck between eras - it was too late to capitalize on the novelty of 3D gaming, but too early to really take advantage of its online gaming capability. But for as poorly as it did in the marketplace, it was an important step in the industry, and a great sendoff for Sega’s gaming hardware lineage.

Samuel McConnell is a games enthusiast who has been playing games in one form or another since 1991. He was born in northern Maine but quickly transplanted to Wichita.