The Sega Dreamcast and Sega's Final Attempt

[Music] after exploring the history of sega's greatest mistake let's take a look into the history of perhaps sega's crowning achievement that unfortunately for them was never really able to take off today we are going to be taking a deep look into sega's seventh and final home console the dreamcast the year 1998 rumors of two new consoles have begun to swirl around the first a successor to the global hit the playstation aptly named playstation 2. playstation 2 is rumored to have backwards compatibility with the playstation 1 a dvd player and even internet connectivity the second another attempt by sega to grab hold of the market that they had lost not a successor to the saturn but something completely different something using more off-the-shelf parts no partnerships and a brand new ahead of its time system little did anyone know that these rumors of a newer faster and overall better sega console would come to fruition by the end of 1998 in japan the dreamcast was sega's final effort to come back into the console wars that had whittled itself down to just three competitors nintendo sony and now sega nec snk atari and panasonic all had their own attempts at consoles throughout the 16-bit and 32-bit eras but by the end of the sixth generation of home consoles there would only be three companies remaining unfortunately for sega they would not be one of them the failure of the saturn sent sega's financial state into a freefall releasing the saturn and the 32x at around the same time made them lose customers along with that the saturn was expensive to buy and difficult to develop for after coming off of the success of the sega genesis it seemed like sega had managed to take all of the wrong turns sega decided that they didn't really want to give up and instead they wanted to give it one more shot they looked at the failings of the saturn a dual cpu and dual gpu configuration that made it hard to develop for not so great development tools in general and a poorly timed and configured american launch and from those three issues they decided to learn from their mistakes and fix them so where do you start when creating a brand new console the hardware of course starting in 1997 two teams at sega were tasked with developing new console hardware the project known internally as katana had one group led by hideki sato developing for it it also had another group led by tatsuyo yamamoto to start sato decided to use the hitachi sh4 as the primary processor and the videologic power vr2 graphics processor which was manufactured by nec the sh4 was needed since they were gunning for a more powerful cpu that could do the geometry processing required for polygon creation the 128-bit chip operated at 200 megahertz and included a vector graphic computational engine with a 64-bit floating point unit a 32-bit fixed point unit and a dma controller the dma controller allows the sh-4 to access vram and would allow for the power vr2 to access main ram helping with high speed packet transfers between main ram and vram what is interesting about the sh4 was that it was actually used in the sega naomi arcade boards at the exact same clock rate naomi also happened to have an updated power vr2 graphics processor however naomi costed 1 995 a much steeper price than katana's eventual msrp yamamoto's team on the other hand decided to go a completely different route with their hardware using a motorola powerpc 603e cpu and a 3dfx voodoo 2 and voodoo banshee as the gpu the 603e also hit 200 megahertz but could hit 300 megahertz at a tdp of 6 watts besides that it was a much more off-the-shelf counterpart to the sh-4 however sega eventually told yamamoto's team to change the processor to match sato's team mainly because sega had a good relationship with hitachi which now had both teams working with the sh4 the gpus on the other hand are where the main difference was yamamoto and his team decided on the voodoo 2 and the voodoo banshee that would work in tandem with each other the banshee is a 2d only graphics card whereas the voodoo 2 was a 3d accelerator that needed to work with the banshee to make 3d graphics at the end of the day though the power vr card that sato would choose ended up being more powerful than the voodoo 2 at the time with features like automatic translucency sorting normal map bump mapping better bandwidth utilization and a few other features that would make the image quality overall better than the voodoo 2. in fact the power vr due to tile rendering architecture has a higher fill rate and overall faster polygon rendering throughput than even the voodoo 3 which wouldn't release until 1999. by the end of development katana was even able to render a peak of 5 million polygons per second with its game engine performance compare that to the geforce 256 which would peak at 2.9 million polygons per second on paper katana at the time of release was incredibly powerful and even more powerful than some of the highest npcs on the market however there was one thing that seemed to ultimately sour the deal of katana using the 3dfx chip besides the voodoo 2 just generally being a little less powerful the main thing was that in 1997 3d 3dfx themselves went public with their ipo now this allowed for regular stock market shenanigans but this also meant that they had to unveil its contracts with sega in turn the public now knew about the development of project katana which obviously angered sega of japan executives it's likely that due to this decision sega of japan decided to cut ties with 3dfx altogether and ultimately decided to go with satosh's team and the nec designed power vr for their next home console due to this release of their contracts the rumor mill had started letting everyone know that sega's newest console was indeed coming with the brains and the brawn of katana selected sega needed to choose the rest of the specifications for the media that would be used sego ultimately decided on the gd rom system over the cd-rom and the very expensive dvd-rom gd-rom allowed for one gigabyte of data on disk compared to the maximum 650 megabits of storage on the cd-rom comparing that to dvd-rom dvd-rom actually allowed for 1.46 gigabytes of storage along with new cutting-edge features like better graphics gd-rom and being the first 128-bit system project katana also had something that was quite ahead of its time internet capabilities with a 56k modem built right into the console this actually makes the dreamcast the first console to ship with one built in and with that the dreamcast even had a fully functioning web browser and email client the ability to connect to the internet ultimately had a huge impact on games that released for the console many games shipped with some sort of internet functionality whether that be downloadable content for sonic adventure or full on multiplayer capabilities like in fantasy star online other than simple internet connectivity the dreamcast also had a pretty nifty gadget up its sleeve this device was called the virtual memory unit or vmu for short these little memory card type guys plugged directly into your dreamcast controller and acted like you guessed it a memory card the difference between a regular memory card and the vmu however was that the vmu had buttons unplugging the vmu from the controller shows a d-pad and buttons that allowed the player to not only manage their saves directly but interact with what game saves they had playing mini games taking care of chow from sonic adventure the possibilities were endless project katana throughout development started to become what modern consoles are now lower cost pcs the hardware that was being used in katana fell more in line with pcs of the era and this in turn helped reduce the cost of the console furthering this parallel microsoft helped develop a custom version of windows ce for katana that had directx api and dynamic link libraries doing this made katana an easy sell for people looking to port pc games over to the console sega however would provide superior development tools at the end of the day so most developers would use that instead ahead of launch sega went ahead and spent 50 to 80 million dollars on hardware development 150 to 200 million on software development and 300 million on worldwide promotion before you launch a console however you have to announce it [Music] though rumors of the so-called project katana had begun circulating in 1997 due to the contracts with 3dfx sega was still staying very tight lift on their new project with the saturn being a moderate success in japan it was mainly the rest of the world that had rejected the console sega took their time to learn from their mistakes to get easy to use hardware and easy-to-use software making it a dream to program for compared to the saturn many reports of the console were going around and all of them included these facts as well with the hardware software and everything else done what was left for sega's new console well the name for starters sega had decided to hold a public competition to name the new system and ended up with over 5 000 names to consider before finally landing on the name dreamcast the name dreamcast is actually a portmanteau of the words dream and broadcast according to employee katsutoshi iguchi a game developer by the name of kenji eno famous for real sound and the survival horror series d and d2 submitted the name and the spiral logo for the dreamcast but sega has never verified this claim with a name in mind things might be looking up for the dreamcast and ultimately for sega on the 21st of may 1999 the dreamcast was shown to the world at the sega new challenge conference their plan was to release the system in november of 1998 in japan with that announcement it seemed that sega's plan for launch was a bit odd though sega wanted the dreamcast and the saturn to go in parallel with the saturn focusing on 2d games and the dreamcast focusing on 3d games the main issue was that the saturn was still holding its ground in japan so many japanese developers felt it was unnecessary to release games for the dreamcast that didn't seem to bother sega enough to care however you see sega anticipated a release date of 1999 for the playstation 2. with that in mind sega wanted to build up titles and developers ahead of the ps2 launch in hopes to stall sony's efforts on may 27 1998 bernie solar then took the stage at e3 coming to restate that the dreamcast did in fact exist and that it would be coming to north america in the fall of 1999. the plan was to have 20 to 30 total games at launch though none of these games were shown off at e3 only tech demos later in 1998 at the windows world expo tokyo microsoft showed up upcoming windows products one of these included the windows ce compatible dreamcast this showed off the console in a prototype form but was quite similar to the final edition then on august 22nd sega dropped their system seller for the dreamcast sonic adventure was finally revealed after being in secret development for years revealed by yuji naka himself and the full team it was shown running on final hardware and was shown to be pushing 4 million polygons per second which was over the 2 to 3 million predicted for the hardware launch day however was getting closer for sega and after announcing sonic adventure it seemed that they had finally shown their hand and were indeed betting on winning [Music] on november 27 1998 sega's new console hit store shelves in japan with a launch price of 29 000 yen or roughly 300 in america prior to launch however things were already going poorly for sega first they had an issue with nec nec was unable to manufacture the required amount of power vr2 chips with sega initially planning to deliver 500 000 consoles for the launch of the dreamcast due to these manufacturing limitations they were only able to produce a total of 150 000 units sega even estimated that they could have sold an additional two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand units if they had sufficient supply with four games available at launch july pen pen troll selling virtual fighter 3 tb and godzilla generations virtual fighter 3tb would prove itself the king again debuting second in the software charts for the week godzilla pen pen and july would take the 16th 21st and 25th spots respectively though the launch was a decent success for sega when it comes to finances a majority of systems were pre-ordered and due to the lack of stocks current ceo ira majiri was dismayed that they had failed to distribute 200 000 systems to retailers for the launch period for the rest of the launch window sega had devised a plan to launch a game a week for four weeks after the console hit sore shelves this too was unfortunately interrupted blue stinger geist force sonic adventure evolution incoming monaco grand prix racing simulation 2 and 7th cross evolution all had planned releases between december 3rd and december 23rd blue stinger was first to be delayed with a new launch date of march 1999 and geist forest was fully cancelled evolution was delayed until january 21st and monaco grand prix was pushed back to march 11th sonic adventure was even delayed from its release on the 17th to release on the 23rd capcom's resident evil code veronica a hit dreamcast game was also planned for the dreamcast launch window but was also hit with a delay until fall of 1999 the aim was to sell a total of 500 000 units by the end of 1998 and 1 million by the end of march 31st sego only managed to sell 900 000 units by the 31st but did sell over a million by the end of may along with that about one-third of customers with the dreamcast logged onto the internet with the dream passport service included which greatly exceeded expectations like the saturn however sales began to dip across 1999 with some reports stating that the nintendo 64 might have outsold it a few times that summer in june at the sega new challenge conference 1999 they announced a price drop to 19 900 yen or roughly 200 with the price drop and launch games dropping in prices well sales jumped 10 000 percent and with the release of c-man in july it seemed as though the dreamcast is doing well enough though sales were a bit disappointing what mattered most was the launch of the dreamcast in america [Music] in the summer of 1999 sega began running ad campaigns to tease the newest console to the american public titled the it's thinking marketing campaign the dreamcast beautiful orange swirl and a launch date of 9999 were prominently displayed however there was one main issue with the campaign sega forgot to show the public that it was indeed a video game console now this might seem weird in today's context but remember that back in the 90s video games weren't the multi-billion dollar industry they are today hearing the name playstation is very common today and if someone said playstation 5 near you just about everyone would know it's the new playstation console if you were an average person in your new york apartment and saw an ad on tv with the vague tagline it's thinking and then saw an orange swirl with maybe the mention of the word dreamcast you would probably have no clue as to what was going on in fact according to their test market only 45 percent of people knew that a dreamcast was coming and even fewer knew what a dreamcast even was despite this weird screw-up the dreamcast had pre-order sales of at least 200 000 with some reports stating 250 000 and even getting closer to 300 000. this nearly doubled or tripled the amount of pre-orders that the original playstation had in 1995. with that in mind sega dubbed the dreamcast as the most anticipated video game console in history whether that was true or not was yet to be seen on 9 9 999 the dreamcast officially hit the north american market it had a price of 199 us dollars and had a total of 18 launch titles for comparison the japanese launch price was around 299 us dollars and had four games sega decided to wait to launch the dreamcast in america specifically to analyze the situation and to fix any mistakes they made during the japanese launch for launch titles sega had worked closely with midway games to ensure that there were more than four games at launch hydro thunder mortal kombat gold nfl blitz 2000 and ready to rumble boxing were all developed by midway and all released the same day as the dreamcast along with those four the dreamcast also launched with soul calibur sonic adventure nfl 2k blue stinger and many many more some games however like godzilla generations just didn't launch in the west due to poor critical reception 15 000 retailers across america were given their share of dreamcast for launch and around 400 stores even took part in special launch parties for the console this included celebrities sega hired including bnl guitarist stinger ed robertson baywatch star donna de erico verne troyer famous for mini-me in the austin powers movies a playboy cover girl named rina maro and even minnesota vikings players tony williams and dwayne rudd funny enough final fantasy 8 released on the same day as the dreamcast and there are some reports of players who are initially at stores just to buy that game ended up picking up dreamcast as well by the end of the day the dreamcast and its software had totaled over 97 million dollars every single toys r us had sold out by 1pm that afternoon within the first four days the dreamcast managed to sell over 400 000 units by the end of two weeks it had crossed the half a million mark selling 514 000 units hoping the dreamcast would sell 1 million consoles by the end of 1999 and 1.5 million by the end of march sega's senior vice president chris gilbert told next gen gaming that in light of the past 24 hours we are now re-evaluating these forecasts sega even brought up that star wars the phantom menace had only brought in roughly 65 million dollars during its opening weekend and that the 97 million dollar figure was more than the imac and brought in the dreamcast however hadn't made a profit yet with that 97 million number and had a ways to go like every console launched unfortunately the dreamcast had its issues in particular a batch of ready-to-rumble boxing and sonic adventure discs were defective regardless the launch period was viewed as quite the success even final fantasy 8's launch didn't seem to make a dent in sega's cash flow sega did however have trouble keeping up with demand when it came to consoles vmus and controllers on tuesday november 23rd the dreamcast had officially passed one million machines sold only taking two and a half months to reach that number this meant that the dreamcast was the fastest selling video game machine in north america sega not only boasted that but also boasted that it had a three to one software to hardware ratio the dreamcast so far looked to be a hit unfortunately though it didn't target the right enemy sony's playstation currently held the top spot of market share with nintendo's n64 in second and the saturn in third with the launch of the dreamcast it didn't exactly cut into the playstation's market share instead it cut into nintendo's electronics boutique claimed that nintendo 64s were being traded in for the dreamcast at three times the rate of the playstation with that though sonic adventure and soul calibur not only managed to top the dreamcast sales charts but also the overall sales charts by january of 2000 sega had managed to move 1.5 million dreamcast consoles however the continued popularity of the nintendo 64 and the playstation still proved to be better with the nintendo 64 selling 1.9 million units and the playstation 1 selling 3.3 million units all during quarter 4 of 1999. this is also believed to be due to a rise in popularity of video games in general remember that pokemon red and blue had released a year prior and pokemon snap stadium and pinball all released in 1999 so the pokemon craze in america had just started at the end of the first quarter march 31st 2000 sega had revealed that roughly 2.5 million dreamcast had been sold and 13.83 million pieces of software it sold as well within five months of initial release sega was able to bring the dreamcast market share to respectable 20 sega seemed to be back in the race but how long would that last here's the hint not very [Music] with the dreamcast performing up to and above expectations in america things seemed to be going well for sega a large rectangular shadow was being cast on every move that sega made however and that was of course the playstation 2. with rumors swirling since the mid-90s there was no doubt that sony was going to make another console the playstation 1 was a huge success being able to beat out the fairly lame sega saturn and even their former business partners console the nintendo 64. word had began to leak in 1997 that the new console would indeed have backwards compatibility a built-in dvd player and even be able to connect to the internet and finally on march 1st 1999 the playstation was shown off to the world on display they showed no playable games however there were tons of technical demos available to show featuring gran turismo final fantasy 7 crash bandicoot tekken and ridge racer most of these would never really materialize on the ps2 or would at least materialize in different forms along with that sony even inflated their numbers for the power of the ps2 stating it would be able to render millions of textured polygons which with the vram that was included would make that literally impossible this in turn caused a huge focus shift from the media with some gaming outlets claiming it was 20 times more powerful than the dreamcast and even 100 times more powerful than the ps1 both of these claims were wildly inaccurate especially since no real games have been shown running on the machine with the internet starting to become a normal part of most people's lives sony also announced the potential of playing games over the internet coming as early as 1999 no online servers would end up coming to the ps2 until july 2001 in japan august 2002 in the u.s and june 2003 in europe and early models of the ps2 even required you to purchase a network adapter with one not coming built into the ps2 all of these things did not stop the playstation 2 from having an enormous amount of hype behind it sony not only had the marketing but they had the brand recognition and they had a lot of people waiting for this console after a very successful launch japan sony had their sites aimed towards america launching october 26 2000 the playstation not only brought in an estimated 250 million dollars on the first day but also sold through over 500 000 consoles both numbers blew the dreamcast out of the water and for comparison's sake remember that the dreamcast made 97 million on launch day and sold 514 000 units in two weeks many consumers had held off on the dreamcast simply because the ps2 was coming soon and it seemed to be very evident with the playstation 2 being a monster when it came to sales it seemed evident that the dreamcast wouldn't be able to compete now on the horizon happened to be two other consoles the nintendo gamecube and the newcomer microsoft's xbox the playstation had managed to snuff out the possibility of a sega comeback and with the gamecube and xbox looking to launch sometime in 2001 it seemed less and less likely that sega would continue to run in the hardware race [Music] what's most interesting when it comes to the dreamcast's downfall isn't that the playstation 2 outright killed it in fact as with the sega saturn it seemed as though some of the fault could be blamed on internal struggles within sega itself in may of 2000 sega had replaced shuichiro iremajiri with isao okawa nakayama himself who had been there since sega's rise to fame with the genesis also left the company okawa lacked faith in both the saturn and the dreamcast and by 1999 okawa was even claiming that the dreamcast would be sega's last console okawa had a vision of sega becoming a third-party online-centric software developer and this sentiment was soon shared with other higher-ups at sega peter moore charles bellfield and david rosen all seemed to agree that third party was the way to go and that making hardware was just too risky and expensive near the end of 2000 sega started to issue statements saying that they had a desire to work on other non-sega platforms including pdas bandai's wonderswan and even the gameboy advance they even had some plans to license a dc chip which was essentially dreamcast technology that could be used in dvd players then acclaim entertainment accidentally revealed that there were some ports of hit sega games in the works including 18 wheeler american pro trucker after okaba's promotion there are even more rumors of crazy taxi and seamen both being ported to the ps2 but these rumors were denied by sega of america at e3 at 2000. for the american market bellfield denied rumors of ditching the console at a november 2000 press conference and even announced that sega was indeed developing the dreamcast technology not discontinuing it even going as far to suggest that the dreamcast was a brand hoping it would appear on other devices possibly dvd players but never on rival consoles belfield even stated that he was not aware of any playstation 2 xbox and gamecube ports in development despite some internal reluctance and many believing sega could still pull it off sega of japan decided to pull the plug on the dreamcast soon after [Music] on january 31st 2001 sega officially announced the discontinuation of the dreamcast after march 31st 2001 with the announcement came that they were indeed switching to third party software development with the death of the dreamcast announced units were reduced to just 99 then further reduced to 79 and eventually only 49.95 to be cleared out of stores sega's final numbers at the end of the fiscal year being march 31st claimed the dreamcast had sold 8.2 million units and 51.36 million software units though the official numbers after discontinuation would end up being 9.13 million units sold this however was unable to surpass the total number of the sega saturn which was 9.26 million to be fair the dreamcast had achieved more in a few months in america than sega was able to in years on april 14th 2001 sega attended game jam yujinak himself had just won numerous awards for fantasy star online and as a tribute to the now dead console and the games that were still going to launch for it in 2001 naka was joined by shenmue designer yu suzuki and long time sega game planner and producer noriyoshi oba to give the final sign off of sega's last console as a console ahead of its time in technology and scope the dreamcast is a fantastic system despite this and despite having such hits as sonic adventure 1 sonic adventure 2 shenmue skies of arcadia fantasy star online soul calibur ikaruga crazy taxi c-man jet set radio space channel 5 grandia 2 and many more the dreamcast was unfortunately unable to capture the hearts and minds of america japan and europe away from the playstation 2. internal struggles the announcement of the gamecube and xbox and financial losses that all started with the failure of the saturn had eventually caught up to sega the dreamcast was never able to directly compete with the xbox or the gamecube with sega even adding support to both of those consoles at launch would sega still be in the console wars today if they hadn't flubbed the launch of the sega saturn would a different head of the company that was more committed to making the dreamcast a success have changed the outcome hopefully there's a parallel universe out there where sega continued making consoles here in this world though sega has been able to continue their legacy by simply making great games while many fans will miss the days where there was more than just nintendo microsoft and sony that won't stop many of us from enjoying what was and thinking about what could have been thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Video Game Docs

Views: 15,733

Keywords: Dreamcast, E3, Gaming, Genesis, Legend of Zelda, Mario, Nintendo, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Saturn, Sega, Sega 32X, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Shenmue, Sonic, Sonic Adventure, Sony, Super Nintendo, Video Game History, Video Games, advent rising, computer chronicles, console games, game docs, intellivision amico, ps2 launch day, sega consoles, sega documentary

Id: S3s5QJrHgOI

Length: 31min 42sec (1902 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021