The Sega Dreamcast Was the ‘What if?' Console

New York Times

10 hours ago

GD-ROMDreamcast1999 – 2001
Photo illustration by The New York Times; Sega
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Most Xbox games are also available on the PlayStation these days, and Nintendo has long since stopped trying to compete directly with Sony and Microsoft. But in 2000, the video game console wars were cutthroat, and about to produce their biggest casualty: Sega.
The Dreamcast was the earliest entrant in a generation of video game consoles that would eventually include the GameCube, the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox. The first console with a built-in modem, the Dreamcast was ahead of its time in some ways. But it was behind in others (it could not play DVDs), and by spring 2001, with Sega losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, it was discontinued. Sega has been out of the console business ever since.
To look back at the Dreamcast 25 years later is to see a collection of paths not taken and possibilities deferred. It is an alternate version of what 21st-century gaming might have looked like, had things gone differently.
Sega had long defined itself in opposition to Nintendo, presenting itself as the edgier alternative. 'Genesis Does What Nintendon't,' its ads promised in the early 1990s, when its console outsold the Super Nintendo for several years. But its follow-ups, the Sega CD and Sega Saturn, struggled to break through, and by the Dreamcast era, the company was dabbling in the genuinely weird.
The Dreamcast's novelty controllers included a motion-sensitive fishing pole and a pair of electronic maracas, and its primary controller incorporated its own oddity: the V.M.U., or Visual Memory Unit, a removable memory card that had its own tiny LCD screen and buttons. When plugged into the controller, the V.M.U. provided each player with a secondary screen. When removed, it functioned as a tiny GameBoy-like hand-held system capable of playing simple games — as if the console were sending spores into the world.
Like so many aspects of the Dreamcast, the V.M.U. never quite worked out — too small to use comfortably, too limited to play anything interesting — but it was certainly the most experimental choice in the design of any of that generation's consoles.
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