And Why It Didn’t Have To

The Saturn was not a stillbirth, it did not have to fail, and it could have been the system to beat. What proof have I? Consider this: after playing my imported copy of Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter a few times, VZ staffer Matt DelGiudice’s younger brothers Adam and Justin pooled what little money they had to buy a Saturn and a $79.95 copy of the game. Later, seeing their system, our friend Nick Civitello dropped the cash for system and game, and recently splurged on a $100 copy of Dragon Ball Z: Shinbutouden. Then more North Branford high schoolers started buying Saturns and import games. And, apparently, this is not an isolated situation: the TRSTS reports for October 1999 show the Saturn hardware outselling the Dreamcast hardware by a margin of nearly two to one and Saturn software outselling Dreamcast software by nearly four to one! What makes these figures even more amazing is that only new systems and games sold at retail in the US are counted, which means that sales of used and imported hardware and software make these numbers even higher. Simply put, people are buying Saturns and games like crazy in spite of the fact that the games are priced two and three times higher than Playstation and Dreamcast games. Even worse, this is product from which Sega could today be making an obnoxious profit but instead gets nothing. ^[9]

⁹ Of course, these sales spikes had to do with the severe price drops on the Saturn, but it proves that people wanted the system, but at a lower price. Had there been more and better software, like the VS. series, available in the US, they’d have sold many, many more systems.

New Kid On The Chopping Block

So, having learned from all of their mistakes with the Saturn, Sega releases the Dreamcast on 9.9.99 ^[10] and pulls off the perfect system launch, right? Uh… no. While it is true that the DC had more pre-launch hype than any other video game system, this probably had less to do with any ingenuity on Sega’s part and more to do with the fact that it was the first system to be released since the Playstation placed video games firmly in the mainstream. That is, the audience was already primed for The Next Big Thing, and the Dreamcast was the closest thing they could find. ^[11] But whatever the reason, the DC had some impressive launch hype built up, and the largest library of launch games ever seen. ^[12] Although big-name titles like Marvel vs. Capcom and Castlevania were forever slipping backwards ^[13], the launch lineup still stood in stark contrast to the meager crop of Japanese launch games, which numbered three: the slumber-inducing July and Godzilla ^[14] and the barely adequate Virtua Fighter 3tb ^[15], none of which made it to the US on 9.9.99. And while a few, like Soul Calibur and Sonic Adventure, were great games, most were basically throwaway releases.

That fateful day ran rather smoothly in that Sega sold over 97 million dollars worth of Dreamcast crap in its first twenty-four hours, much of which worked. Unfortunately, the rest of it did not, and faulty Dreamcast systems and games flooded American households. Isolated incidents? Hardly. One unlucky soul (who wrote to EGM) found himself on the receiving end of a bad Dreamcast, a bad Sonic, a bad Soul Calibur, and a bad VMU. At least he got his equipment: Sega preferred to ship to stores only exactly as many systems and games as had been preordered, even when the discrepancy was something like fifty games to two hundred systems. Even the savviest of customers got shafted when they realized that the VMU had been eliminated from the package (they come standard with Asian machines). And players anxiously awaiting House of The Dead 2 would have to wait a little longer: although the game was in stores, Sega had refused to bring out a gun, because they didn’t want to be associated with video game violence. ^[16] (They failed: there are currently two third-party guns in stores, one of which carries a large “SEGA DREAMCAST” logo.)

And even when customers managed to come home with perfect equipment, they attempted to get online with Sega’s much-touted out-of-the-box Internet access and realized all too late that AOL users (i.e. everybody in America ^[17]) couldn’t connect with their Dreamcast. That’s nothing, of course, compared to all of the kids who sliced up their fingers on the sharp edges of their GD-ROMs.

¹⁰ In the United States. The Japanese launch was way before this, like in the forties or something.
¹¹ I wasn’t sure of this in 1999. In fact, saying this in 1999 – that the Dreamcast’s big launch day was a product of timing and circumstance and not any inherent quality of the system – was pretty controversial. Now it’s all but established fact.
¹² And yet seen. I don’t believe any other game system has had that many titles at launch. I mean, they were mostly pretty bad, but there were so many…
¹³ Or, in the case of Castlevania: Resurrection, ultimately cancelled for being crap.
¹⁴ To Bernie Stolar’s credit, Sega Japan was trying to force him to release Godzilla Generations in America for the DC launch. He stood up to them and said, “No way.” Perhaps it was actually this act of defiance that helped get him canned.
¹⁵ It had no Versus mode. NO. VERSUS. MODE. And the US didn’t want it without one. By the time Sega Japan finally got around to reprogramming it, it looked old and jaggedy next to, uh, the DC launch title Soul Calibur.
¹⁶ An absolutely ridiculous political move, made even worse by the fact that they made Japanese lightguns incompatible with the US system so nobody could have any fun, ever. This one also gets the five-star rating for sheer irony, since this move was caused by Columbine, and the Columbine shooters liked Doom, not lightgun games – and Doom is played with a keyboard and mouse, both of which Sega released for the DC.
¹⁷ This has changed, of course. But at the time it was a pretty big deal.

Five Reasons The Dreamcast Is Failing

Okay, so the Dreamcast’s launch didn’t go as well as it should have. Shouldn’t things be getting better by now? Well… not really. First of all, it’s rather obvious that the Dreamcast isn’t living up to the excitement of 9.9.99. Only a few more games have debuted since then, and they haven’t been the kind of quality games that Sega promised. In fact, they’ve been quite unspectacular. So much for Bernie’s “every title a breakthrough” promise. ^[18] Secondly, even when there is a title or accessory worth purchasing, good luck finding it. Sega was aware of the demand for the system: look how they were able to keep it stocked well into and past Christmas. But why are memory cards and accessories so difficult to find? I am willing to bet that there are fewer VMUs than Dreamcasts in this country… not counting the imported units that Electronics Boutique and Software Etc. have been forced to stock. ^[19]

Even more conspicuous by its absence is the much-vaunted Internet gaming. While Japanese gamers have been playing Sega Rally 2 online since January 1999, US gamers won’t be until at least fall 2000. Guess Bernie should have thought twice before letting those whoppers about online gaming out of the box spill forth. ^[20] And speaking of which, where are all these highly advanced games that he’d been running his mouth about? Like most promises from Sega, the advanced gameplay capabilities of the Dreamcast turned out to be nothing more than so much marketing fluff. ^[21] The vast majority of DC releases are simply existing Playstation games with a graphical overhaul, and even the original titles pale in comparison to Playstation offerings in the same genre. Heck, even my eight-year-old cousin told me that he doesn’t want a Dreamcast, since “the only thing that’s better are the graphics.” And with a decided lack of second parties like Rare or Square, Sega has to rely on sub-par third parties to fill out their game libraries, which is a dangerous risk indeed. ^[22]

Finally, the Dreamcast is failing because, like most of Sega’s other hardware efforts, it was created to compete with the previous generation of hardware and not within its own generation, which will make it technologically inferior in a year or so. The Genesis may have done what Nintendidn’t, but the SNES flattened it. The Saturn was stiff competition for the SNES, but it quickly fell to the easier-to-program Playstation. And the Dreamcast looks great against the Playstation, but not against the DVD-powered PS2. ^[23]

[ Next: Maybes ]

¹⁸ He really did say this. “I promise you that every Dreamcast title will be breakthrough.” I guess he meant that if and when the game really, really sucked, it would be easy to break the disc right in half. (And it was, actually – the flimsiness of the DC discs soon passed into legend.)
¹⁹ This changed fast, of course, as stores filled up with unwanted hardware, software, and accessories. But I still think there were fewer VMUs than Dreamcasts released into stores on launch day. I couldn’t save games on the DC until, months later, I finally found a Japanese Godzilla-flavored VMU in an Electronics Boutique.
²⁰ Of course, Phantasy Star Online did eventually set the bar for the console net-gaming experience.
²¹ Yeah, everybody does it, but that still doesn’t make it okay.
²² Can you think – quickly! – of a great American DC title that wasn’t by Sega or Capcom?
²³ Another comment that was a bit of a fire-starter in 1999, believe it or not.