15 Dreamcast Facts You Probably Didn’t Know

There are some things in life that people only begin to appreciate long after they’re gone. Great art, musicians, waking up without the realistation that we are nothing but specks across the stars, and even video game consoles have all tended to receive a better assessment post death, and the Dreamcast is perhaps the best example of that. For a console that never got its due in its day, naturally, there’s an array of facts about Sega’s last ever console that you may not know about. Take these chocolate salty facts, put ‘em in your brain, and learn ’em.

 

1. Seaman Could Have Freaked Up Nintendo

In the years since the Dreamcast’s release, games like Seaman have become mascots for the console’s creativity. A contender for one of the weirdest games ever made that also appears on every weirdest games list for the rest of time, Seaman’s closest comparison would be 3D Tamagotchi but way more complex, with players charged with looking after the eponymous creature that’s got the body of a fish and the head of a human. How this didn’t become nightmare fuel for an entire generation, we’ll never know, but in an alternate universe, Seaman wouldn’t have launched on the Dreamcast. According to the game’s creator and key designer Yoot Saito in an interview with The Verge, Seaman almost launched on the Nintendo 64DD, and it would have been thanks to industry legend Shigeru Miyamoto.

“I only met one other person that could understand my base feeling and that is Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto-san really likes strange and different concepts. So while Seaman was released on Dreamcast, behind the scenes we came very close to choosing to develop the game on the Nintendo 64DD. As a matter of fact, around the time Seaman was released on Nintendo’s rival hardware, the Dreamcast, Miyamoto-san was featured in a magazine wearing a Seaman shirt. Seaman was eventually released by Sega, but Miyamoto-san was an incredibly important person in the process of getting Seaman made, especially for someone like myself with very little console game experience.”

As an interesting bonus fact, the English football team Arsenal were sponsored by the Dreamcast for a season, and who was their goalkeeper at the time? David Seaman. Clearly, SEGA should have made David Seaman’s Seaman, which would have saved the Dreamcast.

 

2. Shenmue Was Originally A Virtua Fighter RPG

Another game that’s become synonymous with the Dreamcast is Shenmue, SEGA’s landmark sandbox RPG whose DNA has gone on to influence countless games over the years. There’s a genuine argument to be made that without Shenmue, we wouldn’t have the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, and while Shenmue is a franchise of its own at this point, there was a time when the first game was going to be nothing more than a spin-off RPG for Virtua Fighter.

Originally developed for the SEGA Saturn, Shenmue started life as a prototype called The Old Man And The Peach Tree, which was inspired by the slower pace of 80s RPGs and adventure games, before morphing into a VF project.

Titled Virtua Fighter RPG: Akira’s Story, this spin-off would’ve starred Virtua Fighter mascot Akira Yuki as the main character, though whether the plot or characters that appeared in Shenmue would’ve also appeared is unknown. Again, this original version was set for release on the SEGA Saturn, but at some point during the game’s development the project moved over to the Dreamcast, with Yu Suzuki believing that the new console needed its own original IP to become a killer app, instead of relying on established IP. Thus, Shenmue was born, and the rest was history.

As an aside, the idea of a Virtua Fighter single player adventure of some kind did stick around at SEGA, as Virtua Quest would launch a few years later for PS2 and GameCube. Sure, it’s not quite an RPG, and it’s also not quite a good game, but you do get to have a big scrap with Akira.

 

3. It Was Actually Pretty Successful (To Begin With)

We mentioned at the start that the Dreamcast is considered to be a flop as far as consoles are concerned, perhaps a bit unfairly. The Dreamcast was only around for about 18 months worldwide before SEGA decided to call it quits, with the release of the PS2 being seen as one of the main reasons why the console ultimately failed. That, and the fact it was so easy to bypass copy protections.

The Dreamcast would ultimately sell just over 9 million units worldwide, which is a far cry from the tens of millions that other consoles have sold over the years. Even the GameCube, another console “failure” as far as the commercial aspect is concerned, managed to sell somewhere in the region of 24 to 26 million units worldwide, so the Dreamcast failing to crack 10 million shows that SEGA’s console with the big swirl on it wasn’t quite up to standard for some people.

However, what many people tend to forget is that the Dreamcast actually exploded out of the gate in terms of sales. While the tail-end of the Dreamcast’s lifespan is certainly a whimper, SEGA opened with a bang in North America, earning one million units sold in the space of two and a half months. For context, it took Sony nine months for the PS1 to reach that same total, so for the Dreamcast to beat that in less than a third of the time was staggering.

Now, could you make the argument that the 1999 gaming landscape was different to the 1995 one, as in those four years, Sony and the N64 demonstrated some of the best of gaming up until that point, and the Dreamcast benefitted from that momentum? Possibly, but the fact that the Dreamcast beat some of the PS1’s records is an interesting fact all the same.

It’s also worth noting that the Wii U only sold around 13 and a half million units with two more years in a far more mainstream market, so there’s a good chance that maybe, with just a bit more time and money, the Dreamcast could have kept living the dream.

 

4. The Dreamcast Beat TiVo & The MP3 Player

A nice little add-on fact for you, and something to give you more of an idea of how much the Dreamcast was primed for success heading into the new millennium is the fact that the Dreamcast won TIME Digital’s Machine Of The Year in their November 29th, 1999 issue. TIME obviously runs their Person of the Year award every year, usually giving it to someone that no one is happy about, or using the format to make some kind of statement, so naturally TIME Digital had to run a Machine Of The Year award as some kind of counterbalance.

While the idea of a console that would ultimately go on to flop isn’t the most ridiculous thing in the world, the cover of the magazine in question has the Dreamcast controller beating both TiVo and the MP3 player, two products that would ultimately become cornerstone products of how people consume TV and music respectively. You know, at least for a time anyway. TiVo and MP3 players had a longer time in the sun than the Dreamcast did, that’s all we’re saying.

Quite how this rousing endorsement from TIME Digital magazine didn’t immediately translate to the Dreamcast shifting a billion units and being cited as the cause of peace in our time, we’ll never know. Also, to be fair, Big Mouth Billy Bass was robbed. Show your dad this dumb fish and watch him absolutely lose his mind with joy.

 

5. It Used Motion Controls Before The Wii

Any Cultured Vultures console facts regulars will probably know that three kinds of facts keep appearing throughout all of the consoles, particularly from the PS1 era onwards. They either experimented with 3D before the likes of 3D TVs and the 3DS were a thing, they dabbled with motion controls before the Wii popularized the idea in the mainstream, or they bundled the console into a TV for some kind of Franken-console abomination that we simply must own. While we’ll leave you to ruminate on which of the remaining two will pop up later in this list, let’s talk about the Dreamcast and its brief love affair with motion controls. And by that, we mean, we’re talking about SEGA Bass Fishing, let’s go!

SEGA’s beloved game about a man holding his rod, SEGA Bass Fishing could be played with the basic Dreamcast controller if you were a big chump, but for the authentic fishing experience without having to leave the house, you could also obtain a fishing rod peripheral that included motion controls and a functioning reel. No fishing lines or a hook though, so you don’t need to worry about having someone’s eye out when you swing the rod around. While there were a couple of third party rods available that also used motion controls, the most widely known rod was developed by SEGA and ASCII, and was even bundled together with SEGA Bass Fishing in PAL regions.

They had a low print run though, so if you see the bundle going for cheap, snap it up.

 

6. The Half-Life Port That Basically Was

We don’t need to tell you that Half-Life is one of the most popular and beloved first person shooters ever made, changing the game completely when it launched on PC at the turn of the millennium.

Naturally, console ports were in the works, and while the first Half-Life would make its way to the PS2, a Dreamcast port was also in the works. The port was announced in 2000, and it would have included the full game, a new and exclusive mission pack and an entire second disc that would have featured, among other things, Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike. Basically, the Dreamcast nearly had its own version of The Orange Box, but the release fell apart quite literally at the final hurdle.

Despite being announced in February 2000, the Dreamcast port of Half-Life would be delayed numerous times, all the way up until the summer of 2001. With a scheduled release in June 2001, publishers Sierra would announce in May that the Dreamcast port was canceled, citing the classic line of “changing market conditions” as the main reason why. That changing market condition they’re referring to was likely the fact that SEGA announced in March they were halting production of the Dreamcast, so Sierra decided there was no point in finishing a game for a dead platform. Besides, the PS2 version of Half-Life was lousy with loading screens, so the Dreamcast version wouldn’t have been much better.

Still, if you want to see it for yourself, a few builds of the Dreamcast Half-Life port have made their way online in the years since.

 

7. Postal’s 25 Year Late Port

From a port that never was to a port that probably never should have been, it’s not really a surprise fact to tell you that people are still developing homebrew games for the SEGA Dreamcast even in the year 2024, but what’s perhaps more baffling is what Running With Scissors and UK-based developers WAVE Game Studios achieved in 2022: porting the original Postal game to the Dreamcast. WAVE Game Studios have made a name for themselves developing games for the Dreamcast in the 2020s, with Driving Strikers deserving of its own mention here too. A loving Rocket League homage, Driving Strikers managed to bring official online support to the console over 20 years after the whole thing got nuked, and it even features cross-play with PC and Linux players.

The original Postal was a twin stick shooter instead of the FPS that made the series notorious across the world, but the idea of porting a game like Postal to a platform like the Dreamcast 20 years after the console’s unceremonious discontinuation is either genius or insanity. We’re not quite sure which, but that’s probably par for the course when it’s got anything to do with the Postal franchise. If you’re interested in picking up Postal for the Dreamcast, you’ll find the game runs at a solid 60fps, and the physical disc is region-free too so you can play it from anywhere in the world. If nothing else, Postal for the Dreamcast is miles better than the Postal movie, but then again, so is being punched in the face.

Quick bonus fact: at the time of recording, some lunatics are also trying to get GTA 3 running on Dreamcast. Godspeed, you wild bucks.

 

8. Isao Okawa Is A Legend

The gaming industry is a bit of a pit right now, eh? The amount of lay-offs that have hit the industry is staggering, and it makes you wonder how one of the most successful and profitable industries on the planet can just bleed money and talent at such an alarming rate. In these disappointing times of corporate greed, many like to remember the story of Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo, who took a massive pay cut to offset the failure of the Wii U. It’s a wonderful story, but one that also deserves to be shared and celebrated is Isao Okawa’s act of generosity that allowed SEGA to continue unaffected after the Dreamcast.

Because the Dreamcast couldn’t continue its launch momentum, SEGA ended up in dire financial straits by the time they ended production of the console. Facing difficulties, then-President Isao Okawa essentially gifted the company back his millions of shares in SEGA, totalling about $730 million or 85 billion yen. This would counteract the 80 billion yen loss SEGA were posting because of the Dreamcast, allowing them to successfully pivot back into purely game development and publishing instead of consoles.

This was far from Okawa’s only legendary act regarding the Dreamcast, as he also begged Microsoft to make the Xbox compatible with Dreamcast games, so fans could still play their favorite games. Unfortunately, just a month after he gifted his shares back to SEGA, he passed away due to heart failure.

 

9. You Could Trade Pure Alpha

One of the more well known facts about the Dreamcast is how much the console pushed the boat out when it comes to online integration with your console. MMORPGs like Phantasy Star Online, which supported the use of a keyboard, along with the console’s own internet browser, have been covered to death already. We’ve even spoken about how the Dreamcast and the PS2 together became the first example of console-to-console crossplay with Capcom VS SNK 2 in our PS2 facts list, which is absolutely the cheapest plug this side of Turkish hair treatment. Something that isn’t discussed as much though is SEGA’s ambitions to have the Dreamcast get involved in other aspects of your life, including shopping and business.

While these products were never released outside of Japan, the range of uses and software available is staggering. On the weird end of things, you’ve got the Toyota Doricatch series, a collection of virtual showroom experiences based on nine different Toyota cars, including the Celica and the RAV4 L. In essence, they were on display tech demos that allowed those looking for a new car to customize their prospective purchase without asking some guy with a spray gun to change the paint job sixteen times over. Reportedly, there was also an online service called Saibai Net, which would allow users to order fruit and vegetables via their Dreamcast. It’s like a Sonic-branded Hello Fresh. Probably.

Perhaps the most interesting addition to the “Dreamcast does anything other than play games” pantheon though was SEGA’s collaboration with Nomura Securities, a multinational firm that specialized in the handling of stock markets, to allow players to buy and sell stock via their Dreamcast. The process required its own GD-ROM, the specially made discs designed for the Dreamcast, but discs were reportedly not available for public consumption, so facts and figures about how many people in Japan actually used the feature are basically non-existent.

Clearly, those apps that let you manage stock portfolios are missing a trick by not making a console compatible version. We love trading pure alpha in between levels of whatever game we’re currently playing.

 

10. The Dreamcast’s Many Other Canceled PC Ports

The canceled Half-Life Dreamcast port from earlier is interesting in its own right, purely because the game was so close to release before Sierra decided to murder the whole project, but Half-Life is just one of several PC games that were slated to get Dreamcast ports, but they never came to pass for one reason or another.

There’s lot of games that never made it to the Dreamcast, whether due to the console shutting down production in 2001, development moving over to another console like the PS2 or other reason entirely, but the amount of those games that happen to be PC games is astonishing.

The list of PC games in particular reads like a murderer’s row of some of the biggest PC releases of the late 90s, not including the already mentioned Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike. Baldur’s Gate, Black & White, Diablo 2, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Outcast and System Shock 2 are just some of the examples, and it would be interesting to see how some of these games would have worked on the Dreamcast. In the case of System Shock 2, we sort of have an answer, as assets from a Dreamcast build were found on an old devkit years ago.

Meanwhile, where is our port of Virtua Golf that you promised, SEGA? Massive cowards.

 

11. SEGA Wasted $100 Million On Marketing

Earlier on, we spoke about the massive loss SEGA were posting regarding the Dreamcast, but around $100 million of that specifically was wasted on the console’s marketing. $100 million in marketing sounds like a huge investment in today’s landscape, but throwing that amount of money around back in the late 90s seems absolutely ludicrous, especially as today it’s closer to $200 million due to inflation.

It becomes even more staggering when you read the full press release of what SEGA were doing with the marketing budget, which has been archived by The Verge. The whole thing makes for some good reading, but there’s definitely a few highlights in there.

For starters, SEGA put a huge amount of effort into targeting the “young adult” demographic, which they aimed to court by offering full sponsorship of that group’s “SuperBowl”: the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards. We assume the VMAs were cheaper than the actual SuperBowl to be honest, though the console’s launch date did coincide with the VMAs event.

Alongside the VMAs sponsorship were a wave of “cryptic” print ads ahead of the console’s launch, a TV campaign with ads developed by Pacific Data Images, who also worked on the movie Antz, and a total of 950 TV ad spots on MTV alone between July 1999 and March 2000. They even managed to get Pepsi to turn traitor on Sony (and their exclusive Pepsiman game) by creating a series of advertorials around movies and pop culture. If that’s not enough advertising for you, SEGA embarked on a “‘celebrity and sport celebrity seeding’ program for Sega Dreamcast to ensure that ‘everybody that’s anybody’ has a Sega Dreamcast.

Rest in peace, Dreamcast. You would’ve loved influencer culture.

 

12. SEGA Has A Dream (Library)

SEGA made a name for themselves during the Genesis/Mega Drive era as being incredibly forward thinking when it came to not only online support, but how people consumed and purchased their games, even during the 90s.

The SEGA Channel is probably their most notable example, which allowed Genesis users in America to play games through their Cable TV package. SEGA would offer a similar program for the Dreamcast called Dream Library, included as part of Dream Passport 3. Dream Passport was the disc designed for use with Japanese Dreamcasts that would give the console basic internet exploration features, like searching the web or checking your email. All caught up? Good.

The Dream Library feature in Dream Passport 3 basically allowed users to buy SEGA Genesis and PC Engine games via the internet. Curiously, there was no means to actually store the downloaded game on the VMU, those mini Game Boy looking things that you could store your Sonic Adventure Chaos on. Any time you powered down your Dreamcast, the games would disappear entirely, but you’d be able to redownload the games again as many times as you like. Crucially though, your save games would be stored on the VMU, so you could at least pick up where you left off.

The line-up of games on offer changed every month, with SEGA maintaining about 50 games at any one time, giving Dream Library an almost “Game Pass before Game Pass” quality to it.

 

13. The Dreamcast’s PS2 Hit Piece

The Dreamcast might have lost to Sony and the PlayStation 2 in the bloody and brutal “console wars”, but that doesn’t mean that SEGA didn’t fire a cheeky little shot across the starboard bow before dipping out of console development entirely. If you haven’t heard of Segagaga before, prepare to hear the good word of SEGA’s RPG that poked fun at the Japanese gaming industry as a whole.

Players control a lad by the name of Sega Tarō, who is given the unenviable task of saving SEGA as a company from their dreaded rivals, DOGMA, a not so subtle allegory for Sony and the PS2. DOGMA have cornered 97% of the console gaming market, with SeGA left to wallow in the scraps of the 3%, so it’s up to you to reverse those fortunes, usually by shouting vicious insults at Samba De Amigo for some reason.

Basically, it’s on you to travel to the various SEGA development studios and make sure things are running smoothly, but due to the stress and crunch-like constraints of the job, they’ve turned into mutants. The only way to get them back in line is to send someone from upper management (yourself) to shout at them. Yeah, that’s a game studio alright. Fail in these fights and a whole month of development time will be lost, while success will allow you to recruit the person into one of four dev teams that increase the player’s stats. After three years of dev time, the game ends based on your individual performance. Segagaga was released digitally in Japan on March 29th 2001, two days before SEGA ended the console’s manufacturing entirely, almost as if they were saying “we couldn’t reverse our fortunes, but maybe you could”.

While the game wasn’t that successful, given it launched at the end of the console’s lifespan, it did get enough attention to warrant a physical release. There’s also been multiple attempts to get an English fan translation off the ground, but none have managed to actually complete the project for one reason or another.

 

14. The Dreamcast TV

Did you guess that there would be a Dreamcast TV entry on this list? Your options were this or 3D honestly, and we couldn’t find anything about 3D, so TV it is.

Back in the 90s to early 2000s, we really loved convenient bits of technology. Why get a TV and a VHS player for your kid’s bedroom when you can get the TV with a built-in VHS player? Is it any wonder our phones have become these all-singing, all-dancing wonder machines when we started asking questions about how much one piece of technology can do for us? Sticking a VHS or DVD player of some kind into a TV was all the rage back then, but something that was less common was video game consoles bundled inside TVs. Obviously, different console manufacturers would have a go, as we keep talking about them, but they’d often be limited releases or only available in a certain region. The Dreamcast TV is no exception.

A collaboration between SEGA, CSK and the Fuji Corporation, the SEGA Divers 2000 CX-1 is a 14-inch CRT TV with a Dreamcast plonked into the top of it. They’re an incredibly rare bit of tech, as only 5000 were ever made, and the TV was criticized at the time of release for costing about four times as much as the standalone console. However, the TV did also come with matching accessories like the DreamEye camera, a controller (obviously) and a keyboard for your mammoth PSO sessions. Still at $799, we’d rather spend that on a cool looking bit of the Dreamcast’s history than on whatever it costs to buy a PS5 Pro. Let’s just see how much they’re going for now on eBay, eh?

Oh. Oh no. That’s too many monies. The monies are too many. Monies be many.

 

15. Dreamcast, Atelier & The Christmas Virus

We’re finishing off with a spicy one here.

Most discs from the PS1 era would, when inserted into a CD player or PC, allow players to rip the game’s soundtrack or access some exclusive wallpapers and other assets. Naturally many would try this with the Dreamcast’s GD-ROMs, and it might be a well known fact that if you play some Dreamcast discs on CD players, you get a warning message about how playing these discs in a CD player or PC might cause some catastrophic damage. Usually, that damage would come in the form of some loud static noises as the CD player tries to treat the majority of the game’s files as one track, but sometimes there were still easter eggs or assets to find when inserted into a PC. However, there was one Dreamcast disc that could actually cause some serious damage if inserted into a PC: Atelier Marie & Elie: The Alchemists of Salburg 1-2.

A remake/remaster of the first two games in this isometric JRPG series, Atelier Marie & Elie: The Alchemists of Salburg 1-2 received a Japan-only release on the Dreamcast in November, 2001. The bundle came with two discs and people quickly realized that inserting those discs into a PC would reveal a host of interesting goodies, including a pretty nice Atelier screensaver for your computer. All would be well for about a month, until Christmas Day rolled around, and those who opened the screensaver file would find that their entire computer had been bricked by a nasty little virus called Kriz.

For whatever reason, with the most prevailing theory being that a workstation at developers Kool Kizz being infected with the virus, the Kriz virus managed to worm its way onto every disc of Atelier Marie & Elie: The Alchemists of Salburg 1-2, with the payload lying dormant on your computer until Christmas Day, at which point it basically activates like the weird neck brother in Malignant and renders your PC completely useless.

Kool Kizz were actually pretty quick to cotton on to the issue, putting out a statement within just a few days warning people not to put the game’s disc in their PCs, and thanks to the game’s Japan-only release, the issue didn’t become too widespread. Just make sure you’re careful if you’re hunting this game down, legally or otherwise.

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