As a kid I was surrounded by 16-bit consoles. The Sega Mega-Drive stands out clearly in my mind. Oh how we loved Sega… The Dreamcast was Sega’s last attempt at a video game console, and it was launched in 1999. It was therefore the final console of the twentieth century, and it lived a short but happy life.
The Sega Saturn was a surprise to everyone in the video game industry at the time as, when it was unveiled; Sega revealed that the system was already available to buy in shops. It was unprecedented. And foolish! It greatly angered third parties as they had not been involved by Sega in the making of the Saturn and therefore had nothing prepared for it. They were going to miss out because they had not been invited to make games for the system. This, coupled with the dual CPU problem, made many of them turn their attention away from Sega and instead head towards Sony and Nintendo, who were developing their own new consoles. The Dreamcast was intended as a comeback for Sega. When the system launched at Christmas, many of those same third developers refused to help Sega out, still bitter about the Saturn’s shocking launch, and so started developing games for Sony and the upcoming PlayStation 2. Electronic Arts also refused to do business with Sega over creative differences regarding the system’s sports games, and so Sega had to develop their own Sega Sports series in order to keep the competition on that front.
It’s a sad story, because by the time Sega started working on the Dreamcast they had finally got their heads together and were making games directly for their audience. The Dreamcast finally brought us the very first full 3D Sonic game with Sonic Adventure and the system continued to offer some really ground-breaking titles (Shenmue was just brilliant!).
Sadly, it was on January 31st 2001 when the dream finally ended, and it was announced that the production of the Dreamcast was coming to an end.
Sega had turned to producing software instead. They were officially out of the console war.