A Documentary on Dreamcast

Archipel shared a new 2-part documentary dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast, and you can’t miss it.

Archipel shared a new 2-part documentary dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast, and you can’t miss it. The documentary features a number of legendary game creators behind some of the console’s most iconic titles.

In the first part, creators will tell you about how they encountered the Dreamcast, the context at the time, in addition to the story behind their titles:

“SEGA announced the discontinuation of the Dreamcast in January 2001, less than three years after its release. In the second part of this documentary, we asked the game creators about the reasons the console met this fate, in addition to the legacy that it leaves behind:”

The documentary was set up by Archipel, a channel that started with toco toco, a regular series introducing Japanese creators, artists and the places that inspire. The channel now offers more diverse, Japan-centric documentary content with new series or standalone videos, focusing on a wider range of people and aspects of Japanese culture.

You can find other videos from the team here.

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UtopiaNemo
I have the utmost respect for each of these developers. I must say I think they’re mostly incorrect in their assessments of why the Dreamcast failed.

The Dreamcast’s ultimate failure had so little to do with the way Sega handled the Dreamcast. Sega and their third party affiliates such as Namco and Capcom put out so many games of such stellar quality, that the Dreamcast won over a generation of gamers who had previously been diehard Nintendo or Sony fans. They even won me over, who had been a diehard Sega fan since the SMS days, but was so disillusioned by the Saturn’s handling that I had initially decided to sit the Dreamcast out. At that time, the Dreamcast launch was widely considered to be the strongest console launch in US history.

In my opinion, the three issues leading to the fall of the Dreamcast were (in inverse order):1)piracy, 2)Sega’s great deficit of finances and cachet following the Saturn debacle, and 3)Sony’s masterful marketing of the PlayStation 2.

Piracy’s effect on Dreamcast sales is a hotly debated topic, but I’ll say that the turn of the millennium, most college and post-college guys I knew pirated every bit of music or software they could.

Regarding the Saturn debacle, the infighting between SOA and SOJ is well known, as are the number of hubristic decisions Mr. Nakayama made which left Sega in huge financial deficit. They were also directly responsible for erasing a lot of the respect and good will Sega had chiseled out worldwide during the Mega Drive/Genesis era. With the Dreamcast, Sega was digging itself out of a hole. They had seemingly done it as well, and would have surely continued along that path, had it not been for the PS2.

There is no doubt in my mind that the overwhelming reason the Dreamcast failed was because of the PS2.
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UtopiaNemo
·5 years ago·

A Documentary on Dreamcast

Archipel shared a new 2-part documentary dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast, and you can’t miss it. The documentary features a number of legendary game creators behind some of the console’s most iconic titles.

Join discussion

Comments 1

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