Birthday of the latest Sega game console
November 27, 1998 Sega Dreamcast game console was released. It became the first 128-bit prefix on the market and marked the collapse of Sega as a gaming equipment developer.
After the release of the disastrous and inconvenient game development for Sega Saturn, the company tried to catch up and create a truly promising competitor for the increasingly popular Sony PlayStation. In principle, the company had all the chances for that - the Dreamcast's graphics and processor power was impressive, the architecture was convenient for writing games by third-party developers, online games were available, and in the US gaming market for the first month they sold over half a million copies of the console.
A whole conglomerate of famous companies: NEC (128-bit GPU), Hitachi (CPU SH-4 RISC CPU), Yamaha (sound chip), and Microsoft (modified Windows CE operating system and compatibility with DirectX ).
Even compact discs for this set-top box were special - a specific GD-ROM standard with increased recording density supported discs up to 1.2 GB (and this was several years before the DVD was released to the masses!), Although standard CD-ROMs were also read without problems. A memory card, familiar to the buyers of consoles for all the same Sony PlayStation, were not just drives, but an auxiliary control with a display and were installed inside the gamepad.
The memory card in the Sega Dreamcast was not just a drive, but a complete gadget in the gamepad
Unfortunately, as a result of large investments in advanced hardware, Sega began to feel not too confident financially, in addition, when choosing from two versions of the prefixed “losing” team, the development team at once dismissed, and 3Dfx did not slow down to troll the Japanese with patents after as information arrived that a video accelerator in the console was developed by a competing NEC.
At first, there were no problems with the games on the new console: the Unreal Tournament Resident Evil action games, Dead or Alive 2 fighting game and the sensational online RPG Phantasy Star appeared on the Dreamcast as soon as possible, and next year the legendary exclusive appeared on the console - an adventure game in the open Shemnue World.
But then the Japanese company stopped controlling the situation around its offspring: first, the “buggy” Ready 2 Rumble Boxing first came out (this is now a miserable unstable games get the “patches” on the day of the release, and in the absence of mass Internet access this was not forgiven) to produce fancy memory cards on time, and with well-publicized online games, things went badly.
Sony at that time, too, was not idle and quickly lured to its side Electronic Arts, as well as the developers of the famous Tekken fighting game - the company Namco. Already in October 1999, when the PlayStation 2 was released, Sony’s partners miraculously turned out to be the majority of game developers who were previously loyal to the Dreamcast. It should also be noted that the PlayStation 2 won the hearts of customers not only with games - this console was one of the first and cheapest DVD players on the market. And after such a mass character, as usual, the cashier’s office, along with the games, were pulled up.
Sega GT - racing game for Sega Dreamcast
The game that glorified Dreamcast for years to come - Shenmue
After all these troubles, the once promising Dreamcast existed for some time as a residual platform for porting games from the PlayStation 2, and then the project was closed and Sega retrained into a game publisher.
