Ask your average gamer with a passing interest in the Dreamcast to name their favourite titles for the system, and there is a good chance that you might hear answers like Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, or Resident Evil CODE:Veronica. The console certainly had a healthy crop of long-form, narrative-driven sagas like this which remain an enduring part of its identity to this day. However, it’s probably just as likely that the answers you’ll receive are replete with brash, high-tempo classics such as Crazy Taxi, Power Stone, or The House of the Dead 2. Titles in this vein, which were so obviously shaped by their arcade roots, also played a huge role in making the Dreamcast what it was – and some of them shifted big numbers too (OK, big numbers for the Dreamcast).
In retrospect, given what was just around the corner for video gaming, it is not uncommon to hear the opinion that Sega’s swansong console was overly reliant on arcade ports. If it were to serve evolving tastes, so the argument goes, perhaps it needed to have attracted more games that were divorced from the arcade scene. Considering the multitude of factors that coalesced to make the Dreamcast a commercial flop, it is impossible to say with any certainty whether this theory holds much weight. Personally, I suspect it may have the tiniest grain of truth to it. If so, then daydreaming about how the console’s release library could have been packed out with even more arcade titles is perhaps a little bit perverse, but this is the Dreamcast Junkyard after all, and pontificating on this type of nonsense is our jam.
The NAOMI-Dreamcast Connection
For the uninitiated, I should probably explain that, in the same year that Sega launched the Dreamcast to the home market (1998), they also launched the New Arcade Operation Machine Idea (NAOMI) system for the arcade market. And, barring a handful of differences which made the arcade system marginally superior, the two were practically twins.
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| The front page of a NAOMI press release from 1998, with the Dreamcast swirl incorporated into the logo (later to be dropped in favour of clarity). Image courtesy of Sega Retro. |
I am not at all technically minded, and plenty of other articles by highly knowledgeable authors have been written about the affinities between the two systems, so I won’t feign expertise and start talking about chips and memory. For now, it is sufficient to say that because of the similarities between the NAOMI and the Dreamcast, porting games from the former to the latter was a fairly simple affair. Naturally then, masses of NAOMI titles were brought over to the home market using this route - or were they?
Relying on the data assembled by the wonderful archivists of Sega Retro, by my count 159 titles were released for the NAOMI, either on ROM cartridge or GD-ROM, but only 60 of these made it over to our beloved Dreamcast. Sure, among those 60 there are many, many, stone cold classics, ranging from blockbuster hits like Crazy Taxi through to lower-profile titles that have garnered a cult following over the years, such as Ikaruga. As thankful as I am for ports like these, those numbers mean that 99 NAOMI games didn’t make the jump over to the Dreamcast, and indeed, many never left the arcade full-stop.
In certain instances, this is understandable. The Dreamcast had its fair share of bizarre accessories, but would anyone out there really have wanted to cram a StarHorse terminal into their living room? Probably not.
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| OK lads, back to mine for a few hours of StarHorse? |
For other reasons, games like Dragon Treasure, where players sought out ‘medals’ in a thinly veiled gambling loop, were probably not well suited to the home market either. You can’t lose money to yourself after all. Yet there are plenty of other games that could have feasibly made it onto the Dreamcast, brightening up its library, bringing us hours of joy, and getting savaged by a grumpy and short-tempered reviewer in the Official Dreamcast Magazine. So, in no particular order, here are the NAOMI games that I feel should have been blessed with releases on the Dreamcast.
Monkey Ball
Landing in arcades with aplomb in July 2001, Monkey Ball had that upbeat, blue-skies aesthetic that Sega development teams of the era seem to have mastered. On the face of it, rolling a twee monkey character around maze-like platforms to collect bananas and reach an end goal is very simplistic, but the combination of platforming and puzzle elements proved to be a big hit, and the opportunity to master the controls and beat prior scores lent the game a degree of depth and replayability.
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| Monkey Ball screenshot courtesy of the Video Games Museum. |
Before the end of the year, the game was ported to the Gamecube as Super Monkey Ball - the first game Sega published on a Nintendo home console following their exit from the hardware market. To the delight of an ailing Sega, it was a commercial hit, spawning a quick sequel and a franchise that has remained active to this day. But really, this game’s first home console destination should have been the Dreamcast, and had it hit the arcades a year earlier, I don't doubt that I could have been clasping a well-used copy of Monkey Ball in a battered PAL case right now. Fortunately though, thanks to the dedication of Memorix101, an unofficial port is in the works, and we may well see a fully working version in the near future.
Crackin' DJ
Rhythm games were a big deal in the late nineties with the likes of Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania first taking the arcades by storm and then quickly transitioning over to the lucrative home gaming market. Of course, the Dreamcast was not immune to this bug and had a small but high quality library of rhythm titles, including the internationally recognised Space Channel 5, as well as Japan-exclusive hits like the Pop’n Music series. Yet, to my mind, it was a crying shame that Hitmaker’s Crackin' DJ didn’t make an appearance on Sega’s home console. Created specifically with a view to capitalising on the rhythm craze, its drawn out development process was by all accounts a tough one, and upon release it flopped, with blame partly falling on the daunting dual turntable controller that beginners struggled to comprehend.
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| Look mum, I'm a crackin' DJ! Flyer scan courtesy of LaunchBox Games Database. |
In light of its woes in arcades, not porting Crackin' DJ to the Dreamcast was in all likelihood the right commercial decision, but it means I was denied the opportunity to play it back-to-back with Jet Set Radio, in a fit of hip-hop fueled euphoria, from my dingy house in a bland English town. It’s also a missed opportunity for the Dreamcast to have been saddled with yet another endearingly cumbersome accessory that is only suited to a single game (or two if Crackin' DJ Part 2 was also ported in this hypothetical scenario). For now, we’ll just have to make do with listening to the soundtracks and dreaming of what could have been.
Illmatic Envelope
It’s well established that the Dreamcast has an exquisite library of shoot-em-ups. Furthermore, thanks to the circumstances that made the NAOMI an enduringly attractive home for shmup developers, it's also fairly well known that shmup ports from the NAOMI gave the Dreamcast a much longer official lifespan in Japan than elsewhere. Between 2002 and 2007, ten such games were released as Japanese exclusives for the Dreamcast, and in fact, the last ever Dreamcast GD-ROMs to be pressed and sold were reprints of Border Down in January 2008. Nevertheless, there were a handful of shmup titles released on the NAOMI that never saw the light of day on the Dreamcast, and one which would have been a perfect match for the little white box was Illmatic Envelope.
Released to arcades in June of 2008, Illmatic Envelope (AKA Illvelo) uses the same basic architecture created by Milestone for predecessors Radirgy and Karous, but applies an even more bizarre premise and what can only be described as a near-psychadelic visual presentation to produce a chaotic experience that is hard to put into words. We had glimpses of Milestone’s iconoclastic approach before, but in Illmatic Envelope it was allowed to run rampant.
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| A still screenshot really doesn't do this title justice... I'd recommend a video instead, such as this playthrough hosted by Insert Coin. |
In late 2008, the chances are that an officially licensed Dreamcast port would have been just as viable as Milestone’s prior titles, with a small but dedicated fanbase still ready to snap up a print run of a few thousand copies. However, by the time Illmatic Envelope hit arcades, GD-ROM production had halted, which made such a prospect an impossibility regardless of demand. Fortunately, the game was not destined to be confined to the arcade with a Wii port appearing in late 2008, but that didn't fully satisfy my appetite. To this day I still yearn for a proper late-stage-Dreamcast DVD-case style release.
Mazan: Flash of the Blade
Released by Namco to arcades in 2002, Mazan: Flash of the Blade is a first-person hack and slash-type game, where the player takes on the role of an ancient Samurai tasked with defeating hordes of historically accurate monsters, including some rather terrifying penguins. The key feature the game is built around is that of a sword controller surrounded by a ring of sensors, the movements of which are then relayed into the game. Given that the action progresses on-rails, and considering the manner in which enemies present themselves, perhaps the most apt way to describe Mazan is as a “pseudo light gun game”.
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| Flyer scan courtesy of Neon Rocketship. |
In the post Wii-era, the kind of motion controls the game offers probably aren’t as much of a draw as they once were. Indeed, after experiencing the horrendously clunky sword-fighting of Red Steel, some may have been put off the concept for good. However, the online consensus seems to be that Namco implemented the technology for Mazan well, and the game has drawn high praise from some well-informed commentators, such as Video Game Esoterica who describes Mazan as their “favourite unported arcade game ever”.
I’ll accept that releasing a Dreamcast port with a plastic sword and enormous sensor-ring accessory kit in 2002 would have been a reckless move. But surely something could have been worked out between the Samba de Amigo maracas and the fishing controller? Too ridiculous? Well then, I’d have settled for playing it with my Dreamcast mouse, or even the keyboard, à la The Typing of the Dead.
Kasei Channel Mars TV
The final game I'll cover here is the wonderfully vibrant Kasei Channel Mars TV, in which groups of up to three players compete in a succession of "quiz shows" that are broadcast from the planet Mars. Developed by Sega Software R&D Dept. 3 and released to arcades in 1999, Kasei Channel Mars TV is typically categorised as a "table game", but it is perhaps clearer to state that it ultimately consists of a set of mini games.
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| Screenshot courtesy of LaunchBox Games Database. However, again, seeing a video is a must, and I would highly recommend this footage from Insert Coin. |
Obviously, the 2D art style and straightforward gameplay mechanics wouldn't have exactly been ideal for showing off the power of Sega's new home console back in 1999. However, in my eyes, Kasei Channel Mars TV could have been a perfect early online multiplayer game, perhaps releasing at a budget price in the vein of Toy Racer, or even being bundled as a magazine disc, as was done with Planet Ring in Europe. A trick was missed here, and the fact that the game has never made it out of the arcade is unfortunate.
Honourable Mentions
Some of you may be aware of the heartwarming story from 2004 where Dreamcast fans effectively saved the developer Triangle Service (a one-man band consisting of Toshiaki Fujino) from bankruptcy. Trizeal had tanked at the arcade, and upon gaining a licence to publish a Dreamcast port, Triangle Service issued an open letter calling for Dreamcast owners across the world to pre-order the game, which they duly acted upon. Perhaps less well known is that Triangle Service had intended to release their next NAOMI title, Shooting Love. 2007, on the Dreamcast in November 2008 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the console and pay thanks to those who had supported Trizeal. This would have been a fitting end to the console's official lifespan, but alas, it was not to be, because GD-ROM production had stopped.
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| The NAOMI cartridge for Shooting Love. 2007 courtesy of Sega Retro. |
While not releasing a game because there is no physical capacity to produce discs is reasonable, what is less forgivable is that in PAL regions the Dreamcast only had two light gun games (Confidential Mission and The House of the Dead 2), and even in Japan, the Dreamcast only managed to muster two more (Death Crimson 2/OX and the Virtua Cop 2 re-release). A bit stingy, considering that there were several perfectly serviceable NAOMI light gun games that could have made the jump with little effort. OK, maybe not Gun Survivor 2: Biohazard CODE:Veronica, which was a hot mess with a terrible title to boot (six words and two colons, really?!), but the ancient Egyptian-themed The Maze of the Kings would have been lovely.
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| The Maze of the Kings title screen, courtesy of Sega Retro. |
I'm quite ignorant about fighting games, and so I didn't think it was appropriate to pick one out in the section above, but I will note here that there were at least five fighting games released on the NAOMI which were never ported to the Dreamcast (Akatsuki Blitzkampf Ausf.Achse, Toy Fighter, Jingi Storm, several variants of Melty Blood and several variants on Guilty Gear XX). Given how well regarded Guilty Gear X on the Dreamcast is, I can only assume that fighting game afficionados would have been thrilled to see one of the four Guilty Gear XX variants that were released between 2002 and 2006 ported over too. As to why shmup developers of the time universally agreed that Dreamcast ports were still worthwhile, yet fighting game developers did not, I don't know. Maybe that's an investigation worthy of another article...
So there we have it. Based on a perfectly fair, rigorous and transparent methodology, I've decreed which games should have been ported from the NAOMI to the Dreamcast. However, I am humble enough to concede the possibility that I may have made a minor mistake - if there are other titles that you believe warranted a port, then do let us know in the comments below. Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for news on such ports becoming a reality in the near future. As we reported earlier, a port of Monkey Ball is underway, and a port of Cleopatra Fortune Plus (albeit "vibe-coded") has recently released, which hopefully means that the flood gates are now open.
P.S. To read a similar case made for titles from Sega's other arcade hardware (Model 3, Hikaru, Naomi 2) check out this article by Gregory Oborne over at It's Still Thinking.