In the late 1990s, with the bitter taste of the Saturn's commercial flop lingering in their mouth, and the looming presence of a gargantuan new competitor on the scene, the folks at Sega rallied round the idea that they could revive their financial fortunes by getting a new home console onto the market. In that moment, high-stakes decisions needed to be made about the characteristics that would define what came to be known as the Dreamcast. What would the technical architecture of the hardware be? How would developers be brought on board? What direction would the branding take? How comically loud could the operation of the disc drive possibly be?
One concept that Sega firmly hung their hat on was online gameplay. The Dreamcast was to be the first home console to be online out of the box, a distinction which Sega hoped would have punters flooding forth with a much-needed cash injection into the company's coffers. Online gameplay was a central pillar of the Dreamcast brand, featuring front and centre in the console's marketing campaigns. In the States, Sega called on nu-metal titan Fred Durst to push SegaNet. Here in Europe, a range of tongue-in-cheek adverts were published that played to nationalistic jockeying (think harmless English-French banter, rather than the disintegration of Yugoslavia). Japan didn't miss the memo either, although a big chunk of their marketing eschewed the macho competitive aspect in favour of pushing the Dreamcast's internet capabilities to a female demographic.
 |
| A selection of advertising materials focusing on the Dreamcast's online functionalities, from left to right: USA, France, Japan. |
Of course, during it's official lifetime, the Dreamcast never got close to fulfilling the upper limit of its "up to 6 billion players" tagline. However, Sega did erect a superb online architecture that allowed hundreds of thousands to experience online competitive and cooperative gameplay for the first time. Compared to the lifespan of the official servers of some contemporary games, many titles in the Dreamcast's online library had a damn good innings too. The official PAL and Japanese servers for the OG grandaddy of online RPGs, Phantasy Star Online, were maintained well into 2007, with hundreds of players logging on to say emotional goodbyes in the final couple of days (I'm not crying, you're crying). Others lasted even longer. The official servers for Starlancer, hosted by GameSpy, held on all the way to 2014, although we cannot be sure whether that was a deliberate stay of execution or some admins simply forgetting that the things still existed.
 |
| Source for dates: Online Consoles (dreamcast.onlineconsoles.com); DreamCast Online Gaming (dcog.netfirms.com, available via Wayback Machine); dreamcastlive.net; Sega press releases; sleuthing around old forums; and a smidge of informed guesswork. |
However, regardless of the staying power of some, eventually every single online Dreamcast game had its official servers switched off. Luckily for us though, the scene has persistently had a cohort of skilled and generous technicians working in the shadows to revive these online functions through unofficial measures (shout out to the likes of bluecrab, Flyinghead, ioncannon, petter3k, and Shuouma). More recently, they have even been bolstered by developers bringing brand new titles online, such as the indie smash-hit Driving Strikers, or freely distributed homebrew projects like ClassiCube, NuQuake and even Counter Strike.
 |
| 'There's an interesting story behind this Dreamcast game. In 1999 I remember it was. I got up in the morning and made myself a piece of toast. I set the toaster to three - medium brown...' |