The World's SMALLEST Dreamcast Games!

The Dreamcast's GD-ROM format was a strange beast, being ever so slightly bigger than a CD-ROM but nowhere close to the capacity of the impending, mighty DVD-ROM. Packing in 1GB per disc, a majority of the Dreamcast's retail game library barely even tapped into this extra available space. As we will explore here, storage space isn't everything though: you can squeeze some pretty darn good games into not even a tenth of a GD-ROM's space!

In this day and age of being able to store Dreamcast games on many different kinds of hardware, like SD cards or hard drives, it is possible to strip these games of any blank data that is used to fill up the rest of a GD, leaving just the necessary files to save space. This can be a risky move, as doing so can break games if they're not optimized correctly, but there are "means" to find games that have already been shrunk down to be used on a optical drive emulator such as GDEMU or MODE.

My entire shelf of Dreamcast games and more fit on this! What a time we live in!

It's via this technique that I have been able to put together this list of games that are all less than 100MB! Take note, I am not including indie releases, prototypes, unreleased games, Atomiswave ports or software like web browsers and Fish Life. Also I haven't downloaded every game ever released so there are probably some visual novels out there that are tiny in size for all I know.

15. Silent Scope - 96.91MB

Konami's Dreamcast output was kind of disappointing. When they weren't busy cancelling Castlevania games for the system, they did throw out the odd bone with some arcade ports such as this here sniping-romp. It's a real shame the Dreamcast wasn't blessed with a sniper light gun like the Xbox, as the game played with a standard controller feels like it's missing something. Much like Samba De Amigo, though, it is playable enough this way but you can't help feeling like it's a lesser experience. Oh well.

14. Ooga Booga - 91.49MB

This very unique collection of mini-games, with an emphasis on online multiplayer, released exclusively in North America and was touted as one of the big hitters during the push to sell people on SegaNet. Luckily, this is one of those games where online play has been revived, though even if that wasn't the case, this would still be worth checking out as there is nothing else quite like it on the Dreamcast.

13. Evangelion Typing Project E - 71.59MB

I won't go into too much detail about this one as it has been discussed here at length in the past after Derek Pascarella treated us all to an English translation! Evangelion Typing Project E gives us another game to practice our touch-typing skills on, but instead of gunning down zombies with words you er...do Evangelion stuff! Like the anime! I dunno, I haven't really had a chance to play much of it yet, but definitely give it a shot if you're a fan of the show! There are in fact two translated Evangelion typing games, but I couldn't properly shrink the other one without it breaking, so I assume if optimized well it'd probably be a similar size to this one.

12. SEGA Tetris - 62.56MB

This was the first Japanese import Dreamcast game I ever purchased from eBay, if I recall correctly! Why this one stayed in Japan is beyond me, but the console rights for Tetris have always been a bit of a confusing ride as Sega themselves found out when their Mega Drive/Genesis release had to be recalled... But this is Sega Tetris, not to be confused with Tetris...by Sega. Got it?

I really dig the presentation in this game. It's also kind of notable for being one of the last arcade Tetris games before the new rules came into play like swapping, hard drops and now legendary T-spins. The gameplay of this one gets ridiculously fast-paced, making it one of the harder Tetris games out there, though there are plenty of modes to mess around in, including a UFO catcher claw game with cute Sonic 1 remixes!

This is another one on the "someone get it translated and back online if at all possible" wish list!

11. Plus Plumb - 62.53MB

No, I wasn't going to pop down the shops just to buy a plum to photo this with. That'd be silly.

Only 3kB less than Sega Tetris, we have another Japan-only puzzle game! Plus Plumb is a pretty obscure one as far as I know. I discovered it back in around 2000 when a car boot sale I went to every week had a store of bootleg games (oh no! ☠️). These bootlegs were incredibly low effort, literally just plain CD-Rs with the game's titles penned on them, most of which were random Japanese games I'd never heard of until I took them home and fed them to the rotating Utopia reindeer.

Plus Plumb is a pretty standard match 3 versus game with some Pokémon-looking mofos chatting in between stages (with full voice acting!). I played quite a bit of this back in the day (did eventually buy a legit copy, don't worry) so the music from this is one of those earworms that has stuck with me for 20+ years!

10. Planet Ring - 62.44MB

Also within the 63MB range is this PAL exclusive, online-only mini-game collection that was given away on the front of magazines and the like. I never got around to trying this one out when the original servers were up, but luckily it's one of those games that is back online today! It even has voice chat so you can talk to someone other than your mutant human-faced fish for a change!

There's gold in them there Dreamcasts (apparently)!

Did you know that every Dreamcast's CPU contains about 50 milligrams of gold? I didn't, but apparently that's true...not that I can find a source to back it up. Turns out there is also a community of people in this big old world who extract gold from CPUs for the purpose of making money. Although, according to this website: "there is very little profit from extracting the gold content found in most computer chips and electronic components yourself unless you have significant quantities of recyclable material to be processed." So fret not my fellow Dreamcast fans, if you are lucky enough to own multiple Dreamcasts, you could extract enough gold from them to afford some fries at McDonalds or something.

If you fancy some of that Dreamcast gold goodness for yourself, and can't be bothered retrieving it from your own console, 'Retroldtech' has just the product for you: an engraved gold bar of Dreamcast gold - or a 'lingot' - as it is listed, for the bargain price of €75.00 (£65.68/$77.19)! It is apparently the "finest gold on earth," has a purity of "9.9.99" and comes in at a mighty 128 karats.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this product is completely in jest. If you take a quick glance at the product's page, you will soon realise this is not actual gold, and is merely a joke/novelty product.

In recent years, there has been a surge of independently-crafted joke toys. Most likely inspired by parody artists such as Obvious Plant, creators across the internet have took to making and selling their own ironic homemade toys, all presented rather smartly with cardboard backings, just how the old Star Wars 3.75 inch figures were presented. 

Probably the best way to demonstrate the lengths of absurdity this trend has reached to, check out Ben Gore's 'Saturn's Son' figure. Inspired by  Francis Goya's infamous painting of Saturn Devouring His Son, you receive his son, devoured, presented as if you could've walked into Toys 'R' Us back in the day and found it amongst the action figures. Products like this aren't really meant to be taken out of their packaging and are intended as a novelty, the kind of thing you'd display in your house to make your friends chuckle when they visit, provided they have a very specific sense of humour.

Retroldtech has some intriguing products on their website, including cool miniature replicas of Sega consoles and some awesome (but very pricey) Nintendo 64 fairy lights. It appears they have now moved into gag/novelty gifts with their recent Dreamcast 'gold lingot,' and it appears there potentially may be more to come, as the product is marked as '#001' of 'RetroLOLTech'.

Now you know this isn't real gold, perhaps the price seems a bit on the steep side, but I guess you just have to remember that this won't be a mass produced product, and is most likely made in someone's home just for the fun of it. Still, 75 euros though…

Will you be purchasing a novelty Dreamcast lingot? Let us know in the comments below!