Launching the Dreamcast on 9/9/99 - An Interview with Electronics Boutique's Alexander Danielian

Dreamcast launch night on 9/9/99 at Electronics Boutique, Las Vegas.
(Image credit: Next Gen Magazine, November 1999)

Serendipity is a thoroughly wondrous phenomenon. I'm happy and confident to make this statement, as the parameters which lead to the following could quite easily be laid firmly at the door of said concept. See, a couple of weeks ago, I happened upon a fabulous interview conducted by The Retro Hour with one Alexander Danielian. Alexander was the store manager of the Electronics Boutique store at Sunset Galleria, Henderson, Las Vegas - the store which was selected by Sega of America as the flagship location for the launch of the Dreamcast on 9/9/99.

In that interview, Alexander explained how he was a pivotal cog in the Sega machine unleashing the Dreamcast on the expectant American public, and it was a truly fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. A few days after hearing the episode, a mutual friend, Jordan Freeman of Zoom Platform fame, reached out to me and asked if we here at the Junkyard would also like to speak to Alexander...and naturally I enthusiastically accepted.

Who even are you if you don't listen to The Retro Hour?

I want to make it clear that you should absolutley also listen to or watch The Retro Hour's fantastic interview with Alexander (think of this interview as a supplementary piece), but I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to really drill down into some specific Dreamcast-related insider info on that hallowed launch night, and pick Alexander's brain about some of the more esoteric aspects of the Dreamcast's brief tenure as the hottest new games console around.

Alexander was featured in Business Week for his outstanding Dreamcast sales performance.

The following interview is pretty in-depth and therefore quite lengthy, but naturally all of it is exquistely interesting, so I encourage you to read every word. You might even learn something about one of the enduring urban legends about special edition Dreamcast consoles and Electronics Boutique...

DCJY: Hi Alexander. It’s a pleasure to be able to speak with you. Could you give a brief introduction as to who you are and how you are linked to the story of the Dreamcast?

Alexander Danielian: Sure, it’s great to speak to you Tom. My name is Alexander Danielian, and I was the district trainer and store manager at Electronics Boutique at Sunset Galleria, Henderson, a suburb of Las Levas, Nevada - which was the flagship location for the official North American launch of Sega's Dreamcast console, back on 9/9/99.

Trading in Dozens of Dreamcast VMUs at GameStop

The wind howled through the crack in the window pane, and a crackle of lightning illuminated the room as a cat hissed and fled from the encroaching storm. There was spilled Diet Dr. Pepper on the large cardboard box filled with retro video games, temporarily framed by the flash from the approaching storm. Actually, none of that happened. I just wanted to begin this tale with an over dramatic intro. Everything else here is factual, though.

I was filled with self disgust as I feverishly cleaned up the very small spill which I was sure would get me labelled as "that guy" by the employee who would have to go through the box later on and tell me what pittance they would bring for trade in. We all know who "that guy" is, the disgusting loser who at the age of 35 is trading in over a decade's worth of gaming detritus so he could justify getting a new console that was clearly manufactured with a younger, more attractive audience in mind. Of course I thought I was that guy, but I didn't want anyone else to recognize that fact. So I checked every single game to make sure there was no telltale brown dot of diet soda that would out me as a loser. That was my mindset as I left my condo.

Earlier I was digging through other cardboard boxes and comparing VMUs to each other. I didn't want to be a dipshit and try to sell broken stuff to GameStop but at the same time I couldn't bear to part with immaculate Visual Memory Units with their caps firmly in place that had probably never been used. The irony of course was that the bulk of the VMUs had been purchased from a GameStop for 50 cents each when they were clearanced out. My local store in Watertown, NY had told me that they had no Dreamcast items left. A month later I was in Syracuse, NY and they had a huge double rack of Dreamcast items on deep clearance. When I had asked where they all came from they told me that had been sent from the Watertown store. Now they would be sold back to GameStop for $2.25 each. A true example of the gaming circle of life. As a VMU hoarder, the volatile video game market had finally swung into my favor...

Guest Article: Expanding The Dreamcast Collection Part 1 - The Naomi Connection

Ross O'Reilly is no stranger to the world of NTSC-J Dreamcast collecting or arcade gaming. Not least because he lives in Japan and his apartment is stuffed full of arcade machines and Dreamcasts. Here in this first of a series of guest articles at The Dreamcast Junkyard, Ross explains why the Dreamcast collection you have may seem complete, but is in actual fact far from it. The Dreamcast's history is intertwined with that of the Naomi arcade machine, and here Ross explains how you can expand your library of Dreamcast-style games by getting involved in the Naomi scene. At this point, I'd also like to point out that all of the quality artwork is the work of the author. Cough.

Ross, over to you...

I’d assume that many of you reading this already own a substantial Dreamcast collection or have at least played a wide variety of games on the system. It’s been almost 18 years since the console was first launched in its home territory of Japan, and while it’s still getting support (unofficial at least) to this day, the number of new titles has of course dwindled since its heyday.

Most gamers, even fans of the Dreamcast, moved onto greener pastures long ago. But what’s the hardcore Dreamcast fan to do?

Support the indie scene: A worthy cause no doubt, but let’s be honest, the quality of these titles are rarely anything special and never up to the standard of the Dreamcast’s best Sega developed games.

Import: Finding games that were unreleased in your home territory can be great fun. Whichever region you’re from, I can guarantee that there are a tonne of great games that never came to your shores. Many of us have already done this for years though; the list of import games we’ve yet to play is diminishing fast. What next?

Complete sets: The hardest of hardcore collectors can go for a complete set, but if we’re honest, the Dreamcast wasn’t that good; there were still a tonne of crappy games that came out for it. Do you really want a shelf half full of absolute rubbish you’ll probably never play and certainly not enjoy? Oh, you do? Well, even if that’s the case, I presume you wouldn’t turn down the chance to find some new 'good' games to play.

But don’t worry, there is still hope! In this series of articles, I’ll detail how you can expand your collection and find more than enough fresh content to keep you happy and out of the whisky bottle for at least another year or so. All you have to do is ever so slightly redefine the meaning of 'Dreamcast game.'

An Interview with Kenji Tosaki: How the Sega Dreamcast and its Beloved Peripherals Came to Be

One day we realised that The Dreamcast Junkyard account on Twitter (or X, as it is now known...) was followed by none other than Kenji Tosaki, the peripheral development manager at Sega of Japan from the 1990s until 2001, when he retired. He led the design process for classic Sega Saturn peripherals like the 3D Control Pad and the Virtua Gun, but perhaps most importantly to us here at the Junkyard, he was heavily involved with the design of the Dreamcast console hardware, its controller, the Visual Memory Unit (VMU), and even the Samba de Amigo Maracas Controller, to name a few. To have such an important figure from Sega's heyday follow us—of all people—was truly an honour. We knew we had to reach out and try and arrange some sort of opportunity to speak with him.

What followed was a whole lot of machine-translated correspondence, and we must thank Tosaki-san for answering all our questions, as well as his time and patience throughout this process. Another thank you also goes out to Brian Vines and Laurence Goodchild for assisting me with the decision on which questions to ask, as well as Derek Pascarella for some technical explanations.

Of course, we couldn't just let the resulting interview you see below remain machine-translated, so this is where I must extend a huge thanks to translation extraordinaire (and my former Nakoruru fan translation comrade-in-arms) Duralumin, who graciously translated Tosaki-san's original Japanese answers into English.

What was revealed from our conversation with Tosaki-san is a whole lot of great insight into how the Dreamcast hardware and many beloved peripherals came to be. We also thought it was important to use this opportunity to try and dig deeper into some of the more esoteric Dreamcast-related lore, to try and get some light shone on topics that have fuelled debates within Sega fan communities for decades. Why was a second analog stick a no show on the Dreamcast controller? What was Sega's view on adopting the almighty DVD format that would've supposedly helped the Dreamcast go toe-to-toe with Sony's PlayStation 2? We also made sure to pick Tosaki-san's brain about some cancelled Dreamcast peripherals, such as the VMU MP3 player, with the hopes of unearthing new information about them.

While our interview does touch on the Sega Saturn somewhat, it is mainly referenced to assist the explanation of points relating to the Dreamcast's own design. If you'd like to hear Tosaki-san get more in-depth about the Saturn, I highly recommend you go check out his interview with our friends over at SEGA SATURN, SHIRO!

Credit: Sega Retro

DCJY: Thank you for agreeing to talk with us about your career at Sega, Tosaki-san. We have read that you were involved with the design of the Dreamcast console. The design was definitely more compact than its predecessor, the Saturn, and very futuristic-looking for the time. When you and your team set out to design the console, what inspired the design?

Kenji Tosaki: The lead director and producer on the design of the Dreamcast was actually Mr. Oikawa [Akitoshi Oikawa], who also handled the design of the Sega Saturn. For the Dreamcast, the design of the console itself was contracted out, but Mr. Oikawa personally handled the controllers and other peripherals.

Now, when the Saturn was still in development, we ended up drawing up the design ahead of finalizing how much space all the internals would need. Stuff like the main board, the CD drive, power supply unit, all of that. The original design was quite a bit smaller than what the Saturn finally became. As development progressed, we added more components, and the footprint grew larger.

The preliminary designs for the console couldn't accommodate all the changes, so we had to go back to the drawing board, and it ended up quite a bit different from what we had originally envisioned. It had to be made larger, so we also had to redesign some of the finer details of its appearance to match.

With the Saturn, the technical development —the main board, the drive unit, etc.— and the product design had been sort of progressing on different fronts, and that disconnect caused us a lot of issues. Plus, the technical design turned out to be more complex than expected, so the production and assembly was more complicated. We learned from all of that when we were working on the Dreamcast. 

Our top priorities in designing the Dreamcast were to optimize the internal layout and heat dissipation. I think the internal design turned out really nice and clean. Of course, keeping it simple also helped with assembly. We also waited to plan out the console design until the technical design had been locked in to a certain extent, so we didn’t have to go back and rework a lot of things.

Regarding the design itself, we shopped the job around to a wide variety of outside agencies for proposals;  not just Japanese companies, but even American design houses. Mr. Oikawa reviewed a ton of ideas. 

Ultimately, Mr. Oikawa went with a relatively minor Japanese company’s proposal. They did a very good job of taking Mr. Oikawa’s asks into account when building their approach.

On the conceptual approach, I’ll quote Mr. Oikawa himself:

"The Dreamcast design is made up of simple shapes; squares, triangles, and circles. The point of the triangle points toward the player, representing how the games and online content were to be player-focused. From the console, straight to the player. But then the start button on the controller points towards the Dreamcast. That represents how, in response, the players reach out and connect with the console."

Credit: Sega Retro

When you and your team were designing the Dreamcast's controller, what were the most important features or aspects that you knew it had to include? It is well known that the Dreamcast controller shares some design similarities to the Saturn's 3D Control Pad, which you also worked on. How much did that controller inspire the Dreamcast's controller?

When we were developing the Saturn 3D Controller, that was the first time we had ever tried to design an analog-input controller. We looked at how we could best make an analog controller, and spent a lot of time working on the basic design, control methods, layouts, and all the associated design questions.

We also looked into all kinds of additional features; stuff like integrated displays, paddle wheel controls, mouse input, motion sensing, infrared, rumble, haptics, voice recognition... many different things. Most of these features proved too costly to have natively on the Saturn 3D pad, but we made sure to design the controller to include an expansion port so those features could be added later.

We had actually planned out a motion sensor and vibration pack, and even made a prototype. We made sure that the controller's cord ran out of the back, since anything to do with motion sensors that you would have to tilt or shake around would be harder to use with the cord coming out of the front of the controller. 

For the analog inputs, we felt it was essential to use a sensor that wouldn't experience any change in the analog signal from drift or wear. To accomplish that, we used "Hall" elements. We knew we definitely didn’t want resistive sensors. We didn’t add them for the sake of having a selling point, we just saw it as the obvious choice. It wasn’t until 2020 that we saw other companies start making controllers with those same Hall elements. I guess the market finally caught up to the Sega 3D Control Pad, and it only took 25 years.

When it came to the Dreamcast controller, we applied a lot of what we had learned from the Saturn 3D pad.

As I mentioned, the idea behind the Dreamcast ecosystem was “play and communication.” The console could go online, but the concept extended beyond just that. There were also four controller ports, so you could have four people at once all playing together. Then, we decided we would try putting an individual display on each controller. We had originally conceived it as something like a personal monitor for each player for sports games, with individual displays. The VMU was our solution.

Connecting the VMUs directly to the console would have meant we would have to add four pretty big ports for four players’ VMUs, which wasn’t a great solution from either a cost or design standpoint. So, we decided to explore plugging the VMUs into the controllers instead. Every VMU would be like a memory pack, but with an LCD screen and control buttons; it could have its own independent apps, and when it was plugged into the controller, the screen would serve as an additional display.

Away from the controller, you could connect VMUs together to swap data with your friends, or play games against each other. That was another facet of the “communication” concept. For us on the peripherals team, we figured it wasn’t likely that every kid would have an internet connection they could use to play online, so we focused on ways we could build “play and communication” through controllers and accessories.

We also planned out a built-in gyro sensor, so you could control games by moving the controller, as well as built-in vibration, and a built-in light gun pointing device. It turned out to be too expensive to implement those features natively, so we decided to build two expansion slots into the controller. That would leave room for us to release expansion units after the fact. We expected one slot would usually be occupied by the VMU, so we needed to have one more for other expansions.

The most important decision made regarding the controller was to have memory units connect to it instead of the console. We designed the VMUs for that purpose.

The controllers themselves were developed to work with an interface device [MapleBus] that could also support VMUs and any expansion packs. MapleBus proved essential, as it had the kind of scalability we needed.

For the expansion slots, we had to think about what sort of functionality we would need in the future. For instance, if we put out a rumble pack, the vibrations from that accessory would travel down to the slot and the connector. That’s not necessarily healthy for the components, and we expected these to be used long-term. So, we had to come up with a design for the connectors that would be durable and reliable.

The analog input was also much more advanced than the 3D Control Pad. We improved the precision, and allowed wider strokes. At the same time, the units could be made smaller, and needed less space to install internally.

I really would have liked to have seen the gyros, vibration, and wireless pointing built-in on the controller, but it just would’ve been too expensive.

The original US patent for the VMU. Credit: Sega Retro

Interview: Out of Print Archive

Many gamers of a certain age will no doubt recall those halcyon days when the only way to really get your fix of gaming news, was to await the monthly publication of your favourite magazine. The internet of the early '90s was far removed from the internet of present year, and as such watching video of new releases or flipping through hi-resolution images direct from developer on social media wasn't something you could do. Indeed, most of my early memories of using the internet to find out about new game releases involve sneaking into the school IT suite at lunchtimes to employ Alta Vista in my insatiable quest for knowledge. Oh, and using Game Sages to get cheats. Does anyone else remember Game Sages or am I just making that website up?

Kids these days will never know the anticipation of that illuminated N *shakes fist at cloud*

Yes, back in the day, the magazine was king and it was through reading those printed materials that I took an interest in pursuing games journalism as a profession. Nowadays, I'm actually quite glad that I am not a professional games journalist, such is the the way online discourse has morphed, but for a period back in the late '90s and early 2000s it was all I wanted to do with my life. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that ambition either. 

Magazines of that period, and more to the point - the people who created them, were our heroes. They were the influencers of their day. Gus Swan, Marcus Hawkins, Caspar Field, Les Ellis, Jaz Rignall, Radion Automatic, Zy Nicholson, Wil Overton, Paul Davies, Keith Stuart, Simon Phillips, Ed Lomas, Tim Weaver, Mean Yob...just a few of the names I can instantly rattle off as an avid reader of a plethora of UK magazines from the 90s and 2000s. And I'm sure those in other parts of the world, and of a certain age can name the authors of their favourite magazines too.

The point I'm trying to make is that magazines were a huge part of many gamers' formative years, and the popularity of podcast Maximum Power Up's superb series of interviews with journos of yesteryear proves this. Furthermore, one website which encapsulates the magic of print media and preserving those memories is the excellent Out of Print Archive. A repository for digitised copies of print magazines of a bygone era, the Out of Print Archive has cemented itself as one of the premier online destinations for anyone who is looking to re-read those magical tomes of their childhood and take a walk down memory lane.

For this reason, we thought it would be pretty cool to speak to the people behind Out of Print Archive, ask them where the inspiration for the site came from, their digitisation process for various Dreamcast-related (and other format) magazines, and to find out what makes them - and the Archive itself - tick. Enjoy...

DCJY: Thanks so much for agreeing to speak to us about all things magazines! Could you tell us a bit about who you are, and what your roles are at Out of Print Archive?

Andy: Hello, my name is Andy (meppi64), I’m from Belgium and I’m working my way through scanning all my UK magazines, editing and restoring them. I also do all the coding and design work on the website itself and I run the Twitter account.

Neil: Hi, I'm Neil, I'm from the United Kingdom (Scotland) and I am one of the admins at Out of Print Archive. One of my initial roles when starting the project was to reach out to the UK publishers in an effort to obtain permission (officially and unofficially) to archive their back catalogue of gaming magazines. 

This allowed us to archive classic video gaming magazines without the nagging feeling that a publisher might come along with a cease and desist order. I have also written the odd article on classic magazines and have caught up with a few important people from the magazines in questions for an interview or input for a feature.

What’s the origin story of the Out of Print Archive? When and why did you decide to set up the site?

Neil: I have always been a fan of classic gaming magazines which lead me to create my own digital retro gaming magazine called Retroaction in 2008. After the release of the first issue, Carl, a fellow retro gaming magazine fan commented on how the ‘zine reminded him of the classic magazine GameFan, particularly its design and layout. 

He asked if he could post the news of the release with a small write up on the retro gaming forums where he was one of the admins along with Andy. This in turn introduced me to the world of magazine archiving and to Andy and his fantastic method of archiving Official Sega Saturn Magazine. I knew then that I wanted my own magazines to be archived in a similar way.

By 2009, we felt we needed to start our own archiving project. One that was totally transparent: free from ads, donations, or any other hindrance. Our main reason for this was to follow on from one of our main goals, in that to reach out to the publishers from yesteryear and get their permission to archive their back catalogue of magazines.

Andy: Originally I came across just 3 digital scans of the Official Sega Saturn magazine online, this must have been somewhere around 2004-2005. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any more. Reading through these made me remember just how incredible this magazine was and how it was seemingly lost to time, hardly 6 years after the final issue was released.


So this set things in motion for me. I started the hunt down a complete set, with the goal to scan them (in a rather poor fashion at that time) and looking for various ways to get them into peoples hands again. From here, it snowballed into collecting a lot more magazines.


I met Neil as well as Carl, who has since moved on to other projects, on a message board and after a lot of trial and error, as well as seeing how several scanning projects handled things in ways we didn’t agree with, we decided to set up our own site. Focussing on putting quality above everything else, but also doing things with respect towards not just the publishers, but also the editors, writers, designers, etc.

Basically all the people who originally created these magazines we all fell in love with at one point of our lives.


Wow, so we effectively owe the creation of the Out of Print Archive in some way to the Official Sega Saturn Magazine. Not what I was expecting! You clearly have a love of print media - what are your earliest memories of print magazines?

Andy: My earliest memories of a print magazine has to be Club Nintendo. Not quite sure how I found out about it, but I believe there was some kind of postcard included with certain NES games, which you could send in to Nintendo to request a subscription. Once you were signed up, every 2 months you would receive a free copy of Club Nintendo magazine, which lasted from 1989 to 1993.

Neil: My earliest memory of print magazine is picking up C+VG in 1988. I was fairly late to notice magazines, considering I had been playing games for at least three years up until that point, but C+VG opened my eyes to the wonders that were out there. I eventually reserved a copy of C+VG and continued to receive a copy of it until the early 2000s. My other earliest memory is of grabbing a copy of Amstrad Action in 1989. It was an anniversary issue where they gave away a cover-mounted cassette tape with demos and freeware stuff. This issue also reviewed one of my favourite computer games of all time, Laser Squad.

Title Defense: The True Story of Why it Never Came to Dreamcast

Some time after the publication of our article on the lost boxing sim "Title Defense" last year, I was contacted by friend of the Junkyard and all-round Dreamcast super-sleuth PC Wizard. Intrigued by the promise of Title Defense after reading that very article, PC Wizard tracked down a member of the development team (who shall remain anonymous, as we weren't totally sure if any of this was still under some arcane NDA) and made them talk. No doubt with a lamp in their face, CIA style. That’s how I like to imagine how things went down, anyway. 

In reality, PC Wizard sent a polite email asking what our source remembered about Title Defense, and to our pleasant surprise, they actually replied and explained to us what the deal was with that particular pugilism sim, Climax Studios, some of the other canned Dreamcast projects, and why we never saw Title Defense on our Dreamcasts - or any other contemporary platform, for that matter. With all that out of the way, over to our informant...

How mysterious...

"OK, so the first thing to do is to frame this appropriately. At the time, Climax was a work-for-hire developer, which meant most of our work was either porting (often PC to console conversions such as Warcraft II, Diablo, Populous: The Beginning, Sim Theme Park/Theme Park World, etc.) or pitching for projects that publishers were looking for developers to do on their behalf. In addition to this we had our own original concepts that we would pitch to publishers and see if they were prepared to fund. 

So, on to Title Defense. I think the tl;dr on this - and which will probably be most disappointing to know - is that Title Defense as an actual game never really existed. From memory it was a fairly non-interactive PC tech demo to show physics-based dynamic mesh deformation - in this case the changing muscle shape of the boxers as they threw and received punches. 

Once we saw it internally, we decided that it could be the basis of a boxing game and came up with a high-concept design document. We then put out a press release to say that we had started development, naming every high-end system we could think of (including Dreamcast, naturally), as a way of gauging publisher interest and hoping to encourage a few of them to come to talk to us about the game and hopefully sign it. 

We’d just signed a PR agency to represent us to the press so a lot of it was their work, and to be fair to them, they did get us a lot of press! Also, given the interest in Dreamcast at the time, anything that mentioned it as a potential platform was guaranteed to generate hype.

I didn’t have much to do with the concept design of Title Defense as I had doubts about the viability of the project. At the time sports games really needed official licenses to work and Electronic Arts had all of the boxing licenses sewn up with their Knockout Kings series; a lot of the work was done by our Development Director - it really became his 'baby' from an internal championing point of view. 

I think I just gave some feedback, edited and generally knocked it into shape so we could give it to interested publishers. Beyond that we pushed the project to the press and potential publishing partners and the larger management team put detailed business proposals together. 

We did have some discussions with a few publishers and some of them came to see the demo, but in the end none of the discussions got very far. As I suspected, a game like Title Defense really did need official licenses to make much sense. We sent a few proposals out to Acclaim and possibly a few others, but certainly conversations never really advanced beyond that, so eventually the project was shelved as we moved on to other things. So yeah, not much of a story from a Dreamcast point of view but at least now you know why it never saw the light of day!

If memory serves, pretty much all of the titles in the DC-UK feature you showed existed in some form or another, either as paper design docs or demos, or were actual in-development titles on other platforms that either publishers requested or that we were trying to convince them to make. Stunt Driver was a playable PC demo that we pitched as a Dreamcast (plus other ‘next-gen’ platforms) title that came to be responsible for the formation of Climax Brighton, which was then sold to Disney and turned into Black Rock Studios - home of Split/Second.

Of the other titles in that article, Austin Powers Mojo Rally was a project we'd been asked to pitch to Rockstar who had the Austin Powers license at the time - I kid you not! Roswell Conspiracies was an in-development title on the Nintendo 64 for Red Storm based on an animation series, and I think Red Lemon Studios (who were involved in the cancelled Dreamcast shooter Take the Bullet) were doing a game for the Sony PlayStation that may have seen the light of day. Anyway, they asked us to pitch an enhanced Dreamcast port and shortly after cancelled the N64 game. As I recall through the mists of time, there were quite a few Dreamcast titles that we were asked to pitch for - we had very early access to Dreamcast dev-kits that nothing really happened on, mainly as the Dreamcast failed to take off in the way that everyone hoped - oh, what might have been!

I heard much later through the grapevine that was because someone at SEGA Europe thought we were related to the Japanese company Climax Entertainment (known for LandStalker, Time Stalkers and some of the Shining games), and so we were delivered kits in the first wave by mistake!"

***

 

So there we are - straight from the horse’s mouth (well... keyboard)! Title Defense was never really anything more than a glorified tech demo. And it's somehow linked to Rockstar so maybe also Grand Theft Auto. Yeah, I'm really reaching here. Anyway...mystery solved!

Huge thanks to both PC Wizard and our source for helping us shine a light on some of these forgotten Climax Studios games that never were. Maybe somewhere out there in the wilderness, playable builds of Austin Powers Mojo Rally and Roswell Conspiracies are waiting to be unearthed like priceless relics from some forgotten era. The truth, as they say, is out there. Cue X-Files music...

An Interview With Bernie Stolar

There are few people who are more intrinsically linked with the history of the Dreamcast than Bernie Stolar. Along with personalities such as Peter Moore and Hidekazu 'Mr Dreamcast' Yukawa, Bernie Stolar is extremely well known and was the man who kicked the whole party off. Here, in this candid interview we welcome Bernie to the Junkyard and pick his brains on the history of our favourite console and the current trends in the Dreamcast community.

DCJY: Hi Bernie, firstly let me just say how much of an honour it is to have you grace our site with your virtual presence! As huge fans of the Dreamcast, it’s quite awesome to have the opportunity to speak with you first hand. Never did I think way back in late 1999 when I picked up my first Dreamcast, that in 20 years' time I'd be conversing with the man who helped create the console!

Bernie Stolar: No problem, thanks for asking me. I consider it an honour that a product I helped create still has a loyal fanbase to this day. Thank you for keeping the 'Dream' alive.

Bernie delivering the Dreamcast keynote at GDC 1999

To kick things off, I wondered if you could enlighten those readers who may not be familiar with who you are and what your role was with the Dreamcast?

I was President and Chief Operating Officer at SEGA of America from July 1996 to August 1999. I was hired by SEGA of Japan CEO, Hayao Nakayama. I conceived the idea of Dreamcast and hired Peter Moore, Chris Gilbert, and the entire product development team.

You were at Sega of America from 1996 to 1999, all the way through the Dreamcast’s most important and formative years - can you recall the very first time you heard the name ‘Dreamcast’?

I believe it was called 'Dural' and later 'Katana' at one point. I want to say May of 1998 was when I first heard the term 'Dreamcast.'

On the topic of the early days of Dreamcast, can you recall which came first - Dreamcast or NAOMI? Or were they developed in tandem?

I believe NAOMI was released first. If I remember correctly, Dreamcast came about at a time when we were switching from Model 3 arcade hardware to NAOMI. I remember this because, I was disappointed with the fact that the Dreamcast would not really be able to support ports from both arcade units. I had wanted ports of several licensed units, including Star Wars Trilogy and The Lost World: Jurassic Park series. I felt these would be very popular, especially in the American market. To answer your question though, yes they were developed in tandem, definitely with the thought in mind that many of the games such as Crazy Taxi and House of the Dead 2 would be ported to Dreamcast. As a side note, I believe we also licensed the NAOMI architecture to Capcom, Namco, and Taito.

Early Dreamcast concept designs

Just sticking with the origins of the Dreamcast, were there really two different concepts for the Dreamcast in development? There are plenty of forum posts and articles online that state that there were competing projects - one from SEGA of America called Black Belt which was 3Dfx based, and another from SEGA of Japan called Dural which was NEC PowerVR based. Can you comment on these projects and how it was decided that the Dural concept was the one that won? If so, how different do you think the 3Dfx system would have been?

I believe SEGA of America wanted the 3Dfx version and SEGA of Japan wanted the NEC PowerVR. Both made sense for different reasons. With 3Dfx, there were more resources and documentation available for development in the US and Europe. That and it was understood that development would be easier, especially for PC ports. The NEC PowerVR made NAOMI ports simple and was easy to program, however, it was not as well supported (yet) in the US. I doubt Model 3 games would have worked too well on either. Although there was a PowerVR chip shortage when the Dreamcast launched in Japan, both chips had their pluses and minuses. In the end, I'm not sure it would have made too much of a difference.

Famously, you moved from Sony’s PlayStation division to work with SEGA of America in 1996. You're quoted in a VentureBeat interview as stating that the Saturn needed to be killed off as soon as you arrived. What were your initial thoughts on the fledgling successor to the Saturn? Did you envisage that the Dreamcast would become a huge success based on the hardware specs?

When I went to SEGA, they needed a new hardware system because the systems that they had were not selling – all eight of them. Saturn was not being supported by SEGA the way it should have been. When I showed up, it was my idea to develop a new hardware system that had the ability to play online. Before signing with SEGA, I racked my brain on a way to salvage Saturn, but it was just too far gone and too expensive and difficult to develop for. SEGA was nearly bankrupt, they needed a new console and they needed it quick. The only options were to go big or go home.

The Final Days of Official Dreamcast Magazine (UK) and What Happened to Issue 22

As I bid 2025 farewell to the tune of the traditional New Year's Eve song Auld Lang Syne, I contemplated the lyrics and their theme about leaving things in the past. I promptly disregarded that message and continued to write for a blog about a console that was discontinued 24 years ago. 

But that idea of "farewells" sparked an idea — one that taps into a new collecting obsession I fell into in 2025. You see, I developed a bit of a bug for tracking down old Dreamcast magazines, specifically ones that were published in the UK. Although I was able to frequently play the Sega Dreamcast during its commercial heyday round a friend's house, I was probably too young for the magazines of the time to cross my radar, and even if they had, I probably would've been too busy reading the Beano and Dandy to care.

Anyhow, last year I managed to pick up several bundles of assorted issues of Official Dreamcast Magazine, Dreamcast Magazine (the unofficial one), and DC-UK. I quickly noticed a common thread with these lots, however. While I did manage to acquire some earlier issues in them, the majority consisted of each magazine's final entries. It seemed that the sellers were particularly keen to offload these last issues — and upon reading them, it was easy to see why.

As the death knell rang for the Dreamcast with Sega’s announcement of its discontinuation and their intentions to develop games for rival systems, there was a clear scramble from these magazines to reassure their readers that the console still had plenty of epic games on the horizon. As the issues wore on, however, the cracks began to show. The number of games reviewed in each issue dwindled, features became steadily less inspired, and page counts shrank. In the most egregious cases, past reviews were simply reprinted in a desperate attempt to pad out pages.

Of course, this strange editorial limbo couldn't last forever, and eventually each of these magazines would come to accept that the Dreamcast’s fate was a doomed one, and sail off into the sunset — most of them rather unceremoniously. Next issues were promised, but never came. Only one publication, Paragon Publishing's unofficial Dreamcast Magazine, managed to last long enough to earn itself the privilege of a proper send-off.

In what I hope to be an ongoing series, I will be taking a look at how each of the UK's Dreamcast magazines said their farewells —or didn’t— with an additional goal of uncovering what went wrong behind the scenes for those that ended prematurely. You know we love solving a mystery here at the Junkyard.

To start off, I'll be taking a look at Dennis Publishing's officially licensed offering, Official Dreamcast Magazine. Its final issue, issue 21, was released in June 2001.

My scan!

The issue hit newsstands sporting a rather fitting PAL-blue cover featuring Sega’s iconic spiky mascot. Like the rest of the magazine, the cover is clean as hell — and perfectly timed to coincide with the mag’s review of Sonic Adventure 2. Readers would have also found Volume 22 of the Dream On demo disc adorning this issue's cover, which was responsible for its premium £4.99 price tag.

Depending on where you were in your Dreamcast journey, this demo disc may have proved to be either a blessing, or slightly disappointing. Rather than including playable previews of the latest upcoming titles, the 22nd instalment of Dream On served as a "best-of" compilation, packing in demos for nine Dreamcast bangers. These included Jet Set Radio, Metropolis Street Racer, Sonic Adventure, Virtua Tennis, Space Channel 5, Toy Commander, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, Ready 2 Rumble, and Ultimate Fighting Championship. Seeing as all nine of these games were voted into our Top 200 Dreamcast games list, with the majority of them ranking inside the top 30, it was a well-curated selection, and maybe even well timed for any new Dreamcast adopters who had picked up the console following its price drop to £99.99 earlier that year. If you were a long-time ODM reader, though, you may well have played a fair few of these titles already thanks to the magazine’s high review scores, and were perhaps instead expecting demos for the brand-new Sonic Adventure 2 or Crazy Taxi 2. If that were the case, you might have been left feeling a bit miffed.

Credit: Chromagi

The magazine's editor, Warren Chrismas, made the reasoning for this demo selection clear in his note at the front of the issue. While he began by calling out the "gloom merchants" for insisting the Dreamcast was dead and buried months before —citing the high quality of both Sonic Adventure 2 and Crazy Taxi 2 as a reason for fans of the console to remain excited— this positive tone was soon contradicted by the sobering reality of Sega's situation.

Trapped on Dreamcast: 10 exclusives that never left

In the dog days of the Dreamcast's reign, it became somewhat obvious and inevitable that Sega would take many of its most beloved franchises and port them to other systems. The pivot into becoming a major third party publisher was pretty much written in the stars, and Sega had the catalogue to pull off such a previously unthinkable task. The Sega of 2001 had a glittering array of first party gems that were screaming out to be unleashed onto the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube (and beyond), and nobody can deny that those first few years after the Dreamcast bit the dust were truly epic for Sega, as it left the hardware business and forged ahead as a major publisher.

"Sega is a company that has always dared to innovate and push this industry forward. Sega will continue to do so with its new strategy, and the result for consumers will be what you would always expect from a 'rules-breaker' like Sega - a library of pioneering, jaw-dropping content now available any way you want to play."

- Peter Moore speaking to IGN, February 2001

As well as arcade ports and first party games that were originally destined for the little white box, Sega took many of the Dreamcast's most iconic titles and either ported them to other platforms in-house, or farmed out responsibility to third parties. For the most part, this worked out pretty well for Sega and the games that made the leap often ended up having extra features imbued upon them. Sonic Adventure and its sequel, Skies of Arcadia, Ferrari F355, Crazy Taxi, Sega GT, Shenmue II, Rez, The House of the Dead, Space Channel 5...the list reads like a veritable smorgasbord of 'triple A' (Jim Sterling voice optional) experiences and franchises. Of course, this could also be said of the myriad third party releases that debuted on the Dreamcast; with esteemed titles such as Dead or Alive 2, Soul Calibur, MDK2, Headhunter and Resident Evil Code: Veronica all being ported. In the case of the latter, ported to death...which is ironic.

What I'm getting at is this - if you were a Dreamcast owner when the power cord was pulled from the console on that fateful day back in early 2001, you could quite easily have gone and bought a competing platform from any of the other major manufacturers and continued the Dreamcast party like it was 1999 (or 1998 if you were, y'know, in Japan). But what about the Dreamcast titles not only from Sega, but from third parties, that never made the leap from the sinking ship like so many digital rats? The titles that still to this day have never been ported to alternative platforms and can still only really be played on a Dreamcast, or an emulated Dreamcast, at the very least? Let's take a little look at 10 titles (in no particular order) that are effectively trapped on the Dreamcast, and never left for pastures new...

1. Seventh Cross: Evolution

We covered this little oddity a while back here at the Junkyard, so if you'd like to read a more in-depth analysis please feel free to check it out here. For brevity though, Seventh Cross is a game quite unlike anything else on the Dreamcast, in that you begin the game as a helpless organism that must adapt to survive the harsh alien landscape it is born into. 

From slopping about in a primordial pool trying not to become lunch for other lifeforms, to escaping the aquatic cradle and embracing a more land-lubber-esque (yep, just made that term up) approach to this crazy little thing called life, Seventh Cross is a truly bizarre experience. The game was localised in English but never received a PAL release, and it's not really very difficult to see why. I can't imagine many people would have been champing at the bit to give this a go during the early years of the Dreamcast's life when stuff like Pen Pen TriIcelon was vying for attention on store shelves. Um.

2. Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise from the Ashes

The Dreamcast isn't lacking when it comes to games featuring mechs head butting each other after spilling each other's pints, and Gundam Side Story is one of the better 'simulation' style offerings. Unlike the arcade brawlers like Tech Romancer, and the battle arena shenanigans of Virtual On and Frame Gride (see below), Gundam Side Story allows the player to slip inside the cockpit of a building-sized mech and take part in a first person tactical battle against enemy units on sprawling maps.

Cast your mind back to stuff like Iron Soldier on the Atari Jaguar, but add vastly superior graphics and a really quite engaging storyline and you're on the right track. While Gundam Side Story may look like a pretty basic military shooter, there's a huge amount of tactical play involved, and giving orders to your fellow mechs on the battlefield is an integral part of proceedings. Add to the mix a healthy dose of ranged combat and hand-to-hand mech fisticuffs and this is about as close to Pacific Rim as you can get on Dreamcast. Sort of.

3. Armada

Armada is a game that's quite difficult to categorise. In some ways it's an arcade shoot 'em up, in other ways it's almost an RPG, while in others it could be classed as a multiplayer couch co-op experience. Either way, it is an intriguing title that never experienced much in the way of success due to the fact that it was only released in the United States. A PAL release was scheduled and cancelled, as was the planned sequel. We have looked at Armada briefly in the past, check out our article featuring it here.

Essentially a top down space opera style adventure, in Armada you spend your time traversing the vast distances of the cosmos, plotting courses with co-ordinates and battling marauding alien fleets on the way. You can hire allies to help you fight off the alien threats you encounter throughout your journey and the game is playable by up to four people on one Dreamcast. It's almost like a couch co-op forerunner to stuff like Helldivers, where having some human comrades to assist you will make the game much more manageable (and enjoyable). It's also worth mentioning that Armada was originally conceived as an online multiplayer experience, but that option appears to have been removed during development. Still, it's an interesting and ambitious title that could have been way more popular had it been released with an online component as originally intended.

6 Dreamcast Games That Would Perfectly Suit Nintendo Switch

Earlier in 2017 we pulled off a fairly ridiculous April Fools prank that garnered far more attention than we ever intended, or expected. Remember the whole 'DreamStream' thing? It got picked up by a fair few groups on social media and it fooled more people than I'm comfortable admitting, but that's probably just down to my amazing skills of internet tomfoolery. As awesome as it would be to stream Dreamcast games onto a Switch via an internet connection, the very premise is as daft as a brush - that is, why wouldn't Sega just release the games as downloadable ports, as opposed to stream them and require the user to have a WiFi connection? Tsk!

Anyway, this got me thinking. After Damon's rather excellent recent post about Splatoon 2 being the Dreamcast game we never knew we wanted; and after recently purchasing a Switch myself, I started to think about the other jewels in the Dreamcast's library that would make great additions to the Switch's steadily growing software suite. Sega has been a strong supporter of Nintendo hardware ever since the Gamecube and there's been a big enough length of time since the Dreamcast graced us with its presence that there are bound to be millions of Switch owners who have never played many of the system's greatest titles. Surely, with the almost mythical status the Dreamcast has garnered over the past few years, it would be a license to print money for Sega to release - either as budget downloadable games; or as a 'best of' multi-pack - a selection of the finest software ever to grace the little white box of tricks?

With this in mind, here are my picks for the best first party Sega games that would fit right in on the Switch. Please bear in mind that this is just first party stuff, so unfortunately it doesn't include a Switch port of the amazing Spirit of Speed 1937 - a game that was clearly passed down from heaven by the hand of God him/herself (delete as applicable). They'd mostly have to be re-worked with an aspect ratio more in keeping with the Switch screen too, but this is all just wishful thinking in the first place so don't go all keyboard warrior on us. Anyway, here we go...

The Murky World of White Labels

While I do consider myself to be a collector of all manner of Dreamcast related tat, I’m far from what most people would consider 'hardcore.' I do not have a full complement of any region’s library for instance, and while I do have around 95% of the PAL releases in my collection, I refuse to pay over the odds for the remaining few (mainly shit) titles required to call it a 'full set.' Furthermore, many of the peripherals and consoles I own are unboxed and or in 'used' condition – I generally buy Dreamcast stuff to play with it, examine it, record its existence in an easy to digest manner and upload it here for people to enjoy…or take it to events for other people to play with/destroy and cover in hand slime.

What I'm trying (and failing) to convey is that I'm not one who only collects sealed or mint condition stuff, and I'm not overly precious about stuff being kept in a nuclear bunker where radioactive dust clouds, sunlight or curious hands cannot get to it. Nor am I one who feels he has to collect absolutely everything with a Dreamcast swirl on it...and that's the point I'm meandering toward with this wholly unnecessary, rambling introduction.

One aspect of collecting for the Dreamcast that has barely shown up on my radar until recently is the collection of white labels. I have been aware of the things for as long as I’ve been aware of the Dreamcast itself but collecting these PAL-centric preview discs has never really interested me for some reason. For those who aren’t familiar with white labels, they were special sample versions of Dreamcast games that were predominantly sent out by Sega Europe to the press for preview purposes and – as far as I'm aware – also used in Dreamcast demo pods in stores such as GAME and Electronics Boutique in the UK. As I said, I’ve never really been very interested in collecting these preview discs, but Mike Phelan included a very comprehensive list of them - complete with serial numbers - in our recently outlawed collectors guide (you can still download it for free here); and several friends randomly donated a selection white labels to me over the last few weeks.

Fragmented Almanac: Teaser Trailer and an Interview with Developer Roby Provost

Last month, the Junkyard office was abuzz with excitement when we caught wind of the news that Fragmented Almanac, a compilation of two eerie narrative-based puzzle games, was soon due to be released by fledgling indie studio ANTIRUINS on our beloved Sega Dreamcast. Alas, we don't actually have an office (yet), but the flurry of activity on our Discord and WhatsApp channels did a commendable job of emulating an exuberant water cooler experience nonetheless.

The duo of games contained within the Fragmented Almanac wrapper, The Hideout and Summoning Signals, have been in gestation for many years now, and whenever we had the opportunity to sample the work-in-development, our appetites for more only grew. At times it looked like the projects were sadly destined to join the extensive list of cancelled Dreamcast games, and so it was particularly sweet to hear that they are in fact now complete, and due for both physical and digital release in March of 2024.

Of course, after a lengthy session ogling the artsy ANTIRUINS website, I only wanted to learn more. Fortunately, lead developer Roby Provost has been kind enough to spill the beans in the following interview that covers everything from the conceptual foundations of Fragmented Almanac, down to the nuts and bolts of the game's printing and distribution. To put the cherry on top, Roby also provided us with a new teaser trailer that we are delighted to reveal for the first time here on the Junkyard.

* * *

DCJY: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us Roby. To kick things off, can you tell us what players should expect from The Hideout and Summoning Signals, the two games that are being released together as Fragmented Almanac?

Roby: They are quite unique games. They're not shmups, that's for sure! I honestly think that Fragmented Almanac might be one of the most polished indie Dreamcast releases we've seen so far. As I tried to explain on our website, it is at the intersection of video game, art and alchemy. It's a game that makes you dream, or at the very least, makes you think. We wanted to make a project that lingers in the back of your mind, trying to decode the meaning of "scroll". The whole release is designed like a puzzle: full of secrets, truths and symbols. 

This being said, they are not long games. We wished we could have made the full version of Reaperi Cycle, a game which The Hideout was initially a demo of, but it was way too ambitious - especially when we first started back in 2016. Still, we think that people who enjoy strange, narrative-driven games with some puzzles will enjoy Fragmented Almanac. It's definitely a unique proposition, as games like Seaman or Seventh Cross Evolution were. Of course, I really think Seventh Cross Evolution could have been way better. Maybe we'll have to make Eighth Cross Evolution one day 😉.

And if you had to categorise them by genre, would it be fair to say they are "point-and-click" adventures, or is that too restrictive?

I honestly struggle to find the proper term for these games! You don't even click to move around, so perhaps it's more like a cursor adventure? But even that doesn't have a great ring to it. Maybe they are puzzle games? Strange, narrative-based puzzle games?

Whatever they are, they have a distinctive eerie and mysterious style. What is the inspiration behind that?

I think eerie and mysterious is just in our DNA! More seriously, most of the inspiration for our games is drawn either from ideas of the past, or visions of the future - and in particular, things that have been forgotten or that are not bound to happen. The concept of the almanac, a book or document that predicts the time, felt like a great starting point. It's interesting to think about what motivated the creation of almanacs. Were their authors trying to create a system to anticipate the future? Were they trying to provide a guide, a sense of security? Some almanacs are based on the words of religious texts while others get their predictions from the stars. It was interesting to research the many forms that almanacs take, both visually and in the information we provide.

For us, the Almanac is used to somewhat guide and inform the player. As you play the game, you'll unlock fragments and access more lore and art from the game. Muet (Simon Chiasson Greffard), one of our team members, is the one who infused The Hideout with most of its alchemical philosophies. We dug deep within alchemical imagery and symbols and tried to craft something out of it.