The sixth generation of video game consoles in the US officially began nine years ago today on 9/9/99, with the introduction of the Sega Dreamcast.  Join us as we take a look at what made the Dreamcast special, and what made it a miserable failure.

It’s also the PlayStation’s birthday, but for some reason everyone only wants to talk about the troubled system, not the runaway success

The Dreamcast was announced with all the flashy wizbang graphics and features that made then current systems – Sony’s PlayStation, the Nintendo 64, and Sega’s own failing Saturn – look like Pong. I know I spent months drooling over shots of Soul Calibur and thinking that 3D graphics were finally here – not the blurry mess we had with the PlayStation. I was pumped up. To the max, even.

The problem was that Sega had been a major disappointment in the preceding years. The Saturn failed. The Sega CD failed. The 32x failed. Lack of support from Sega left people cautious about their new wonder machine (especially when the Sega of America president was fired a month before the Dreamcast launch), and Sony took advantage of this by announcing the PlayStation 2 half a year before the Dreamcast went on sale, promising to blow Sega out of the water. Like many others, I drank the Kool-Aid and pushed the Dreamcast down on my shopping list to wait for the PS2 a year later after Sega’s machine launched.

Which is a shame, because I missed out on some fantastic games until much later, when I picked up a practically-new Dreamcast for $15. You can probably find one for that price too, and if you can take the awful controller, here are some of the games that defined the Dreamcast experience:

Soul Calibur
While not an original property (it’s a sequel to an arcade/PlayStation game) it is still the game that people link with the Dreamcast. A rock-solid, fluid fighting system that is forgiving enough for practically anybody to pick up and enjoy a match. It was a launch title, which makes the game even more amazing because it still commands almost full price today.

Samba de Amigo
Way before our living rooms were filled with plastic guitars and conga drums, rhythm game fans were shaking plastic maracas to the beat of this adorable game. Unfortunately the high price of the maracas put a lot of people off and the game didn’t sell that well. Hopefully the upcoming Wii version will be just as fun.

Seaman
Amusing double entendre aside, this was a unique take on the whole Tamagotchi virtual pet craze, as you raised a fish creature with a human face and carried on conversations via the included microphone. And if you forgot to log in some time with your creature for a couple of days, Leonard Nimoy would chastise you during the loading screen. I felt really bad about that.

Space Channel 5
Oh, how I love Ulala, the star space reporter of this rhythm game. While she basically is a straight ripoff of Lady Miss Kier (despite the courts finding otherwise.. certainly makes it interesting that both Ulala and Deee-Lite are featured in the Wii Samba game!) she really makes this neo-retro music party entertaining. The technically superior sequel never made it to the US on the Dreamcast, but if you have a PS2 you can snap up the ports of both games on a single disc.

Shenmue
While some dismiss this as “Grand Theft Auto without any action”, that’s unfair to this groundbreaking fully realized world. It’s not for everyone with its slow pace and real-world (ish) storyline, but it paved the way for what we expect from city-based games now.

Jet Grind Radio
Finally, a game that doesn’t start with S! Anyway, Jet Grind Radio feels like it was made specifically for me. A game about graffiti and street culture that isn’t full of embarrassing cliches? Sign me up! The highly stylized visuals spawned many imitators, it has a fantastic hip-hop heavy soundtrack, and despite my frustration with the Dreamcast controller, Jet Grind Radio and the Xbox sequel Jet Set Radio Future remain two of my favorite games of all time.

Crazy Taxi
This was the first game that really made me feel like I had brought the arcade home with me. Even though there had been plenty of PlayStation-based arcade games that received superior home releases, it wasn’t until the Dreamcast that it felt like we had more powerful machines than what we’d find in the arcade. The game itself isn’t exactly deep – pick up passengers and get them to their destinations as quickly as possible – but that’s the mark of a great arcade game. The formula works so well that Radical Entertainment ripped it off wholesale for their Simpsons: Road Rage game a couple of years later

Rez
Finally, my favorite game of all time got its start on the Dreamcast. While I never played the original (it never got a US release) and while I believe the definitive version of Rez is the Xbox 360′s Rez HD, I can’t deny its roots. The Dreamcast version can also be played with a mouse as an undocumented feature.

And there we have it. The tip of the iceberg of great Dreamcast games, you look at this list and wonder how the Dreamcast failed, with Sega stopping production of the hardware less than two years after its introduction. And then you remember. Sega.

Tags: Misc