Most Xbox games are also available on the PlayStation these days, and Nintendo has long since stopped trying to compete directly with Sony and Microsoft. But in 2000, the video game console wars were cutthroat, and about to produce their biggest casualty: Sega.
The Dreamcast was the earliest entrant in a generation of video game consoles that would eventually include the GameCube, the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox. The first console with a built-in modem, the Dreamcast was ahead of its time in some ways. But it was behind in others (it could not play DVDs), and by spring 2001, with Sega losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, it was discontinued. Sega has been out of the console business ever since.
To look back at the Dreamcast 25 years later is to see a collection of paths not taken and possibilities deferred. It is an alternate version of what 21st-century gaming might have looked like, had things gone differently.
Sega had long defined itself in opposition to Nintendo, presenting itself as the edgier alternative. “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t,” its ads promised in the early 1990s, when its console outsold the Super Nintendo for several years. But its follow-ups, the Sega CD and Sega Saturn, struggled to break through, and by the Dreamcast era, the company was dabbling in the genuinely weird.
The Dreamcast’s novelty controllers included a motion-sensitive fishing pole and a pair of electronic maracas, and its primary controller incorporated its own oddity: the V.M.U., or Visual Memory Unit, a removable memory card that had its own tiny LCD screen and buttons. When plugged into the controller, the V.M.U. provided each player with a secondary screen. When removed, it functioned as a tiny GameBoy-like hand-held system capable of playing simple games — as if the console were sending spores into the world.
Like so many aspects of the Dreamcast, the V.M.U. never quite worked out — too small to use comfortably, too limited to play anything interesting — but it was certainly the most experimental choice in the design of any of that generation’s consoles.
That spirit of experimentation carried over into software development. One Sega executive remembers that game developers there “could do whatever they wanted” at the time, as the company cast about for a way back to its Genesis glory years. And whatever they wanted, as it turned out, meant a lot of different things.
Shenmue
Perhaps the biggest swing was Shenmue, which was briefly the most expensive video game ever made. Designed by Yu Suzuki, who had created Sega hits such as Virtua Fighter and Out Run, Shenmue was one of the first open-world games, in which players can wander more or less freely through a large simulated environment, pursuing the main plot or side activities at their own pace.
You play as the teenager Ryo Hazuki in a breathtakingly detailed and elaborate simulacrum of Yokosuka, Japan, in 1986. You can wander its streets, take the bus, browse in shops, visit characters — and, of course, investigate the murder of your father and train in martial arts as you prepare to avenge him.
Open-world games would dominate the coming decades, but none were quite like this. Shenmue is certainly not a work of realism — that martial-arts revenge plot prominently includes a magical “Phoenix Mirror” — but it was devoted to the quotidian details of its world. There was small talk, snowfall and vending machines, and the slow, contemplative rhythm was in some ways very un-gamelike.
The kind of open world that took over video games was the one offered the very next year by a game originally intended for the Dreamcast before it switched to the PlayStation 2: Grand Theft Auto III was a playground of speed, spectacle and consequence-free mayhem. Shenmue was exactly the opposite. It was an intimate, intransigent world that operated on its own timetable and was, as a result, immersive and convincing in an entirely different way.
The buses in Shenmue are not just there for your convenience. You can miss one and have to wait for the next, or you can spend too much at the shops and not have enough for the fare. If you visit people at the wrong time, they simply won’t be in; go to a shop too late and it will be closed. When Ryo gets a job at the docks, you actually have to do it, repeatedly playing through a forklift minigame that rides the line between fun and tedium.
The fact that you have obligations and appointments to keep also means that you can truly waste time within the game, in a way that simply wouldn’t have meaning otherwise. Instead of going to work or continuing his investigation, you might have Ryo head to the local arcade, where he can play, among other things, complete versions of Space Harrier and Hang-On, real Sega arcade games designed by Suzuki in the mid-80s.
That was part of Shenmue’s perverse achievement: a virtual world so real you sometimes wanted to wander off and play a game instead of dealing with its demands.
Crazy Taxi
Many of the Dreamcast’s best games were products of the arcade, a market that was prosperous for Sega at the turn of the century. The popular fighting game Soulcalibur, one of the Dreamcast’s launch titles in the United States, may well have been the first home port of an arcade game to actually improve upon the original, with better graphics and added features.
Arcades were already in decline — in large part as a result of those very advances by consoles — when the Dreamcast came out, so the console is in a sense both a pinnacle of arcade-oriented game design and its last hurrah. Few games these days offer bite-size playtime and immediate fun in the old arcade way, and those that do tend to be self-consciously retro, not pushing the style forward but carefully recreating its previous forms.
In 2000, though, none of that had quite happened yet, making the Dreamcast home to one of the greatest and goofiest home arcade games of all time.
In Crazy Taxi, you drive a cab through a cartoonish version of San Francisco, racing against the clock to pick up and drop off passengers, getting extra time for driving as recklessly as possible. The physics are ludicrous, the soundtrack pop punk and the city filled with product placement. A single journey might last just a few minutes — but I don’t think anyone ever played just once.
Seaman
The weirdest Dreamcast game — a high bar, to put it mildly — was in some ways not really a game at all, but a warped version of “virtual pets” like the Tamagotchi and Neopets. Seaman asked you to care for and feed a “Seaman,” a kind of frog-fish hybrid with the deeply unsettling face of an adult man.
Once he matured, you could have full conservations with Seaman, using a microphone that came with the game. His voice was dry and sarcastic and slightly stilted, and he was willing to talk about everything: baseball, books, dating, what part of your body you liked least. He mocked the player regularly, asked questions like “Do you think the internet should be censored?” and even burst into song in the right circumstances. (The English version of the game was narrated by Leonard Nimoy, for some reason.)
Seaman was a hit in Japan, which later saw a special Christmas edition and a full sequel, neither released in the United States.
The possibilities of chatbots as artistic creations — as ways of surprising and confounding people, rather than imitating or flattering or manipulating them — seem all the more ripe for exploration these days. Yet somehow their fullest expression came 25 years ago, in the form of a talking man-fish who loves Hawaii.
Jet Grind Radio
Video games change so quickly that it can be hard to remember how startling certain innovations once were. Jet Grind Radio (known as Jet Set Radio outside the United States) was one of the first games to use cel shading, a technique that made 3-D graphics look like 2-D art.
The delightful, disorienting style fit perfectly with its story of rollerblading graffiti artists battling for turf and taking on an evil corporation. It looked like the whole world was made of graffiti already, so adding a bit more on a few blank walls was only natural.
Dreamcast games tended toward spectacle and beauty, including the sun-drenched lushness of Sonic Adventure and the cartoon surrealism of MDK2, and Jet Grind Radio was one of the most original and spectacular.
Its cel shading was also one of the few Dreamcast innovations to be taken up elsewhere, in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Okami and Persona 5 and beyond. (It has, of course, also continued to be used in animated films such as “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”) As for the rest? Well, maybe in another universe.
Note: Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, Seaman and Jet Grind Radio were each released in North America in 2000.
Produced by Alice Fang, Maridelis Morales Rosado and Rumsey Taylor.
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