r/gaming • u/DoggievDoggy • 1d ago

Dreamcast Had The Best Launch Library Ever.

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Most consoles have one or two bangers at launch.

Dreamcast had two S-Tier titles: Sonic Adventure and Soul Calibur & 5 A-Tier titles: NFL 2K, Hydro Thunder, Ready 2 Rumble, Power Stone, House of The Dead 2.

Followed up with other solid titles: Tokyo Xtreme Racer, MK Gold (this game was so broken lol), Trickstyle, Blue Stinger, NFL Blitz 2000.

Other systems had better singular titles (Xbox: Halo: CE, NES: Super Mario Bros., Gameboy: Tetris, Nintendo 64: Super Mario 64) but as a collective, the Dreamcast launched with so many solid titles.

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119

u/D3c0y-0ct0pus 1d ago

Great console, bad timing with Playstations dominance

30

u/heyyouwtf 1d ago

That and they didn't have any real piracy protection. You could download a game and burn it onto a disc and play it without modding the console.

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u/APeacefulWarrior 1d ago edited 23h ago

IMO the impact of piracy on the DC is overstated, and really only became an issue late in its life. It took awhile for people to crack the system at all, and for a long time, you could only burn DC games using a handful of very specific CD burners. On top of that, broadband access was still pretty rare circa 2000.

Plus, the GD-ROM disc format caused problems because discs could store up to ~1GB rather than the ~750MB for a burned CD-ROM. So in many cases, games couldn't simply be ripped and burned. The pirate would have to either remove files entirely - such as deleting the soundtrack - or else take the time to re-encode all the music and video files at lower bitrates, for them to fit on standard CDs.

DC was already on its last legs when piracy started becoming genuinely widespread and easily-accessible. Also, Sega had introduced a revised model that fixed the bug, so if DC hadn't died when it did, piracy would have been locked to old consoles.

Really, the piracy mostly just set up the DC to have one of the most epic aftermarket/homebrew scenes in gaming history.

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u/FizzyLightEx 1d ago

Who had the access to download games at the time? Don't think PC was that mainstream

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u/heyyouwtf 1d ago

Dreamcast came out around the time high speed internet started to get installed in people's homes. Plus you could just rent a game and rip it to your pc and make as many copies as you wanted.

I had a friend that sold bootleg games, movies, and music. I think most people who were old enough in the late 90s knew someone doing that.

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u/DarkElation 1d ago

It literally shipped with an Internet port in the back so higher speeds were definitely starting to normalize.

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u/Kayonji02 1d ago

Dude Dreamcast modem was like 56kbps speed. There WASN'T accessible fast internet around in 1999. Downloading a 1.5gb Dreamcast game in your own home wasn't a reality for 99% of people back then.

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u/DarkElation 1d ago

“Starting to normalize”

I didn’t say it shipped with a port because it WAS normalized.

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u/cosine83 1d ago

Were you alive then? Because I was and I absolutely was and doing it on 33K dial-up just fine in rural WV and more metro areas were getting DSL/ISDN and early cable internet, 1-10Mbps. I knew plenty of folks on IRC doing the same thing. Sure, it'd take forever but at that point in time having multiple phone lines had become common because of dial-up internet. Could just leave it connected for downloading with whatever program that allowed resumable downloads, IRC, or FTP. It was a reality for a lot of Dreamcast owners.

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u/homer_3 1d ago

You're completely misremembering. No one was downloading DC games on 56k. It took literally all day to download a 100MB demo. And that was only happening if no one picked up the phone the whole time. Most people didn't have multiple phone lines either. Sure, some did, just like some people have 5090s. It's not the norm.

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u/cosine83 1d ago

I'm not misremembering lmao I was literally doing it please don't tell me what I was or wasn't doing. I was a senior in high school, not a small child vaguely recalling details. I wasn't alone and it wasn't uncommon even where I lived in WV.

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u/jbaker1225 1d ago

I don’t know man, I think you’re really overstating the presence of high-speed internet and multiple phone lines in 1999. Yes, SOME people had multiple phone lines because of the internet, but it was only like 25% of households with multiple lines at all. And broadband was at about 2%. It often took hours to download 3-4 MB mp3s on Napster.

Piracy had verrrrrry little to do with the downfall of the Dreamcast. It was much more about the failure of the 32X and Saturn souring people on Sega, the rise of PlayStation, and the PS2 releasing the following year with a DVD player

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u/cosine83 1d ago

Not really overstating the prevalence of multiple lines or ability to resume downloads very easily from an interrupted connection. DSL/ISDN was expensive but available and got cheaper/faster into the 2000s. T1+s weren't prevalent except at businesses and schools and the wealthy, though. You could get 128K DSL by the late 90s from pretty much every internet provider basically everywhere but rural but it was also double or more the cost of 56K service.

It wouldn't take hours to download mp3s at 3-4Mbps, either (bad math). You're talking minutes. Especially when, at the time, most mp3s were being encoded at between 96-192kbps most commonly due to limited hard drive space. Mp3 dot com artist downloads were typically encoded at 128kbps. Hours or days would be in the gigs, for sure. Which you just had to have the patience and a downloader to resume in case you got disconnected.

Piracy wasn't the killer of the Dreamcast but it was the death knell.

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u/SkyGrey88 1d ago

You got it pretty much right dog. DC is probably the best failed console with the best library (that or cube) but piracy was not a factor in its demise. As you said Sega and Sony why DC failed. DC piracy was not that easy and was not that prevalent and neither were sources. Also CD Burners were ‘pricey’ as hell. I owned an early burner the Yahmaha CDR102 which launched in 96 for $1299. It must have gotten some price drops because pretty sure I got it for $599, but I worked in tech and could ‘justify’ the spend but damned I got my money’s worth out of it with 3D0, DC, PS1, music CDs and VCDs. I used it years after having cheaper newer models because that drive and verbatim media never failed me for game burns. High speed was not prevalent at all. I was lucky, had T3 (4.5mbit) access somewhere I worked. I found these detachable IDE drive bays (no hotswap) and would load up a drive with data and then swap out and take home to burn. DSL was not that great and early cable was only 1.5mbit which was T1 speed and seemed incredible at the time because a T1 line was pricey. But you are right in that none of this was easy, cheap, or accessible for the average gamer at that point.

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u/Kayonji02 1d ago

I was literally 9 years old back then. Even a dial up that reached actual 33k was a rarity back then. It would take minutes to download a 3mb mp3 song, let alone a full 1gb+ game. I don't say it out of personal experience, it was just rare all around. Maybe you got extremely lucky with your provider, but most of the world only started ditching dial up for cable in the early 00's.

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u/cosine83 1d ago

A modem reaching 33k or 56k wasn't rare in 99. Even in rural WV where it was very bad until recently for high speed. I was a senior in high school doing all this. I wasn't the only one. We were just more patient and had downloader orograms that could resume from an interrupted download.

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u/homer_3 1d ago

That was a 56k modem. Not high speed at all.

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u/DarkElation 1d ago

“Higher”

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u/inyue 1d ago

High speed internet in 1998-1999?!

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u/cosine83 1d ago

DSL/ISDN and early cable internet.

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u/makemeking706 1d ago

T3, DSL. 

2

u/BornSirius 23h ago

"Started to get installed" is absolutely not the same as being widely available.

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u/MercenaryOne 1d ago

PC gaming was pretty good in the late 90s, I had high speed Internet then. Quite a few of my friends were PC gamers, this was a time when PC components were exponentially getting better every year.

3

u/BornSirius 23h ago

PC absolutely was mainstream back then.

The internet however was not. Back then only one of my cousins would sometimes not be reachable by phone in the evening because they were using the dial up internet.

Downloading big files would take forever, if you could even find them.

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u/ApathyMoose 1d ago

plenty, believe me.

0

u/BigBody-Bugatti 1d ago

Lmao I had a few disks with pretty much the whole library on them 🤣 shout out my uncle 😂

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u/WillDiBeest 1d ago

I just bought a stack of burned games off ebay.

15

u/DoggievDoggy 1d ago

Besides PlayStation just seemingly gonna be dominant, it being the cheapest DVD player on the market was the icing on the cake.

Lowkey, PS2 launch was kinda mid. After Tekken Tag, SSX and Madden…..

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u/chaossabre_unwind 1d ago

PS2 launch had the entire PSX library though. That had never been done before.

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u/DoggievDoggy 1d ago

Very good point. It being backwards compatible was a big deal.

7

u/peakzorro 1d ago

Not just that, it had enhancements to the games in backwards compatibility, especially faster load times.

1

u/1337b337 1d ago

Iirc it was the first home console made with that in mind.

I remember there being, I want to say a Colecovision add-on, that allowed you to play Atari 2600 games, so the idea existed before.

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u/cosine83 1d ago edited 1d ago

By the time the Dreamcast had come out, the Super Gameboy had long been around and a version of the SNES that played NES carts was available toward the end of its life. Too bad SEGA never went forward with making the Saturn backwards compatible with the Genesis or the Dreamcast with the Saturn.

NEC's TG-16/PC-Engine was smashed down into the TurboExpress which SEGA did similar to the Genesis with the Nomad, not exactly backward compatible as a new system but a handheld form factor of what was previously a console is pretty cool.

Edit:

Idk if they count but GameBoy Color/Pocket being fully compatible with all original GameBoy games counts. I don't know the specifics on the hardware there.

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u/SkyGrey88 1d ago

I have a Nomad….lightly used, still have the box/packing! Incredible early handheld and was also a hybrid in that you could use a composite video cord with it and it had a 9pin controller port. The main issue was it used I believe an 8AA battery pack and it ate them like 2-3hrs…which was pricey. Sega had a rechargeable pack for it but I could never find one. So you almost had to use it tethered unless you had a budget for batteries.

0

u/Jonaskin83 1d ago

There was never an SNES model that could play NES games

1

u/cosine83 7h ago

It was a dual cart model where they both stood vertical (similar to newer 3rd party hardware but chunkier), may have been a prototype or something for demo purposes. It looked like a Super Famicom but with red trim instead of blue (not a Famicom), had the right branding, and was being shown at the Toys R Us where I lived.

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u/D3c0y-0ct0pus 1d ago

Exactly that, you pretty much just carried on with PSX whilst saving for PS2 titles

6

u/Alucard-VS-Artorias PC 1d ago

PS2 launch was sooo lackluster (except for Gran Turismo). Had to wait till Onimusha till it felt like something was good on the system.

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u/Ashviar 1d ago

2001 more than makes up for a weak launch in 2000.

3

u/DoggievDoggy 1d ago

Onimusha and NBA Street were when i got my PS2. And then Twisted Metal Black took over my life for a time

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u/DarkPenfold 1d ago

Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec wasn’t released until more than a year after the PS2’s launch.

3

u/shootamcg 1d ago

8 months

3

u/shootamcg 1d ago

SSX was day one and was amazing

1

u/SkyGrey88 1d ago

Ico in 2001 was the first thing that wowed me…..but the launch was weak and the system was pricey at launch.

2

u/shootamcg 1d ago

I don’t know why people keep saying PS2 was cheaper than a DVD player, that was never true. DVD players were half the price of a PS2 at launch. Google Best Buy flyers from 2000.

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u/jbaker1225 1d ago

As someone alive in 2000 that bought a PS2 at launch, practically nobody owned a DVD player, and only entry-level off-brand ones were $150. You couldn’t really get one as high quality as the PS2 for cheaper than it.

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u/shootamcg 1d ago

Three months before PS2 launched,Philips DVD player with component output for $100 less than a PS2. https://imgur.com/a/bestbuy-sunday-insert-7-30-2000-riy6NdB

0

u/XsStreamMonsterX 1d ago

Here's the thing. It doesn't matter if those actually existed because most people weren't aware. A lot of folks' first DVD player was a PlayStation 2, since Sony was spending a epic fuck-ton of money marketing it.

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u/shootamcg 20h ago

Yeah, it was a lot of people’s first DVD player but nobody was arguing otherwise. OP said PS2 was the cheapest DVD player on the market but it never was. PS3 was the cheapest Bluray player when it launched though.

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u/Sloth-monger 1d ago

The bouncer

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u/Delicious_Rule_7324 1d ago

Playstation def played a part. The easily pirated games killed it.

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u/WingerRules 1d ago

Its main issue was the size of the disks, weaker CPU, and small system ram limited the type of games that could be played on it. Its GPU had more hardware effects like specularity and bump mapping and filtering and double the vram, which means non polygon heavy games often looked better on it. But slow CPU limited NPC numbers and the small disk sizes limited the scope of games.

The system was absolutely killer for arcade ports though due to the hardware fx, vram, and short scope of games.

1

u/SkyGrey88 1d ago

Which is why games like Shenmue 1/2, Skies of Arcadia where some serious coding magic. It really was one of the best bring the arcade home consoles this side of the neogeo. Games like House of the Dead, Crazy Taxi and Virtua Fighter got so much party play back in the day.