The demo discs were clutch. I didn't have much money and would play the heck out of demo discs until I could save enough money to buy a game. Saturn didn't seem to have enough titles and PS was spitting them out like crazy.
Yeah hard to describe probably to anyone growing up in a post-YouTube, post-Steam, post-Playstation store era, but getting a video or playable demo of like 20 or 30 games on a demo disc that was sometimes packaged in with a magazine you'd buy in the store was incredible.
Man, that is hooey, if we're talking launch (day one) titles. The US Dreamcast launch lineup was spectacular.
Leading the way was Soul Calibur, one of a handful of games to earn a perfect score from Famitsu[1] and it actually blew away the arcade version (!)
NFL2K was also a launch title and while I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd is allergic to sports titles, it was far superior to contemporary versions of Madden... got correspondingly high reviews as well
Sonic Adventure was pretty spectacular too I thought, I would call that an 8.5 or 9/10 (like a lot of 3D platformers it maybe hasn't "aged well" but at the time, I thought it was spectacular and it was well reviewed)
Power Stone was a blast too.... Hydro Thunder.... bunch of other solid ones. Day one.
Here was the PS1 launch lineup. Ridge Racer is the only really good title here, excluding previous-gen ports like NBA Jam and Rayman. Toshinden was obviously mindblowing as the first polygon fighter many played but it's sort of a notoriously bad game.
But in some ways that just shows Dreamcast had already lost the war before it launched. Sega did everything right and hit the ground running with what many consider the greatest launch title lineup in history, but their rep was too tarnished.
Almost every single game during the PS1 launch was a killer app because every single one was a novel new experience in a 3D rendered space. Dreamcast showed up way too late to compare.
The PS1 also launched several novel IPs.
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable where Tekken and Rayman are not.
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a
dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's
why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable
where Tekken and Rayman are not.
I mean, you could make this same argument to claim that the Atari VCS was better than the NES because the idea of "playing games on your TV" was no longer a novel new experience by the time the NES rolled around.
For everything about to say, please note that I'm not arguing one system was better than the other. Just talking about how they fit in historically. I owned and enjoyed all of these consoles.
For me, the Dreamcast was the first "modern" 3D console where everything came together.
PS1 3D games were largely pretty ugly. Jaggy warping textures and the hardware was not really powerful enough for big worlds. Perhaps even more importantly, the lack of analog controls was a very very serious impediment.
Obviously despite this there were a lot of classic PS1 titles. A few games like Gran Turismo even seemed to pull off miracles graphically while other titles like Metal Gear Solid just leaned into the grimy pixelated look.
The N64 was largely a joke to me. You had a standard analog control, but the hardware was clearly a mess. Specifically there was far too little texture memory so every game had these giant low-res smoothed out blurry textures. Again obviously a few games transcended that but in general, man, yikes.
The Dreamcast was the first modern 3D console. The one where things came together. Enough horsepower and texture memory to render actually good looking worlds and the flexibility to do things like cel-shading. You play DOA2 or Soul Calibur and those models still look pretty good today. Lots of games were locked in at 60fps. Etc. Even had the first console MMO.
The Dreamcast really was a wonder and it has a huge place in gaming history.
The Dreamcast wasn't competing against the Playstation 1, the Sega Saturn was. And price and game library aside it had the hardware to back it up. You can see this in gameplay videos of, say, Nights into Dreams or Tomb Raider.
If anything the Dreamcast was competing against the PS2 and Gamecube (despite coming out at an awkward time significantly earlier than the competition)
Dreamcast had terrible timing, in my opinion. That, and the controller was obnoxious. But wrt timing, the Dreamcast launched in between generations. Console generations tend to last at least 5 years. It was harder for people to afford multiple consoles back then, and if you had purchased an N64 or a PS1 in '96-'98, it was probably too soon to buy a second or third console in 1999, when Dreamcast launched. It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2 and Xbox both launched in the following year and a half with better graphics and DVD support, leapfrogging it in the process.
It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2
It didn't matter because Sony had already won the hype war, EA forsook the DC, and the built in DVD player was something of a killer app itself.
BUT If you go back and look at the first year or two of PS2 titles, they were not technically superior to the Dreamcast.
IMO the Dreamcast had 1-2 years as the best hardware on the market, and another 1-2 years on par with the PS2.
PS2 was far superior "on paper" but in reality, the difference was not as large as the numbers suggested at a glance. The Dreamcast did two things the PS2 didn't:
- Hidden face removal, making it vastly more efficient than the PS2 (most polygons in a scene are actually hidden by other polygons, so if you avoid rendering them that's an enormous win [1]
- Free hardware texture decompression, so it needed much less video memory [2]
Those points were subtle, though. The gaming press and internet chatter at the time was largely (and understandably) oblivious to tech subtleties like that.
In the end, obviously, the PS2 actually was superior once developers (and particularly middleware developers) mastered its tricky CPU. But I didn't consider it to really surpass the DC for a while.
That, and the controller was obnoxious.
I liked the controller unlike many, but the failure to include a second analog stick was a real miss. The sad thing is, the DC's controller protocol had support for dual analog inputs. They just didn't forsee the need.
The PS2 was backwards compatible with the PS1, so virtually all PS1 games from their huge library continued to be playable on PS2. And PS1 games were still shipping in 2000, 2001, and 2002.
Meanwhile, PS2 may have had a poor launch lineup but by 2001 it was rapidly improved with Gran Turismo 3, Grand Theft Auto 3 (by itself a killer app), Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Jak and Daxter, every sports franchise you could want, other smaller hits like Devil May Cry, Max Payne, etc. Meanwhile the Dreamcast was discontinued by March of 2001, just 5 months after PS2's North American debut.
I remember the launch being as attractive as you described (I was always lukewarm on Sonic, though). A few years later when the parents finally agreed to buy me that gen's console, I still went for the PS2 because of the catalog and DVD player, after a long streak of only buying Nintendo consoles. I borrowed a few other the years, but never the DC.
Competition was fierce. I like the arcade-Sega style of games and enjoyed the DC titles when I got my hands on them, but that was as far as I went.
The PS5 is a good example, it was announced over a year before it came out and I'm confident first-party developers could already work on games for the platform, but... exclusives were lackluster at best, and for the first year or two it was pretty much all cross-platform titles.
Probably for the best since production couldn't keep up with demand, so the PS5 was a slow burner that didn't yet need exclusives to sell the console.
PS4 wasn't too different. Many people held off on getting one until Bloodborne came out 16 months later.
I think Microsoft is the one in a really weird position ever since they started releasing PC versions of basically all their platform exclusives. Not that I'm complaining, but they've pretty much made it so there's zero reason for PC gamers to buy an Xbox, whereas there's still reasons to buy a Switch or PlayStation for the exclusives.
I wonder if Microsoft does this because gaming has been one of the biggest differentiators for their OS. That's an advantage that is rapidly fading and they want to hold onto it as long as possible.
Not sure if that stance is going to be relevant much longer. I recall Apple releasing a new framework that actually had some substance during their last keynote. I think Linus did a segment, they were running cyberpunk on Mac at 30FPS, not ideal sure, but it's a big step up.
I kind of totally missed the PS1 launch, but it would have had the advantage that most of the titles being worked on didn't have anywhere else to go, really.
It you're working on a maybe PS5 launch title, you can relatively easily decide to release it for PS4 instead.
Most PS1 titles are tied to a cd-rom, and maybe some of the other hardware, and would have been tough to release elsewhere. Sega CD and 3DO didn't have much traction, TG16-CD and Jag-CD even less, Saturn vs PS1 vs PC was the relevant choice, and I think Sony was better at attracting developers at the time.
Although, it should be pointed out Road Rash was widely ported, launching on 3DO, later releasing on Sega CD, PlayStation, Saturn and PC.
As a lifelong fan of turn-based JRPG titles, this rings true. The Saturn (and the SegaCD before it) had some great titles there, but the PS1 had a while lot more to choose from, while the N64 was very light. By the time the PS2 and DC rolled around, “what the kids want” was clearly moving away from what I wanted. Every indie or retro title in the genre was and is a gift since.
While the turn-based aspect had definitely become more niche by the time of the PS2, JRPGs were still abounding on it and (lesser so, but still) the DreamCast. It wasn't until PS3 that they started to wane; and now they're all but dead (outside of Japan).
lol why is this being downvoted? This is the truth.
Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales darling.
Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D games that were becoming less popular.
The result is that they had a system that had lots of good games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars the market was looking for.
If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things would have been different, but that didn't happen.
> Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
One of the best selling games of that generation was a JRPG (FF7), and it was most definitely a popular genre. Interest in it didn't begin waning until the next generation.
> The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
There were hundreds of "tent-pole 3D" games released for the N64 and PS1; yet people only remember a dozen or so. By your previous logic on JRPGs (which, again, were very popular in the "32-bit era"), this is not a mainstream..."genre".
Your memory of the whole era feels super anachronistic. The Saturn didn't fail because of it's games, it failed because it didn't have enough of them (by chasing third party developers away) and (as you touched on), the majority of the best ones never left Japan.
I was a gamer from Atari 2600 to Saturn. My experience was exactly that once I was bored with Virtua Fighter it felt like nothing good was coming out for it. Even Virtua Fighter while fun didn't stay that fun for very long.
I know I had just got it at New Years 1995/96. It was $399, $790 adjusted for inflation.
It is really one of the worst purchases of my life in terms of the excitement of coming home with it to not playing it a few months after. I had no other games but Virtua Fighter for it and it pretty much ruined my interest in gaming.
Why the downvotes? It definitely was a huge reason.
The Dreamcast had great games, most people agree with that. Most notoriously arcade games. But they were all somewhat niche, and Sega struggled to get the big licences necessary to achieve popular success. In particular: no EA, no Square-Enix, and way behind Nintendo when it comes to first party titles.
Optics, price point, word of mouth. Coming from the SNES as a kid, I only wanted the N64 and that's what I got. Very quickly the PSX got popular and games were stocked everywhere. No one talked about the Saturn.
I did get to play it when it was new (the Saturn), and the catalog I encountered was shitty FMV games and a shmup. I was not enamored.
The Dreamcast though, I remember being very attractive. The demos of Sonic Adventure looked absolutely astounding to me. I was late hopping on to that gen of consoles (parents strapped for cash), and still given the choice I went for the PS2, because it had the more attractive catalog and a DVD player. Years went by and I borrowed a GC to play Prime, an XBOX to play Ninja Gaiden and Halo, but I was not that motivated to try the DC.
This is a bad take. Sega actually had incredible advertising campaigns in the 90s. That iconic "SEGA!" yell was addictive and memeable. Advertising/marketing was never a problem for Sega.
Sega also had tons of mindshare. They fumbled the ball and Sony ran with it for a touchdown. End of story.
Very few autuers agree with you. They make blockbuster movies to finance the goodwill and pocketbooks of the films they want to make. This is why the critically "best" movies every year always go under the radar with relatively few ticket sales.
This is all to say, your opinion clearly isn't the universal one.
That’s not really what I was getting at (although it is generally true, and it is the original meaning of the phrase “the customer is always right”). My point was that advertising steers people’s opinions all the time. Better advertising would have ensured that the kids wanted the games that Sega would actually have.
Although I will also say that they must have known that a lot of kids would already want another Sonic game, so not having one at launch was a mistake. No need to steer people’s opinions if they are already in a convenient place.
Not the ones kids wanted most.