A tearfull revisit of one of the industry's most underrated contenders...

Sega’s Dreamcast holds a special place in the history of home videogame entertainment. It was an innovative beast, being the first 128-bit home console to offer online connectivity out of the box and setting the modern trend for sourcing internal components from PC manufacturers. It also proved to be Sega’s last entry in the notoriously difficult hardware development race and brought an end to the days when arcade conversions sold consoles. Released in 1998 the ill-fated machine would be culled just three years later by a Sega undergoing seismic internal restructuring that would ultimately see the company emerge as one of the world’s leading third-party software publishers.

The Dreamcast enjoyed a somewhat convoluted genesis. Back in the late- Nineties, Sega was still smarting from dismal hardware disasters such as the Mega-CD and 32X, and its Saturn console was losing the 32-bit war against Sony’s PlayStation. As is usually the case when companies are against the wall, cracks began to appear inside Sega’s corporate architecture. Newly appointed Sega of Japan president Shoichiro Irimajiri decided that the company’s internal hardware development division was firing blanks and was determined to look elsewhere for the talent to create a new machine. This was not an entirely new stance; as early as 1995 there were rumours that the Japanese company would team up with aerospace firm Lockheed Martin to develop a new graphics processing unit (GPU), and while this proposed union came to nothing it set the wheels in motion for further excursions abroad in search of new hardware partners.

Around 1997 Irimajiri decided to enlist the services of Tatsuo Yamamoto from IBM Austin to work on a new hardware project. The idea was that the team would operate externally and therefore be unhampered by the internal politics that were pervading Sega’s Japanese HQ at the time. Unsurprisingly, when Hideki Sato – head of hardware development at Sega Japan – caught wind of this he was less than happy and made it clear that any technical production should happen within the walls of Sega’s Japanese HQ. This resulted in two different teams working in secrecy on two different prototypes in two different parts of the world.

… continued