The Videogame Solipsist: Dreamcast

September 9, 1999 was one of those weird numerical dates in history. It seemed ripe for people putting more significance into it than they should--9 is a powerful number, after all, and if I knew anything about Numerology I could probably list off a bunch of "facts" about it. Anyway, the main thing I remember about the date is that MTV was having some kind of awards show (they were whores for the "9/9/99" thing) and the Sega Dreamcast was launching in North America. I think that just speaks to everything that made the Dreamcast unique. Who launches consoles in September, let alone on a unique numerical date??

With a remove of less than a decade, it's easy to get nostalgic and lovey-dovey about the Dreamcast. However, we forget how sketchy the whole thing was when it first came out. Sega had given up on the Saturn in the U.S. by 1998, ironically a time when most of its best games were coming out here. By the end of 1998, it had been released in Japan, and we were teased for nearly a year with the amazing screenshots pouring out of that country. Still, we were very hesitant to buy in to the Dreamcast, after having been confused or burned by the 32X, Sega CD, and Saturn.

So, while I wanted to point out that we had no reason to expect the Dreamcast would be good, in the end I, and many others, were proved wrong. Looking at the games list, the Dreamcast had utter classics in almost every genre, as well as doing things ahead of its time: the VMU memory cards, online multiplayer on a console, first console to support mouse and keyboard, and the first console to use voice chat via a microphone.

I didn't get a Dreamcast until around the time the Playstation 2 was launching. I remember there being this weird time where, in the holiday of 2000, I was concurrently playing Grandia II on my Dreamcast and Final Fantasy IX on my Playstation, and I got way more into Grandia II than I did FFIX, and it didn't make any sense to me. It may have been excitement about having a new console, but Grandia II had voices, which was something I hadn't seen in a RPG before, at least on console. At the same time, there were already a ton of great Dreamcast games to pick up, too: Power Stone 2, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, Virtua Tennis, Soul Calibur, Resident Evil: Code Veronica...I think if you look at the list of Dreamcast games that were released, you'll be shocked how many games you forgot and how many were released in 1999 or 2000.

This is to say nothing of 2001, which was simultaneously the peak and the beginning of the end for the Dreamcast. Let's start with the peak: Phantasy Star Online. It's the one game that immediately jumps to my mind as being what the Dreamcast was all about. I will never forget buying this game with some leftover holiday money, coming home, and getting lost in it for the rest of the day. Other than Diablo 1 and 2, I had never experienced anything like this. It was a dungeon crawler like that series, but with a Japanese RPG style and an amazing idea: free online play across regions. You could play with people across the world on it, and the game even had an innovative chat system that used symbols and a mechanic that allowed you to build sentences out of pieces that the game would translate across languages. For instance, you could make a macro that said "Help" or "Hello" or "Follow Me" and it would show up, properly, in whatever language the other people in your game were using. My fondest memory of this game was fighting a boss with three other people, one of whom was either French or French Canadian. Three of us died in the battle, and watched the last guy somehow manage to defeat the boss on his own while we cheered via the simple, translated phrases.

The writing was on the wall for the Dreamcast, however. The Playstation 2 simply commanded too much attention, and with its ability to cheaply play DVDs, it was hard to ignore for long. The games may not have been there, but by the end of 2001, they were. Things kept looking better and better for Sony while they got worse and worse for Sega. Microsoft had announced their entry into the videogames market with the Xbox, a system that largely felt like their take on the Dreamcast idea. Meanwhile, Nintendo announced the Gamecube, which promised to improve on many of the errors made during the N64 era. February 2002 saw the last official Dreamcast game in the U.S., NHL 2K2. Though the Dreamcast had a relatively healthy lifespan in Japan (like its predecessor, the Saturn) it barely lasted three years in the U.S. and effectively ruined Sega as a hardware brand. It would be their last system ever, though rumors pop up at least once a year that the company may step back in. However unlikely this is, with the increasing nostalgia and love for the Dreamcast, it may actually work the next time...

The Videogame Solipsist: Playstation

If the NES made strides toward turning videogames into a mainstream form of entertainment, and the Genesis tried to make videogames cool, then the Playstation was the system that combined these goals and succeeded at doing both. This success was due as much to the actions of Sony as it was the botched handling of the Saturn and the failure of Nintendo to see the future (or, given their continued reticence in the online arena, a failure to do anything about the future).

It's easy to forget that the dominance of the Playstation was neither assured nor rapid. Launched in the fall of 1995, the system really didn't start to see any great games until 1997, by which point it was more than a bit sobering to compare its game lists and upcoming releases to the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn. However, I don't think anyone was really 100% sure about the Playstation until that time. Though it had the massive Sony corporation backing it, almost everyone assumed that Nintendo would clean up in that generation just as they had before. As kids and/or young adults, we didn't have any idea of the background to what was happening: the expense of producing carts vs. the inexpensive Playstation CD format; the arrogance and unfriendliness of Nintendo to third party developers vs. Sony's open arms; the generally crap N64 hardware vs. the easy to program for and great design of the Playstation. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think we could be forgiven for blindly believing Nintendo's promises and being suspicious of Sony. As some have pointed out, this was the era of failed CD systems like 3DO and Sega CD, and the Playstation felt like more of the same.

By 1997, though, we all knew that the N64 was going to be Nintendo's ballgame and the Playstation had everything else you could possibly want. Everyone kept their N64 around for those--admittedly--brilliant first party Nintendo titles twice a year and spent the rest of the time focused on the Playstation. Which, as I just said, had everything else you could possibly want, including 'cool' mature titles like Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Final Fantasy VII. It even had things you never knew you wanted, like the cult classic Parappa the Rapper, a rhythm game that, one could argue, helped pave the way for the success of Guitar Hero in the U.S. Of course, the Playstation also had all the best racing games, sports games, action games, practically every RPG of that generation (if you didn't import Saturn titles, anyway), fighting games, stealth action (Metal Gear Solid, hello), and even some shoot-em-ups.

Bizarrely enough, all of my friends continued to drink the Nintendo cult Kool Aid during this era. I guess their own biological clock interest in videogames coincided with Nintendo, so they only needed two or three games a year. As for me, I jumped unto the Sony ship in the winter of 1998. After being unable to obtain a copy of Zelda: Ocarina of Time--the one and only game that I felt could satisfy what I wanted on the N64--I wandered over to the Playstation case in Target and I couldn't lie to myself anymore. I wanted a Playstation. Funnily enough, I didn't end up playing through Ocarina of Time until just before the release of Wind Waker on Gamecube, and I know that if I had managed to get a copy of Ocarina of Time, it would only have delayed my Playstation purchase for so long.

There are a handful of factors that made me want a Playstation--the cool factor, the relatively cheap(er) game prices, the variety of titles, the novelty of new gameplay experiences like Parappa or Metal Gear Solid--but the main one was RPGs. Though it runs neck and neck in my heart with the SNES for having both the most and best RPGs, there's no denying how much the Playstation did for popularizing and expanding the RPG market in the U.S. This is largely due to the success of Final Fantasy VII, but since the install base of the Playstation grew so large, companies like Atlus and Working Designs were willing to risk bringing obscure RPGs over because they could probably turn a profit. I know that I bought at least a few RPGs for each year the Playstation was active, and not all of those were Square titles. So it became a positive Catch 22: more people were buying RPGs because more RPGs were being released, and more RPGs were being released because more people were buying them.

Life during the Playstation era was good, but we all still had eyes out for the next batch of consoles. During 1998, we began to hear about Sega's next console, the Dreamcast, which would be released in the U.S. on Sept. 9, 1999. A little over a year later, the Playstation 2 was released, and about a year after that, the Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube would both hit shelves. Though the Playstation 1 era wasn't officially over until 2003, when Final Fantasy Origins (the last significant release by my reckoning) was released in the U.S., it only truly had us for a full 4 years (I'm counting 1997-2001 as the height of the PS1 era) before we started to move on. I kept buying and playing Playstation games, but in the holiday season of 2000 I got a Dreamcast, and a bit over a year later, I got a Playstation 2, at which point I traded in my Playstation due to the PS2's backwards compatibility.

In the end, one could just as easily make the argument that the original Playstation was the most significant console ever released as they could that the NES was. I still tend to bow to the NES, but I do have a lot of nostalgia and rose tinted memories of the Playstation. Though history has been continually less kind to the Nintendo 64 and its games (and the less said of Saturn in the U.S., the better), I would argue that the majority of PS1 games still hold up, and that's saying quite a lot in an industry that moves as fast as videogames.