The Dreamcast Wasn’t Supposed to Matter This Much

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Speaker0: I'm Danny Brown, and you're listening to Artifacts, a storytelling podcast about

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Speaker0: technology, internet culture, media, and the feelings we still attach to them.

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Speaker0: Because sometimes the objects fade, but the feeling doesn't.

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Speaker0: The Dreamcast failed. At least that's the official version of the story.

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Speaker0: Launched in North America on September 9th, 1999, the Dreamcast was gaming giant Sega last console.

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Speaker0: 9-9-99 Which feels like the most Dreamcast launch date imaginable.

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Speaker0: Big, confident, almost weirdly optimistic. And for a little while, it worked.

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Speaker0: People, including me, loved this thing. Critics loved it.

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Speaker0: Developers loved it. and gamers still talk about it with the kind of reverence

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Speaker0: that usually gets reserved for massively successful consoles.

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Speaker0: Except the Dreamcast wasn't massively successful.

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Speaker0: By 2001, Sega was out of the console business entirely.

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Speaker0: The PlayStation 2 had arrived and the market shifted. And the Dreamcast?

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Speaker0: Well, that became another piece of discontinued hardware sitting in closets in thrift stores.

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Speaker0: At least, that's how the story should have ended, but it didn't.

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Speaker0: Because people don't talk about the Dreamcast like it was a failed console.

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Speaker0: They talk about it like it was a lost future.

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Speaker0: And normally, most failed tech just disappears.

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Speaker0: After all, nobody forms emotional support groups for forgotten printers.

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Speaker0: Nobody gets misty-eyed about outdated routers. But the Dreamcast,

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Speaker0: people still love this thing, even 25 years later.

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Speaker0: And personally, I don't think it's real about the hardware. I think it's about

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Speaker0: what the Dreamcast represented.

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Speaker0: The late 90s were a strange moment for gaming. A strange but cool moment.

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Speaker0: Everything still felt experimental. The rules weren't locked in yet,

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Speaker0: and nobody had fully figured out what a modern video game was supposed to be.

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Speaker0: And Sega, especially Sega, well, they operated with this chaotic arcade energy.

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Speaker0: Nintendo felt kind of polished, Sony felt cool. But Sega?

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Speaker0: Sega felt like somebody running into a room with six wild ideas and too much caffeine.

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Speaker0: And somehow, that energy made a Dreamcast feel alive.

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Speaker0: After all, this was the console that gave us Crazy Taxi. A game where your entire

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Speaker0: job was basically driving like a complete maniac while punk music screamed at

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Speaker0: you. It gave us Jet Set Radio.

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Speaker0: Still one of the most visually stylish games ever made.

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Speaker0: Cell sharing before most people even knew what cell sharing was.

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Speaker0: It gave us Shenmue, which was simultaneously brilliant, awkward,

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Speaker0: ambitious, slow, groundbreaking and kind of ridiculous.

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Speaker0: You could work a forklift job, you could feed a cat, you could wander around

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Speaker0: opening drawers in your home.

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Speaker0: The game cared about tiny details before open world gameplay became standard in games.

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Speaker0: And then it was Phantasy Star Online which genuinely felt futuristic at the time.

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Speaker0: Online console gaming at home in 2000 over dial-up.

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Speaker0: That felt like magic, actual magic the Dreamcast

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Speaker0: even looked optimistic the little orange swirl the clean white shell the weird

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Speaker0: memory card with its own tiny screen the VMU or visual memory unit felt like

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Speaker0: something from the future and maybe that's part of why the console stuck emotionally

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Speaker0: the Dreamcast wasn't just selling games it was selling possibility,

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Speaker0: and here's the thing I think the Dreamcast failure is part of why people still feel so attached to it.

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Speaker0: Because when something succeeds on a massive scale, it eventually stops belonging to individuals.

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Speaker0: Instead, it becomes infrastructure. The PlayStation 2, for example,

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Speaker0: sold over 150 million units, which is pretty incredible.

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Speaker0: But the Dreamcast? Well, the Dreamcast feels personal.

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Speaker0: On-in-one felt like being part of a weird little club. And if you loved it,

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Speaker0: you spent years explaining to people why they were wrong about it.

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Speaker0: That creates emotional investment. It turns fandom into identity.

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Speaker0: And as humans, we do this a lot. We become deeply attached to flawed things,

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Speaker0: failed things, underdog things.

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Speaker0: Because loving something imperfect says something about us. It says we value

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Speaker0: experimentation, risk, personality.

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Speaker0: The Dreamcast wasn't polished into corporate perfection. It felt human,

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Speaker0: messy, creative and ambitious.

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Speaker0: And maybe people sensed that even at the time because Sega was taking swings,

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Speaker0: some worked, some absolutely did not but the energy felt different from modern gaming.

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Speaker0: Today, major games on their own can cost hundreds of millions of dollars which

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Speaker0: means risk is harder to write off.

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Speaker0: Experimentation becomes dangerous and everything starts getting filtered through

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Speaker0: market research and franchise strategy.

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Speaker0: But the Dreamcast era, well that felt unpredictable.

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Speaker0: Developers were discovering the future in real time, and players got to come along for the ride.

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Speaker0: One of my favourite things online is watching people talk about old technology.

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Speaker0: Because they almost never talk about specs, not really. They talk about moments,

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Speaker0: feelings, who they were at the time.

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Speaker0: People remember late night gaming sessions, discovering weird games at rental

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Speaker0: stores, hearing crazy taxi music blasting through tiny CRT TV speakers,

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Speaker0: staying up way too late trying to figure out Shenmue.

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Speaker0: The artefact becomes attached to memory, and memory often smooths rough edges.

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Speaker0: Because nostalgia isn't usually about accuracy, it's about emotional texture.

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Speaker0: And the Dreamcast carries a specific emotional texture for a lot of people.

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Speaker0: Optimism, weirdness, possibility.

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Speaker0: A moment before gaming became hyper-standardised, before every online conversation

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Speaker0: became platform-driven, and before everything became content.

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Speaker0: The Dreamcast existed in its little transitional pocket of time where the future

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Speaker0: still felt exciting instead of exhausting.

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Speaker0: And maybe that's a real thing people miss. Not the console, the feeling.

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Speaker0: The Dreamcast wasn't the best-selling console. It wasn't the most powerful.

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Speaker0: It didn't win the generation.

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Speaker0: But, decades later, people still talk about it like it mattered.

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Speaker0: And maybe that's because success and impact aren't always the same thing.

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Speaker0: Some things leave a mark precisely because they disappear. Because they represent

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Speaker0: a version of the future that never fully arrived.

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Speaker0: And maybe part of growing older is realising we spend a surprising amount of

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Speaker0: time looking for those feelings again.

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Speaker0: Not necessarily the objects themselves, but the optimism attached to them.

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Speaker0: The possibility, the weirdness, and the sense that creativity could still surprise us.

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Speaker0: I'm Danny Brown, and this is Artifacts.

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Speaker0: Thanks for listening to Artifacts. If this episode reminded you of a memory,

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Speaker0: a feeling, or a piece of the internet you thought had disappeared,

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Speaker0: you can find more episodes wherever you listen to podcasts or watch the video

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Speaker0: version on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Speaker0: And if you'd like to support the show, visit the website for ways to help keep artifacts alive.

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Speaker0: Until next time, take care of the things that matter to you, even the small ones.