Almost buried before birth, Sega's savior came back to shock us all. With 128 bits, 50 games and a 56K modem, this sub-$200 device can be all things to all people.
It's 3 in the morning. Your eyes are throbbing from playing Expendable too long. On your TV screen, rain drips like a leaky faucet; explosions mushroom and fade just the way they should. When your Space Marine clone character gets caught in a fire storm, you flinch. The game is a cliche; the rendering is uncomfortably real.
You should hit the sack. But your e-mail is calling, so you pop the Web-browser disk into the squat, gray-white deck. Soon you've browsed Yahoo, HotBot and a dozen sites you wouldn't have dreamed of visiting tonight had the machine not transformed so neatly into an Internet box. In a few weeks you'll be able to play all your Expendable sessions online too. Now all you need is an espresso machine to keep you up all night.
Say hello to the Sega Dreamcast, the surprise-hit games console of 1999 and the first nonPC device that gets you online at 56K speeds at a cost of less than $200--and Time Digital's Machine of the Year.
For many kids--not to mention grownups--the Dreamcast will be the first Internet experience outside of school and the first 128-bit gaming experience outside of an arcade. By contrast, market leader Sony PlayStation possesses a mere 32 bits of graphics power, with no modem. But sometime in 2000--Sony is cagey about naming a date, though analysts are betting mid-fall--PlayStation 2 will launch. It will have all Dreamcast's features, plus a dvd drive and backward compatibility (every PlayStation game will work on the PlayStation 2. It will capture many fickle gamers' hearts and wallets.
Still, Sega couldn't have hoped to be in a better position for the upcoming battle. Its next-generation machine has a 12-month head start on its rival. Dreamcast is highly upgradable and may soon add a dvd drive of its own. Best of all, it sold an unprecedented half a million units during its first two weeks, attracted enough media attention to make grown marketing executives weep, and saved an entire company. "Six months ago, Sega was dead and buried," says Sean McGowan, a top toy analyst and vice president of Gerard Klaver Mattison. "Now, everybody, everybody is looking at this thing."
To understand the size of the mountain Dreamcast had to climb, you need to go back to last July, when Sega held a pre-launch show in Manhattan. You could cut the skepticism with a laser sword. Here was a company best known for having produced the ill-fated Genesis and Saturn consoles. Its market share had been gobbled up by Nintendo and Sony. If Sega existed at all, it was as a manufacturer of coin-operated arcade machines. Dreamcast had already fared dismally in Japan--not nearly enough games, Tokyo kids complained, and it was too expensive. Worst of all, Sega seemed to be sticking with Sonic the Hedgehog, a tired symbol of the Genesis and Saturn days, as its mascot, tying him albatross-like around the neck of Dreamcast.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the launch. An outstanding machine was born. No one had ever seen the can't-believe-it's-not-TV sports simulators NFL 2K and NBA 2K. House of the Dead 2, a first-person shooter, was gory and appealing. Trickstyle, a game for cyberpunk surfer dudes, was furious and fun. Even the most hard-bitten critics fell in love with Soul Calibur (see "The Fight of Your Life," page 64.)
Three things had become clear: 1 Sega had more than enough software for a U.S. launch; 2 the company had been perfectly playing a subtle expectations game all along; and 3 everyone wanted a Dreamcast.
In a marketing masterstroke, Sega created an appetite for Dreamcast by supplying video stores across the country with rental machines two months ahead of the official launch. Still, even the most optimistic company executives failed to realize how hot a property Sega was building. Neal Robison, a senior vice president at Sega U.S. who has been involved with the Dreamcast project for five years, recalls the moment he turned the corner. "I was talking to kids waiting in a line at the video store," he says. "I said, 'Well, have you seen such-and-such a game?' And they said, 'Yeah, I really want it.' And then I'd mention another, and they said, 'Yeah, I want that too.' I mentioned a third, and they said, 'Oh, man, you're killing me. I only have so much money.' I thought, Whoa, this is going to be huge."
Almost too huge, in fact. There were danger signs, as Dreamcast sales rocketed toward 1 million in October, that supply was unable to keep up with demand. Bricks-and-mortar shoppers were disappointed; online shoppers suffered agonizingly long waits for their UPS packages.
Assuming it can survive the supply slump, Dreamcast has a rosy nine months ahead. Its online game-play plan includes offering Monopoly and Scrabble, a blatant bid to emulate Yahoo's success with the perennial low-tech favorites. If the broadband revolution arrives as promised, Dreamcast's detachable modem can be swapped for a cable version. And the second generation of Dreamcast games, which explore more fully the potential of a 128-bit machine, will hit shelves in early 2000. By the end of next year, Sega anticipates the arrival of a whopping 150 titles. Better start ordering the double espressos.
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PHOTO FOR TIME DIGITAL BY TAKA
