Confessions of a 45 Year Old … Gamer Pt 3

As we approach 1998 Sony essentially has the North American gaming market to themselves.  The Saturn is dead in North America and Nintendo has the N64 but it’s no threat to Sony’s dominance now.

It amazes me to this day the impact that Sony had on the market.  A complete takeover of the industry by a relative newcomer was not something I had seen before.  I had hope that Sega could rebound from the Saturn debacle and produce a game changer similar to what Sony had done.

In September 1999 Sega released the Dreamcast in North America.  It was radically different than anything they had released before.  It was disc based. It had an extremely powerful graphics processor and an industry first … A built in modem!

On the surface it looked like Sega had a winning package on its hands.  When you started to dig deeper things started to fall apart though.

The system was built from off the shelf components that were already dated when the Dreamcast came to market.  The company that manufactured the graphics processors was having trouble meeting demand for Dreamcast production.

The biggest problem Sega faced was Sony’s dominance.  The cost of producing games at this level of quality was taxing for many developers.  This meant that they wanted their games to go where the largest amount of players were.  At this time that was Sony’s PlayStation.

Also at this time Sony had begun discussing their plans for a “Next Generation” system.  The PlayStation 2 would be significantly more powerful than the original Playstation.  It would be backward compatible with the original PlayStation.  This meant all of your games would work on the new system.  A big win for consumers since you didn’t need to buy new games right away.  The PS2 would also be DVD based.  Giving game developers more space to work with and PS2 buyers the added bonus of DVD movie playback.

While the system would not debut in North America for another year it definitely had an impact on Dreamcast sales.

The PS2 launches in November of 2000.  There are not enough units to go around.  People are scrambling to find one anywhere they can.  It was an incredible launch for Sony and early reviews of the console and it’s games were glowingly positive.

The PS2 would go on to have a very successful life.  Many regard it as the most successful game console ever.  The new Golden Age of gaming.  I share some of those feelings …  Overall I felt the PS2 was more evolutionary than revolutionary.  I still preferred the Dreamcast for the risks it took.  The games on the Dreamcast also looked more polished, cleaner somehow.  It’s difficult to describe.

Sadly I was in the minority though.  Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in 2001.  After which they announced they would be leaving the hardware business all together and begin releasing their games on other consoles.

This would once again leave Sony alone in the game business (see my thoughts on Nintendo in the previous post).  A new player is coming though … A big one.