Memorable Gaming Moment 2000: The Dreamcast

Most gamers remember the year 2000 as the year the Playstation 2 was unleashed upon the world, but I don’t. This is mostly because; well… that whole “unleashing” thing didn’t work out very well for Sony. Manufacturing problems meant that a PS2 was hard to come by for a little while and the system didn’t have any particularly stand-out launch titles. Besides, I was far too busy playing the Dreamcast and tinkering with my PC to turn my attention to a new console. I was convinced that the Dreamcast was the future of gaming and that anyone who didn’t have one in their living room (with a Dreamcast internet disc and keyboard right next to it) was missing out on the revolution. And you know what? In a very painful sort of way, I’m still convinced. Even though I spent hundreds of hours that year playing revolutionary PC games that would end up defining who I am as a gamer, the single biggest memory I have of the year 2000 is clear: the Dreamcast. The whole system; all of its games; every time I looked at that little system, I thought, “This is the future, and the future? It’s a fucking blast.”

Before I list a few of my favorite Dreamcast games that were keeping me up at night that year (and still occasionally do a decade later), let me give proper credit to a few PC games that earned a permanent position in my heart. I know I’m supposed to be remembering a single stand-out memory of the year, but I just wouldn’t feel right about forgoing mention of, say, the first time I played Counter-Strike, or the night that I stayed over at my best friend’s house and we snuck onto his dad’s computer to play the extremely gore-tastic Soldier of Fortune. I spent an entire weekend playing Deus Ex and came out a more paranoid, government-wary kid. American McGee’s Alice was an instant classic, but there was something about it that never quite stuck with me (and it’s no wonder McGee hasn’t made a memorable game since). Red Alert 2 turned me back on to real time strategy – a genre that’s gone horribly silent in recent years. Even the point-and-click The Longest Journey had me practically fused to my desktop PC for a little while.

But truly, more than anything, any game, or anyone else, it was the Dreamcast that wooed me in that first year of the new millennium. It was the thrill of seeing next-generation graphics. In fact, I was so thrilled by those graphics that my friends and I would attempt to find which one of our friends or relatives had the biggest television, just so we could play Sonic Adventure on a screen bigger than our own. And don’t get me started on those fancy VMUs. Visual Memory Units were the future of portable gaming – I was positive. There was a Sega beat ‘em up game called Zombie Revenge that had a feature where you could load your character onto your VMU and bring him with you during the day. You could play mini-games with your character to boost their stats and even feed them, etc.  It was a fantastic idea that’s only now being tried out again in the upcoming Pokemon DS title (ten years later).

Between Crazy Taxi, Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and the epic Grandia II and Skies of Arcadia, my Dreamcast kept me gaming what I’d guess to be very close to every single day that year. In 2001, when it became clear that the PS2 was a powerhouse headed down a road to greatness, I began my mourning for the Dreamcast. For months, I begged my friends to see reason – I showed them how much better certain games looked on the late-in-its-life Dreamcast than on the just-launched PS2. I tried to tell them that eventually they’d want to play games online, but they’d be out of luck (of course, the PS2’s network adapter eventually released in late 2002 to little fanfare). The rest of this sad story is well documented, so I’ll spare you any more details.

But let it be known: The year 2000 was a happy year for me. A year when Sega still had a future – a bright one! – And when video games were just fine with only one analog joystick on their controllers.