I can still remember the day I decided I cared about the Sega Dreamcast.

I was a year out from finishing middle school and heading into high school, dealing with that familiar uncertainty about what I was supposed to be doing with myself. Part of this confusion led to me temporarily falling out of a number of my hobbies, including video games. At the very least, I wasn’t following the magazines and websites as voraciously as I used to, and as a result I missed out on some things here and there.

Until one fateful afternoon, a day or two before summer vacation was set to begin, I got a copy of the Official Dreamcast Magazine pictured above. I don’t quite remember how I got it; it either came in the mail because Sega had my address for years at that point, or it was given to me from a trip to FuncoLand or something. Even as a lifelong Sega fan that actually owned a Saturn (and I may have been the only friend I had at the time who did), I was completely unprepared for what lay within.

An actual three-dimensional Sonic game, back when we all believed every game should be 3D only? The perceived depth and realism of Shenmue? Weird controllers? The idea you could go onto the internet with a video game system, something I’d only recently started doing in heated duels of Quake 2 against my dad and friends?

It seemed like the future was here, all in this magazine with Sonic on the front! I was so unreasonably excited for a game system I just found out about, I called a friend over to make him look at a magazine with me, which is a thing that basically only happened in the 90s.

Whatever little switch got flipped in my brain by seeing that screenshot of a whale chasing Sonic around a harbor, it clearly worked, because I’m still talking about the damn thing 20 years later.

Most of the Dreamcast’s early marketing focused on the idea of it being the future in a way that only electronics advertisements in the Y2k era could. Obnoxiously vague ads implied that “it’s thinking”, and while in hindsight it’s kind of hard to tell what the ads were for, exactly, Sega’s messaging about the system being the future of video games absolutely worked its magic on me.

Owning and playing a Dreamcast felt to Young Tim like I was in on something I shouldn’t be. Here’s the nicest-looking game console I’d ever seen (after being subjected to years of grey/black boxes, and whatever the hell the original N64 was supposed to look like) putting out the nicest graphics I’d ever seen, with a little thing in the controller that lets me play small versions of the games on my TV? It sounded like something my friends and I would’ve made up at school after reading too many issues of EGM, and yet here it was, in my living room shortly after launch (ostensibly so my parents could play House of the Dead 2, a game I rarely got a turn with).

That feeling never quite went away. I managed to somehow rent or borrow an internet adapter to try out Phantasy Star Online, and while that wasn’t quite my first exposure to MMO-style gaming (that would be the unfairly-forgotten Castle Infinity from a few years prior), it was my first time trying it on a console, and it never looked so pretty beforehand. I was so smitten with the idea that at one point I acquired Quake 3, a game I already owned for PC and had played several times before, just so I could play split-screen with my friends and go online to try it out on SegaNet.

Online gaming. The ability to burn CDs and play emulators on it. The whole BleemCast thing. Video games with licensed soundtracks, helping me learn about bands like Millencolin, Lagwagon, and Bad Religion exactly at the age where that’s what I wanted to be listening to. Everything I learned about this system made me feel more invested, like I was part of some amazing future cult that had been granted this technological advancement that the rest of the world wasn’t willing to adapt to.

It sounds like I’m just rattling off system specs, and I sort of am, but each of these things were incredibly important to me. In hindsight, most people agree that the Dreamcast was a system ahead of its time, but the advancements it brought left such an impression on me that I found myself deeply disappointed when, to my young mind, the competing consoles of the next generation didn’t quite stack up. After the Dreamcast died, I would fall out of console gaming for another few years until I was gifted an Xbox, and I can’t help but feel as though my preference for that system was at least partly due to its shallow similarities to my dearly departed Dreamcast.

My time spent with the Dreamcast would inform my general tastes in gaming for years to come. The system’s library primarily relied on fast arcade-style action games, which I’ve always preferred to slower experiences like RPGs (even if there were at least a few decent ones on the platform), and it got me into genres I normally didn’t care for, such as fighting games – Soul Calibur and Power Stone 2 remain a few of my favorite fighting games ever, and I’ve never really explored the genre too much past the Dreamcast’s library. Sega’s more experimental first-party titles like Seaman and Samba de Amigo taught me that games could be more than just shooting or punching dudes on screen (and spiritually followed up my beloved Parappa the Rapper, one of my most formative PlayStation experiences), and the strong Japanese influence on the system would make me more open to Japanese art and game design styles, and would later inspire me to get more into importing games when I had the means to do so.

I don’t mind saying that my time spent with the Dreamcast has probably informed my entire taste in video games since then, which made the system’s death all the harder on me. It isn’t all doom and gloom, however. For a system based in the still-nascent days of 3D gaming, the library holds up surprisingly well, and I’m far more apt to revisit it than I am many of my other favorite things from the year 2000, like Limp Bizkit and the later days of WCW (which died right around the same time the Dreamcast did, and led to me being a completely rudderless high schooler for a while). The import, fan translation, and homebrew scenes have basically kept it alive, and I’m still just snobby enough to avoid playing Dreamcast games on anything than their home platform, even the Gamecube ports of the two Sonic Adventure titles.

Given as we’re some 20 years removed from me receiving that fateful magazine, and even more depressingly only about 18 years out from Sega officially discontinuing the system and exiting the console market, it’s weird to think about just how much and yet how little impact the poor Dreamcast had on the world at large, but specifically on an incredibly impressionable, pre-pubescent me. I still take the thing out every summer and try to play through something just for old times’ sake (and the amount of new or translated games that keep sneaking out for it make this an easier task than it may sound), and I’ll always be grateful for the brief time I spent with it.

Happy birthday, Sega Dreamcast. I would be a much different nerd without your propaganda arriving in my mailbox right when I needed it to.

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