Tomorrow will be the tenth anniversary of the Dreamcast’s North American Launch. It’s hard to believe that the last generation of gaming consoles that began with SEGA’s last console is reaching the ten year cycle. When we were at this point last gen it seemed reasonable that ten years had past between the bulky polygonal games of the Saturn, PSX and N64 era in comparison to the shiny, next-gen graphically enhanced games that all the magazines were going on about. We were comparing games where Solid Snake had no face, to a game where you could see a visible difference between his shaven and unshaven models.

The Dreamcast was an interesting connector of a console, bridging the first true 3D generation and the generation of maxing out those models with depth, complexity and emotion (according to the developers of the time at least). While most ten year anniversaries for games are generally met with an “Eh, it hasn’t aged that well” type of response, the games that the Dreamcast offered while not very impressive technically now a days, seem to remembered more for their value of fun in the memories of those retrospecting those days when SEGA was still in the hardware business.

While the Dreamcast’s time may have been short, that might work in it’s favor when you’re talking about retrospecting. Unlike other systems where you have pauses in between great releases and the universal lull of titles following a system’s release, most of the best memories surrounding the Dreamcast were at that time of release, all in one condensed package of launch title greatness. While it had it’s own dry period that ended up never recovering, the system’s life was so short that the lull doesn’t seem as bad compared to it’s elder brother the Saturn, which was still “Alive” up to the Dreamcast’s release, but nobody really thought of it as such in America. The Dreamcast came and went just as fast, and the industry’s memories of it seem to be all the more better for that reason. I think the industry may have soured on Sonic Adventure after it’s initial launch game hype wore off though. – The Ben