Sega ships its last console with a modem already inside

What happened

Sega needed this one to work. The Saturn had been mishandled in North America, launched early without warning to retailers and burdened with hardware developers found difficult, and the company's standing with both groups had suffered badly. The Dreamcast was the correction: straightforward to program for, capable of visibly sharper graphics than anything else on sale, and supported at launch by arcade conversions and a fighting game reviewers treated as a generational leap. Opening sales in the United States were strong enough to make a recovery look plausible.

The modem in the box was the genuinely forward-looking part. Consoles had offered online play before through add-ons almost nobody bought; here it was standard equipment, with a browser, an included internet service and, later, an online role-playing game that let strangers form parties across regions. Connections were slow and the arrangement was clearly transitional, but the argument it made, that a console should assume a network exists, was correct, and the machines that followed proved it.

It did not survive the anticipation surrounding Sony's next console, which had been announced with extravagant technical claims and the ability to play DVD films. Retailers and publishers held back, third-party support stayed thin, and Sega, already weakened financially, could not absorb the losses. Production ended less than two and a half years after the American launch. Its reputation has improved steadily since, and its library is treated as one of the more distinctive in console history.

The world at the time

In September 1999 the console market was waiting. Sony had been publicizing a successor with unusual specifications for months, Nintendo's machine was three years old, and Microsoft had not yet announced anything at all. Sega was still carrying losses from the previous generation and had very little room to be patient with a slow start.

What it changed

Sega left the hardware business within eighteen months and became a publisher on its rivals' machines. Built-in networking became standard on the following generation, and the paid online service Microsoft launched in 2002 built on ground the Dreamcast had broken. The console is now a standard example of a product that was right about the future and wrong about the moment.