Sega Dreamcast turns 18 today (Western Release was 9/9/99).

[NightDragon83]

Cerebralbore101 said:

NightDragon83 said:
The Dreamcast was a nice piece of hardware and a great bang for your buck when it launched, but it was still too little too late. The Dreamcast is what the Saturn should have been IMHO.

Instead of rushing headfirst into the 32-bit gen in late 1994 to beat out Sony's debut in the market with a console that wasn't exactly capable on the 3D side of things (not to mention a disaster of an early launch in the west), SEGA should've held back the Saturn's release until at least holiday '95 and retooled the hardware to be more forward-thinking and easier to develop for now that 3D gaming had finally arrived.

Who knows, the Saturn probably still would have finished 3rd behind the PS1 and N64 in the generation, but at the very least it would've been more successful with more software support, and SEGA could've launched its eventual successor the Dreamcast alongside the PS2 as a console much more capable of competing with its 6th gen counterparts.

Sega always sucked with the launch timing. Genesis/Megadrive took a year to reach North America. It didn't come out in PAL region until 1990 when it was already a two year old system. I completely agree that Sega should have launched the Saturn in 95. A worldwide release for holiday 95 would have been just fine, since Sony didn't have a reputation in the video game market yet. Why get a PS1 when you can wait a year, and pick up a more powerful Saturn? Now if they had only thrown the Sega CD and 32x projects out before they could have seen the light of day. 

The SegaCD wasn't necessarily a bad thing, it launched in the middle of the Genesis/Mega Drive's lifecycle and had moderate success and a decent library despite its high price tag and the fact that it was an add-on to a console that was already $150+ at the time it launched.

The 32X on the other hand was a disaster and sort of set the tone for the trouble ahead facing SEGA and the Saturn's launch.  SEGA should have taken any titles planned for the 32X and either put them on the Genesis in scaled-down form like Knuckles Chaotix, or held them back and released them on the Saturn like and improved version of Star Wars arcade or a near perfect port of Doom / Doom II, anything to boost the amount of software at or shortly after launch, which was pretty barren for the Saturn.