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

[Cerebralbore101]

NightDragon83 said:

Cerebralbore101 said:

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.

Former Sega of America executives have admitted that the 32x was just a marketing ploy. They never planned on supporting it at all. It was just a way to keep people from leaving them for 3DO and Jagaur. 32x was really powerful too, and capable of 3D like the 3DO/Jagaur. That just goes to show you how much support it got in games from Sega. If they had really supported it we would have seen a lot of games graphically akin to an upgraded Starfox. Instead it got remasters with color changes. 32x launched in Japan a mere seven months before the Saturn.