Today marks the 24th anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast's premiere upon the world stage. The gaming world largely remembers 9.9.99 as the dawning of the Dreamcast (at the very least it's a powerfully evocative date from a marketing sense) but the little console that could first arrived with reckless abandon in Japan at the end of 1998.
Almost a quarter of a century has passed then and while that's a great deal of time by history's reckoning, the world now seems intractably different. I have a very deep desire to write about the material realities of the Dreamcast launch but that's not going to happen to day. I was 9 years old in 1998. If you do the math, that means I sadly "an adult" now and it is the horrible responsibility of adults to thinking wistfully about things with too much sincerity.
and yet... when I think about the Dreamcast and how it genuinely upended the direction of my life, I continually find myself faced with a horrible, frustrating, and all-together fantastic truth: there is no word in English (and perhaps none throughout the languages of this planet) that can capture the feeling in my heart when I think of the dreamcast and the worlds within.
As you get older, there are less and less moments that define you because at some point you have BECOME DEFINED. humans are never unchangeable but the truth is that we start out moldable like clay until the winds of time blow and blow, cooling and hardening us into bundles of diamond. because of this, it's easy to treat the moments we recall "being shaped" as singular. we use words like sentiment, nostalgia, and bias to place this tendency into focus. indeed! there's no moment that is more artistically keen than another. there is only a series of circumstances that imbue the moment with individual significance. what I feel about the dreamcast, someone else probably feels about the Wii or the PlayStation 3 or their first time diving off the high board or a successful night of the stage.
there is nothing important about the dreamcast. and yet...
I am ten years old. I've grown up well but there is an alienation in my soul. There is an anger and a confusion that made me as unruly. I don't understand people. I get into fights at school. I spend more time drawing or enacting make believe stories with friends instead of developing an interest for sports (except baseball. i do love baseball) even at the age of ten, I have secret shames and embarrassing memories. among them is a time when I'm perhaps seven years old and being watched by a babysitter. he's a very tall teen, the son of a nurse my mom works with. he has a Sega Genesis that I love to play.
he asks "what do you want to do?"
I grin. "Sega, man!"
He looks sadly at me and I know it's because he wanted me to say anything else. we throw the football sometimes but I don't want to throw the football right now. I want to play some games. and I know, in my enthusiasm, I have disappointed him but there is something within that strange box. a spark that threatens to ignite my heart.
anyway... I'm ten years old and all that's swirling in my brain. old enough to be awkward and aware of my awkwardness. not quite old enough to understand what the hole in my soul is but left with a need to explore worlds beyond my own. and there is a newer, stranger box now: the dreamcast
the worlds in the box don't feel as cartoonish as the pixel worlds of the Genesis. there is weight and wind and light and time. the water sways on the Station Square beach, the snows fall quietly in Yamanose, and the Arcadian skies are blue. and I feel... something. the spark is now a fire. the fire becomes a supernova. a universe is born in my soul.
I'm left writing pseudo-poetics like this to explain the Dreamcast. because there is no other way to explain that a piece of computer hardware could become a doorway. there's no sensible way to explain that wonderful polygonal heroes changed my life.
when we talk about the Sega aesthetic, it is often a term deployed to talk about certain tendencies in color and sound. there's more vapor-wave haze and strange purples and pinks to the Sega palette (phantasy star, Space Channel 5) there is a twisted merger between the natural and the extra-terrestrial (space harrier, Ecco the Dolphin) there is a lineage tied to the arcade and a more explicitly tactile reality (Hang On's bike, Marvel v. Capcom 2 arcade perfect port, the games within game accessed upon the visual memory unit) and all of these things merge into something nebulously "Sega."
but Sega was not merely a set of artistic constraints or trends. it was a sensibility. if we might boil "Nintendo" down to the reductively cloying concept of "play," then the bastards nailed it when naming their final console. the ethos is sega wasn't to play, it was to dream. nice, Harp, that sounds poetic but what does that MEAN? well...
it means something less safely defined. it means a less unified vision of the future in favor of a fractal mess of blisteringly different worlds. sega's games are not quite as genre-defining or codifying as Nintendo's were. this was clear even in 1999. but it didn't matter because there was always something NEW and STRANGE that you could not predict.
Zelda had a form. Mario had a form. Metroid had a form. you couldn't predict Sega. Sega was a smirk. Sega was the blood you spit up after getting decked in the cheek. Sega was gorgeous. Sega was cocky. perhaps too cocky but you still wanted them to win.
and underneath that, within the beating heart of the dreamcast, some of us found ourselves. we understood that impossible was just a word and that dreams were things you could touch and taste and wear. and we never stopped dreaming.
everyone has a moment when they understand that the worlds in our hearts and the worlds in our dreams are something more than imagined. everyone has a moment when they understand that art is magic. for me, that realization came in the wake of a mismanaged little box, a blue hedgehog, and some pirates. in a short flash of light and color and sound and nonsense, the sheer power of human creativity imprinted itself onto my heart and I understood that EVERYTHING matters and that EVERYONE matters
dream. dream. dream. as light as wind and full of everything that can be.