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Epilogue of the Sega Dreamcast
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The Dreamcast is dead, long live the Dreamcast.
Since the Atari scene doesn't bear too many news or productions to review, we
thought we had a closer look to the final hardware production of a company that
started shortly after Atari was born and lived on until today. But the past 3
years finally tought Sega that surviving on only the own platform will not be
possible, so Sega decided to drop their own console, the Dreamcast, and start
to produce for other company's systems as well.
Obviously, Sega had learned from companies like Atari, because Sega follows a
trend there. When Atari finally saw that having a range of products (Atari TOS
compatible computers, Atari DOS compatible computers, portable computers and
video games) does not work out anymore, they decided to drop their own computer
support (end of Falcon, TT, PC and Portfolio) and solely concentrate on video
games, namely the Jaguar. Sega did just the same when the Saturn did not sell
very well. They dropped their support for basically every of their own system
to concentrate solely on their next project, the Dreamcast. For Atari, the
Jaguar did not succeed to rescue Atari either so they started to sell/use their
licenses to sell games on other platforms - like Tempest 2000 on the PC.
Sega, finding out that the Dreamcast does not succeed to rescue the company's
hardware platform decided to port their games to other platforms - like Sonic
Advance. Atari didn't survive this step, the last real successful project was
too long ago, the company's name had faded already and chances to engage
another project as final rescue was prevented by Jack Tramiel himself. Atari
was sold and is dead ever since.
In contrast to this, for Sega, it looks like it is working out. After a really
bad start (SegaNet, an american ISP specialised on online games, went bankrupt
pretty quickly), it looks like Sega is actually making it. Sonic on the GameBoy
and GameCube sells well, and their projects for PS2 and X-Box (obviously, they
have a contract with Micro$oft) are filling their empty accounts once again.
Certainly, Sega also was one of the most important pioneers of the video game
era and it is sad to see that now in 2002, after having produced their own
video game systems for more than 15 years now, finally leaving the hardware
business. Then again, would it have helped anyone if Sega had persisted on
their own console - and die heroically, but die after all ? If so, some company
had bought out the most important licenses of Sega anyway and used them to port
games to PS2, GameCube and X-Box just as well - Like Hasbro tried and like
Infogrames does now with the name "Atari". In that case, it doesn't change much
- besides the fact that Sega games are still Sega games.
And that's still better than no Sega at all.
End of transmission
End of the Dreamcast
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The Paranoid
of Paranoia from the Lunatic Asylum
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