I made my case, the other side made theirs. Leo remained undecided. Then I played my trump card. I left the office, walked across the street to Toys-R-Us, dropped just over $200 (less than the price of the PS2) and returned carrying a retail Dreamcast and two games, Sonic Adventure and Jet Grind Radio, arguably the best games available at the time. My plan was simple: I'd walk back in, hijack an editing terminal, display the awesomeness that was Sega's next-gen console, let Leo soak in its awesome sauce for a bit, then hit him with the clincher: He could take it home. No big, I'd grab another. But if he wanted a PS2, he'd have to wait until Christmas, or more likely, the following spring. Bing, bam, boom. Point, winner. It couldn't possibly go wrong.
It went wrong. While I was gone, the rest of the team had pulled out the big guns. They snagged a review model of the PS2 from the product lab, sat Leo in a chair in the conference room and popped in the DVD of The Matrix. Then, as he watched bits of granite flying around in slow motion, while gun-toting uber geeks wearing black leather jackets shot up the joint, they hit him with their clincher: He was watching the movie on the cheapest DVD player in existence. Oh, and it also played games. Bing, bam, boom. Point, winner. By the time I returned, purchases in hand, it was all over. I'd lost, and so had Sega. (It's hard to argue with the bank lobby scene.)
I clutched my Dreamcast to my chest and nursed a single, salty tear as the rest of the office slowly turned their backs on Sega and their wonderful little machine. This would be a scene repeated the world over.
***
A month later, when the PS2 finally launched, the Dreamcast had ironically become harder to find. Shipments had slowed, and stocks were slow to be replenished. It was as if the orders weren't even being placed, much less filled. A few months later, the games, too, began to slide into oblivion, and the Dreamcast sections at every local store dwindled away to nothing. In 1999, Sega had launched with the best machine and the most high-quality games anyone had ever seen. They had a well-supported platform which was easy to program for and offered an abundance of after-market options and services. They had, in other words, a first-rate game console, launched perfectly and supported flawlessly. Nothing, so it seemed, could go wrong. And yet it did. Sony beat them just by showing up to the party, and by the time Sega pulled the plug, only 10 million Dreamcasts had been manufactured, an estimated half of which still sat in warehouses and on store shelves.
At first glance, it doesn't make any sense, and considering only the machine, its capability and wide appeal, it doesn't. But the problems with Sega's machine were legion, and most had nothing to do with the Dreamcast at all.
For one thing, Sega launched an online-capable machine and attendant internet service at exactly the worst possible time. It was the first of its kind, and in a vacuum, that would have mattered. Around the turn of the century, however, the internet was a volatile place to be doing business, especially as a service provider. Internet use and online play were catching on in a big way, but so was broadband. Sega's inclusion of a 56k modem in the Dreamcast rendered it obsolete off the shelf, forcing users to upgrade the machine with a pricey broadband adapter or live with a less-than-fast dial-up connection. This created a wide disparity in connectivity speeds to the SegaNet online arena, punishing players who stuck with the onboard 56k, which was most of them, and introduced a measure of confusion to what was really the most intuitive and easy to install internet service going. Still, early reviews of both the SegaNet service and the games playable on it were largely ... well, glowing.
