Sega Dreamcast at 20: the futuristic games console that came too soon

In 1998, the Sega Dreamcast changed the whole face of console and games design, but it was haunted by an unbeatable competitor

The Dreamcast looked like nothing else out there. A lighter box than the uniform black or grey, four joypad ports, a bizarre controller with a memory card that had its own screen and worked as a separate miniature games console. The name - a portmanteau of Dream and Broadcast - was strangely ethereal for a games console (Sega had apparently gone through 5,000 possibile monikers to get here). When a prototype was shown to the press in the summer of 1998, there was no Sega logo. This was a new dawn. This was the future.

Sega was the perennial underdog in the video game console market. When it launched its first consoles - the SG-1000 and Master System - in the early 1980s, it was dealing with a competitor that ruled 96% of the market via its ubiquitous Nintendo Entertainment System. Back then, people didn't say they were playing on a console. They said: "I'm playing Nintendo." The brand was utterly dominant.