[crims0n]

What a legend. The Dreamcast in particular was a work of art too ahead of its time to be fully appreciated. It was the first console with support for broadband, way back in 2000. For context, AOL dialup peaked around this time. Spec-wise, it traded blows with the PS2 (better GPU, slower CPU) despite releasing around 18 months earlier.

The VMUs that plugged into the controllers were another highlight capturing the zeitgeist at the time, where everyone was into Tamagotchis and other little LCD toys. Everything about that console was a joy, shame it didn't do better in the market.

[philistine]

Hideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated CD, which was shockingly easy.

While a Playstation needed a special chip to run pirated discs, a vanilla Dreamcast could play any pirated CD you could throw at it. It was Game Over for Dreamcast 18 months after it was released, pirated discs had destroyed the market, and Hideki Sato was responsible.

Source: https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/

[alexjplant]

There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches... I could go on, but pirated discs wasn't it. If anything the lack of DVD playback was a bigger factor.

> Hideki Sato was responsible.

I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole (on a system without pervasive OTA updates, no less) or why you think it necessary to do so in a thread about his death. Did you lose your job because of the failure of the Dreamcast or something?

[glimshe]

I don't buy it. NES and Atari 2600 piracy were widespread yet they were successful. Same for Nintendo DS and even the PlayStation in some markets.

[mjevans]

IMO there was one other fatal mistake. Dialup internet was also at and passing it's peek. This was the moment when anyone serious about connecting to anything wanted at least DSL if not one of those fast new 'Cable modem' connections.

Today people would think someone is an alien for releasing a console or handheld that didn't support wireless (ethernet) connectivity in at least some way. In that era, it's shocking that a communications module wasn't at least an optional swap in to allow for a selection between a standard modem or a standard (hopefully easy to source) ethernet card. Heck if there were an 'OS module' that games had to call down to it might even obfuscate the difference between dialup, lan, and later wifi modules.

[pjmlp]

On the other hand, that is one of the reasons why Dreamcast has such an active homebrew community nowadays.