It’s been a quarter-century since theDreamcastgraced the world. That’s 25 years sinceShenmuepioneered the open-world city, 25 years since the arcade experience was accurately actualized in the home, and 25 years since the internet became feasible on a game console.
And that latter feat is why this machine is forever attributed as being ‘ahead of its time’; there’s nothing more enduringly futuristic as the internet, and for both better and worse, Sega’s efforts here changed the medium forever.
DreamPi Lets Players Still Enjoy Dreamcast Games Today
Speaking with engineer Luke Benstead, creator of the DreamPi system, alongside gaining insight from the fans, I was surprised to learn about the ways in which this unassuming little white box still remains at the forefront of innovation – even in 2024, it continues to set a precedent for the future.
When Sega’s swansong product launched in 1998, it was the first console to feature a built-in modular modem. The Dreamcast might not have been the very first internet-capable system, but it was the first to make online gaming on a console widely accessible.
To this day, people are still shredding rubber in Daytona USA and fragging each other in Quake 3. Dreamcastlive.net, closely linked with Dreamcast’s biggest forum, Dreamcast Talk, is where players coordinate setting up matches acrossthe 30+ available online games.
“The community is a big draw,” says u/Realistic-Cloud on Reddit. “Retro online gaming is such a small, niche community that you’re highly unlikely to run into griefers/****-talkers/cheaters – at least from my experience. Everyone has gone through the effort to get set up and have a good time.”
Dreamcast Pioneered Online Gaming
Until recently, though, Benstead says this was more hassle than it was worth for most. “Before the DreamPi, you had two options – you could spend a lot of money on a BBA [Broadband adapter] and only play a couple of games, or you could set up a ‘PC-DC server’ which was a way of using Windows or Linux as a pass-through to connect to the internet,” he explains. “The DreamPi is effectively that but with a few extra niceties built-in – stuff like dial-tone generation and automatic answering.”
Anyone can download the DreamPi program for free, which then needs to be installed onto a Raspberry Pi microcomputer to function (you’ll also need a couple ofother bits and bobsto get up and running).
Benstead started working on the project when he was on paternity leave in 2015, and he had everything operational within a year. He tells me the initial impetus to keep the system online was a reluctance to give up on its most legendary RPG: “Originally [it] was PSO [Phantasy Star Online] – a community started to build around that. When the DreamPi triggered the race to bring back the other online games, that community just grew.”
Eventually, every console is expected to transcend obsolesce for a new lease of life as a piece of retro hardware, yet it’s difficult to anticipate anything from the Xbox 360 onwards ever entering that space in the traditional sense. Where the internet was merely a cool feature for Dreamcast, modern systems continue to form a digital symbiosis. It’s clear a large part of the draw in returning to that era is the encapsulation of a time when anything seemed possible – the internet as the most exciting thing anyone had ever seen instead of the unsettling uncertainty many feel it represents today.
Keeping The Dreamcast Alive Means Holding Onto The Past
Despite the Dreamcast’s swift commercial failure, it represented an industry on the precipice of a technological revolution, and its dedicated community today has managed to maintain the excitement that surrounded the new millennium.
It’s a rare preservation of the internet of the past. Where most of retro gaming nostalgically preserves a feeling, this also preserves a moment. For many, it uniquely represents a line in the sand between gaming before and gaming now. “A few years later the entire world went online and everything got bigger and prettier, but soul & creativity have pretty much gone the way of the dodo nowadays,” says u/mazonemayu about the bubble surrounding the Dreamcast today.
Considering the industry’s perceived determination to turn hardware into services, it’s easy to slump into pessimism about the physicality of gaming in the years to come. But Benstead suspects there’s still plenty of fire within the community.
“I’m continually surprised what passionate communities of developers can pull out of the bag: everything from breaking copy protection to reverse engineering and rebuilding online services. I think if there’s something worth saving, people will figure out how to save it.”
Whatever form video game preservation takes in the future, we can be certain the abilities of the fans to adapt to the increasing ethereality will be at the forefront.
