10 Best Next-Gen Reveals In Gaming History
5. The Dreamcast Makes Arcades Obsolete
The student had finally become the master.
When the Dreamcast launched, gone were the days of wanting to go to the arcade to play the best available version of the game. Instead, the best version of any game would be available for play on home consoles now.
No game system demonstrated that fact better than the Sega Dreamcast which launched with Soul Calibur, a pristine fighting game that looked even better on TV than it did at the arcade. It even had tons more modes that were never available in the cabinet. The Dreamcast would go on to have other arcade classics like Hydro Thunder, Crazy Taxi, Mortal Kombat Gold, Marvel Vs Capcom 2, and Street Fighter III Third Strike.
With the Dreamcast not just having arcade-perfect ports, but ones that went beyond what the machine was ever capable of, arcades finally began to drift away. The couch had finally supplanted it as the premiere place for multiplayer gaming, not just with the screen splitting but also for online gaming, with the Dreamcast being the first console to have a modem built in.
While Sega's final foray into the console market was short on success it was certainly high on innovation, and the industry owes a lot to the Dreamcast.