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Former Sega Prez Discusses the Dreamcast's Failure
An anonymous reader writes "Former Sega of America president Bernie Stolar speaks out about the man who ousted him, EA's attempt to monopolize sports games on the Dreamcast, why the Dreamcast failed, and a legendary prank he pulled against Sony. 'I fought to have a modem on the platform. Maybe it was early — who knows. But I fought for a modem in the beginning because I wanted to have massively multiplayer online games on that system.' When asked about the console's online capabilities not catching on with consumers, he said, 'It doesn't surprise me, because there wasn't software tied into it. They were not building and going after software to start that. I mean, I was looking for developers and content providers to start doing that. Sega did not do that after I left. They just abandoned it.'"
Hype? What hype? Here in Switzerland the kids often thought it was the PS2 or X-Box (having no idea about their actual release dates). You need to know that Sega, as far as I know, was never all that popular in Europe. I don't know about the rest of the world, but here nobody even knew they'd made a new console.
Hell, we had to look on the internet (without youtube) for the actual DC commercials since we didn't have even one around here (since Switzerland has German TV stations, I feel safe to say in all German speaking countries, there was a marketing black hole when it comes to that piece of hardware).
The games were great, the hardware was advanced and powerful. Just... nobody knew that.