Dreamcast: Year One - A Review

Dreamcast: Year One by Andrew J Dickinson is a love letter. A one hundred and ten page love letter to be sure but a heartfelt one too, and if you’ve read my rambling piece about Sega’s final home console here, you can already guess as to why I bought this book. An unofficial telling of the console’s first year, I can honestly say that anyone who is a fan of the console (or videogaming history in general) should pick up a copy as soon as they can. Yes, it’s that good.

An A5 softback, this is a good quality publication with a glossy finish. Screenshots are well presented and the artwork is well matched to the topic. Overall, there is an air of quality about it and at £10 for the physical copy, feels good value too.

Beginning with the background to the genesis (see what I did there...) of Sega’s home consoles of the Nineties, Dickinson guides us neatly through the minefield of company politics and competitors in the home console market of the period to the eventual launch of the 128-bit wonder in Japan, North America, Europe and Australasia. For me, this was much like re-watching Death on the Nile – you know the story beats (if not quite remembering the specific plot points) and whilst you know how it ends, the story still has that car crash fascination that makes it hard to turn away from. Dickinson’s telling of the tale (the Dreamcast, not Death on the Nile) makes it all the more engrossing.

Next up are the interviews, and what a selection they are. Starting with former Sega of America COO Bernie Stoller, you get an on-the-spot measure of the challenge Sega faced when trying to get the machine into players homes. The conflict between Sega of America and Sega of Japan is laid bare and I learned a few new things reading through Stoller’s answers. The following three interviews cover the UK magazine scene of the period, with Caspar Field (DC-UK), Ed Lomas (Official Dreamcast Magazine UK) and Dave Kelsall (Official Saturn Magazine UK). These are revealing interviews of how gaming magazines operated in their heyday – and how Heath Robinson some of the production kit was! As noted in the book, at a time when titles like the Official Playstation Magazine had a circulation knocking on 500,000 copies per month (!), times were certainly different and part of me started feeling very nostalgic to those days of anticipation for the next issue of whatever mag I was into at the time. What you do get from this trio is the passion each brought to their job, and I can certainly say for DC-UK, that passion was obvious when reading each issue. The final interview is with Tom Charnock who runs the largest online community for the console, The Dreamcast Junkyard. This is a fan point of view piece and I cannot disagree with the gentleman’s thoughts at all.

The next section is a set of retrospectives (of titles both good and bad) that cover a good range of games (my favourite being Toy Commander which, at the time, simply blew me away with it’s graphical style and tongue-in-cheek gameplay). We also get a number of mini-pieces from Kickstarter backers about their most memorable games, which is a nice little touch.

Finally, we have the games list: every title launched in the console’s first year with box art and region specific release dates where applicable. Flicking through these pages made me realise just how many of these games I actually got to play at the time! Where the time and money came from, I have not a clue, but there were some good memories to enjoy from that section alone.

Naturally, since this is Year One, there is the promise of a Year Two publication and I for one will be supporting the Kickstarter for that book when it is announced. As per the update on the first book’s Kickstarter page (28/02/20) the second book should get a funding launch in May/June this year with a delivery date about the same time next year. In the meantime, you can (and should) buy this one. With the current Corvid-19 situation, only the digital pdf version is available at present (tweet from the author 17/03/20) but at a reduced price of £5, which is excellent value. Hopefully, physical copies will be available for those who want one when circumstances permit.

So there you have it, Dreamcast: Year One. A superlative look at one of the most underrated and under-appreciated home consoles ever released and a tome for any videogame fan’s library, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. You can keep up with the author via Twitter here, where you'll also find details about ordering a digital copy of this fine tome.