Friday, September 5, 2025

I’m back from vacation so I’m back at it here. I thought today I’d try something a little different and talk about some consumer technology from the 1990s.

Item 1: a link

For people of a certain age and lack of social skills, the Sega Dreamcast was an iconic video game console – which is not to say a good one. As the New York Times reports, it was a bit of a mess and, indeed, it basically destroyed Sega as an international combatant in the video game wars.

Most Xbox games are also available on the PlayStation these days, and Nintendo has long since stopped trying to compete directly with Sony and Microsoft. But in 2000, the video game console wars were cutthroat, and about to produce their biggest casualty: Sega.

The Dreamcast was the earliest entrant in a generation of video game consoles that would eventually include the GameCube, the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox. The first console with a built-in modem, the Dreamcast was ahead of its time in some ways. But it was behind in others (it could not play DVDs), and by spring 2001, with Sega losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, it was discontinued. Sega has been out of the console business ever since.

To look back at the Dreamcast 25 years later is to see a collection of paths not taken and possibilities deferred. It is an alternate version of what 21st-century gaming might have looked like, had things gone differently.

The Dreamcast was Sega’s follow-up to the Sega Saturn, which was boring and a commercial flop, and I guess Sega decided to just really go for it with this one. It had the aforementioned modem, and hardware capable of almost matching the quality of arcade games at a time when that was a big deal. But it also had some very gimmicky features, like a memory card with a little screen that you plugged into a controller – but you could also take it out of the controller and play (crappy) games directly on the memory card. If you squint, you can see hints of the Nintendo Wii U (which was also a big flop, but set the stage for the Nintendo Switch, which has gone on to flourish).

Click on through to read more about it (and here’s a nice retrospective written on the console’s 25th anniversary last year), but as far as bold tech concepts that sounded good on paper but didn’t quite find their market, the Dreamcast is up there for me with the Apple Newton, Google Glass, the Rabbit R1, and of course Color Star’s Color World. Also, as of 2022, you can play Mario Kart on it.

Item 2: a list

Plug and Socket Types, Ranked:

1. Type K
2. Type A
3. Type B
4. Type E
5. Type F
6. Type C
7. Type I
8. Type L
9. Type D
10. Type G
11. Type H
12. Type J
13. Type N
14. Type M

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Pareidolia

Her daughter exclaimed, “Mommy, that cloud looks like Nana!” Esther replied, patiently, “No, dear. You’re just experiencing pareidolia.”

Item 5: a photograph

See ya!

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