Dreamcast 25th Anniversary

Five years ago I went all out on Dreamcast coverage for its 20th anniversary in the U.S. and now I don't have a lot leftover that I can post for its 25th anniversary. Of course, it originally launched in 1998 in Japan so today is, again, a U.S. launch anniversary as Sega's final game console debuted here on 9-9-99. I'm going to post a few random scans I didn't use in 2019 and I'll provide links to the 20th anniversary posts below as well. 

From the June 2001 issue of Next Generation magazine is an article about the passing of Isao Okawa. He became president of Sega in 2000 and was the person who made the call to discontinue the Dreamcast, effectively turning Sega into a software-only company. Okawa-san actually wanted Sega to drop hardware before the Saturn launched and helped keep the company afloat using $500 million of his own money. The two other scans are interviews with Peter Moore (then Sega of America president) and Tetsuya Mizuguchi, producer of Space Channel 5 (plus Sega Rally Championship and later Rez).

All the Dreamcast posts from the week of 9-9-19:

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary: NFL 2K

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary: Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine

Gaming Ads: Dreamcast

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary: Press Materials

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary: It's Thinking...

If you're a Dreamcast fan and new to the blog, you might also enjoy this post about Shenmue! Lastly, it's worth noting that Limited Run Games announced a variety of Dreamcast merchandise today and has begun taking pre-orders for Dreamcast trading cards.

E3: The Show That Was (Next Generation #44 - August 1998)

While the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been canceled the past few years, last December the Entertainment Software Association not only announced that E3 would not happen in 2024, but that it was gone for good. Had there been an E3 2024, this would have been the week for it and many game companies are still using this time to hold presentations, as yesterday was the Xbox Showcase and earlier today there was Ubisoft Forward. I've always enjoyed the week of E3 and have written or posted about E3 many times since I started the blog in 2017. I'm not sure if this week will be my final posts in regards to E3 as I've got a stack of E3 show dailies that I could one day scan, and I might do at least something with some of them later this week. In any case, I think I am running out of E3-related magazine articles to scan. This article, appropriately (for 2024 at least) titled, "E3: The Show That Was," is part of Next Generation magazine's "Intelligence" column from issue #44 and it's not 100% E3, though I did scan all nine pages of the section. 

It's always interesting to see if games that made a good showing actually ended up being successful. Next Generation thought the 1998 exhibition had a lot of promising games and not too many disappointments. It viewed Trespasser, a Jurassic Park game, as one of the best of the show but when it came time to review the game, the magazine only gave it two stars out of five. 

A system likely long forgotten by now, there is a page about VM Labs' "Project X" which would not release until 2000 as Nuon. It also isn't exactly a platform per se, instead it is a technology that was incorporated into select DVD players that added game functionality. The company's CEO thought things were going quite well in 1998 with some strong interest from third-party developers. However, only eight games officially released for Nuon. Also, this issue was published a few months before the Dreamcast released in Japan, and there are a couple spots where an unnamed shooter is mentioned, even stating that it could possibly be a pack-in for the console. That shooter, later titled Geist Force, never released.

X-Men Video Game Previews & Reviews

During the '90s I read a lot of X-Men comic books and watched the animated series Saturday mornings on Fox. Disney is reviving the show, titled X-Men '97, on March 20th so I decided to put together some X-Men coverage leading up to its debut. I'll have at least three posts, maybe four, that cover some video games, television appearances, and toys. I scanned quite a bit of coverage from video game magazines but I'm only using some of it in this post.

The scans include a GamePro "ProView" of The Uncanny X-Men (NES), a preview and review of X-Men (Genesis), a preview and review of X:Men: Mutant Apocalypse (SNES), a preview of X-Men 2: Clone Wars (Genesis), a review of X-Men: Children of the Atom (PlayStation), and reviews of the computer games X-Men and X-Men II: The Fall of the Mutants. For Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) reviews I place the review next to the writers that appear on the first page of the column to show who wrote each one. There is also editing on the reviews that appear across multiple pages and sometimes you'll see review scores and or screenshots for other games as well.

GamePro - March 1990

        EGM #44 - March 1993                              EGM #46 - May 1993

EGM #65 - December 1994

                                EGM #65 - December 1994                    Next Generation #40 - April 1998

Video Games & Computer Entertainment - September 1990 & June 1991