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What has a 200-MHz processor, a Windows OS, a modem, a keyboard, and a CD-ROM drive? Nope, it's not the latest Pentium II PC - it's Dreamcast, Sega's new game console.
Dreamcast, which went on sale for $250 in Japan November 20 and will début stateside in fall 1999 with a $100 million marketing campaign, is the first of a new breed. Along with the next PlayStation and Motorola's Blackbird, the box will vie for domination of the $7 billion game market and test consumer interest in multipurpose entertainment platforms.
Dreamcast's ability to manage 3 million polygons per second makes it the most powerful console on the market, leaving even a high-end PC in the dust. In Japan, a partnership with WebTV lets Dreamcast players send email, browse the Web, and shop online. Game developers are signing on in droves, with 45 titles already in the works. "Dreamcast is a system that, on paper, can hardly fail," says John Davison, editor in chief of Electronic Gaming Monthly. "Pretty much every developer I've spoken to in the past couple of months is completely enamored with the thing." And that bodes well for a company now Number Three to rivals Sony and Nintendo.
Motorola is plunging into the market, too, with plans for a set-top chipset that, thanks to ProjectX technology, will handle not only games, Web browsing, and ecommerce, but DVD movies as well. It's what James J. Farrell of Motorola's Media Processing and Platforms Division calls "all singing, all dancing."
So what are the chances for multipurpose entertainment platforms? History is littered with flops: 3DO, Pippin, the network computer. Farrell still isn't sweating it: "We've worked out a load of technology issues our predecessors didn't. We've learned from their mistakes."
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