What Sega's Dreamcast Had in Common With 1920s French Architecture

If we want to know why Sega's Shenmue was a multi-million dollar flop, might we find a useful metaphor in early 20th century French urbanism?

That's one of the thought-provoking questions pondered in Dreamcast Worlds: A Design History, a new book by media historian Zoya Street due out in hardcover on September 9 – 14 years to the day after the Dreamcast's North American launch. A thoughtful, well-researched look back at Sega's final home videogame console, Dreamcast Worlds discusses the short life of the platform, pulled from shelves less than two years after that 1999 debut.

One of the stories told in the book concerns the fate of a series that has had Dreamcast fans hot and bothered since its untimely death: Shenmue, originally released in 1999.

Shenmue was the magnum opus of Yu Suzuki, the designer behind huge hits like Space Harrier and Virtua Fighter. A sprawling adventure game with graphics that were far more realistic than anything else available at the time, it cost an unprecedented $47 million to develop in an era when the best, most advanced games of the time cost about $3 to $5 million. Although the series was originally intended to keep going for 16 chapters, Sega killed it after Shenmue II.

In Dreamcast Worlds, Street explains the failure of Shenmue by analyzing the flawed mentality of many game developers at the time. He deftly connects this with the work of the Swiss-born architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, popularly known as Le Corbusier.

"It's a real shame that games studios, publishers, and games education courses often treat their practice like this technical thing rather than something that is closely bound up in history and culture and craft," Street told WIRED. "The idea that you can fix everything with technology is still very dominant, and Le Corbusier's example teaches us that this is quite dangerous."

The relevant passage from Dreamcast Worlds follows.

Like the game developers at Sega in the late 1990s, Le Corbusier loved technology and science. In the 1920s, he imagined an urban future full of towering skyscrapers navigated by millions of motocars, a civilised world full of clean, minimalist apartments and enormous walls of glass, not because any of these things were necessary, but because they were technically possible. He foresaw that technology would create a more connected world, and sought to plan cities that were ready to facilitate those connections by devising rational transport systems and clean, organised residential blocks.

Le Corbusier’s influence can be seen in most major cities of the world in the form of concrete, glass high-rise apartment buildings, and colossal intercity freeways. In many ways, the future he imagined did become a reality. But his technocratic designs have contributed to urban isolation, the breakdown of local communities and the bulldozing and whitewashing of communities and cultures.

The problem was that networks often break some connections even as they facilitate others.

The freeways that Le Corbusier designed went over or underneath his high-rise tower blocks for the urban poor, without any entry or exit points on the way. In his scheme, the freeways were to allow the middle class suburban residents to commute into their city jobs. Separated from the bustling economic hubs to which those freeways led, unemployment grew in those high-rises.

Le Corbusier must have known that poor people had to get to work too, just as Yu Suzuki must have known that Shenmue had to make more money than it cost. But both designers were more focused on what the new technologies of their day allowed them to build than how they actually connected to other. Yu Suzuki wanted to build the technological marvel that the Dreamcast was capable of, not acknowledging that the Dreamcast didn’t connect his game to enough consumers for it to have any hope of making enough money to be commercially worthwhile.

Although Dreamcast Worlds occasionally focuses on the financial or human angles of the Dreamcast's legacy, it is ultimately a book about virtual architecture. It deals with a time when designers were only just beginning to explore how to properly create spaces for players with both depth and verticality, and in doing so created a discipline: 3-D level design.

Street focuses primarily on three of Sega's Dreamcast games – Skies of Arcadia, Phantasy Star Online, and Shenmue – precisely because each represents a starkly different take on three-dimensional world design. Arcadia had verticality, Phantasy Star's spaces needed to facilitate social interaction, and Shenmue was a open-world sandbox game.

Despite his criticisms, Street says he's so interested in level design partly because there's already so much impressive work being done in the area. He points to recent games like Dear Esther and Proteus, entirely focused on "narrative architecture," as examples of recent games that have stretched the boundaries of what 3-D level design can accomplish.

More than a decade after the fact, the games discussed in Dreamcast Worlds are already showing their age. The book includes screenshots of the games discussed, and it's occasionally jarring to jump from Street's engaging and intricate descriptions of the worlds to pictures of the real things, which look rudimentary next to modern games.

Skies of Arcadia in particular is almost hard to look at these days, but Street is quick to defend it.

"If you compare these games to some others that came out around the same time, they hold up pretty well," he says. "I don't think that those early polygon spaces will be forgotten, because it's actually really enjoyable to see how they deal creatively with their constraints."