Great article Andrew. I too have this issue and though I remember getting it at the time, I guess we just took for granted that everything would come out eventually. Now look at us poring over these pages like academics scouring lost artifacts in a museum laboratory. It’s awesome!
One of my favorite topics/researching since the day Dreamcast "dies". I remember that fateful day. I worked at a Heavy Metal CD store here in Brazil a that time and a friend who had the Dreamcast said "man, SEGA is going to stop manufacturing the Dreamcast. The news came out on GameSpot, IGN." I was devastated by the news. At first I thought it was a joke for him. It all seemed very strange to me because with the non-oficial CDRs the console seemed to do very well here and from the national game magazines and the amount of new games coming out at the end of 2000/beginning of 2001 I didn't expect that. my love affair with the company had come to a possible end (a love that started at the end of 1989, when my cousin got a Master System, shortly after its launch here. I only got mine in March 1991, at the exact moment of the explosion of the third generation of consoles here in Brazil. Very late compared to Japan/US/Europe, as usual). Since that day a part of my heart was broken and I kept mourning for years :-(. After this disappointment things got worse when I bought a magazine, 2 months later that said that Soul Reaver 2 had been canceled as a consequence. And things were just getting worse. On the bright side I almost jumped for joy when I found the Evil Twin (one of the games that makes me wonder with great expectations with its screenshots in the mid-2000 previews) to sell in a store, years later (2004). For me it had been canceled and I only discovered the savior an rare European version that day. To this day I celebrate with joy with every canceled game that leaks on the internet :-)
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
Comment deleted
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Sunday, February 20, 2022
[Image]Who remembers the July 2000 issue of Official UK Dreamcast Magazine (Issue 09)? The cover was adorned with its usual demo disc, sporting demos for Resident Evil CODE: Veronica, Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding and Silver (plus an interactive tour of the Dreamarena website), but rather than a single game gracing the front as usual, brown paper was torn away to reveal the headline ‘100+ New Games: Exclusive shots and insider information the the games you’ll be playing for the next year… and beyond!’[Image]This was a bold, simple cover, aiming to reassure readers that things were all good in the world of Dreamcast, that many new games were on the horizon. Of course we all know how this story ends, but at the time we were still over 6 months away from the announcement of the DC’s discontinuation and the PlayStation 2 was already out in Japan. With more and more people choosing to wait for the launch of Sony’s sophomore system in Europe, sales were slowing and confidence was starting to wane.I recall at the time that the issue did its job. I picked it up ostensibly for the CODE: Veronica demo disc, having only just gotten a Dreamcast myself, but the promise of so many new games on the horizon certainly shored up my belief that the Dreamcast was going to be around for some time to come. Hindsight is 20/20 though, right? Sigh...[Image]Looking at the issue while doing my continued research for ‘Dreamcast: Year Two,’ almost 22 years after it was first published, I found the most interesting thing about the ‘100+ New Games’ feature to be the stats. You see, readers, I took it upon myself to start a spreadsheet and list every single game mentioned in the 22 pages of this feature (written by Ed Lomas, Warren Chrismas and Steve Owen - Ed even mentions it in my interview with him for ‘Dreamcast: Year One’). I then worked out which of the mentioned games actually released on Dreamcast, which of them released in PAL territories, if any of them were released elsewhere and whether any that didn’t release on Dreamcast had any sort of playable version in existence today.[Image]I’ll end this piece with a link to the spreadsheet for you, but first those sexy stats. Check out this bullet-pointed list of factoids that stand out all these years later:In actuality the feature mentions 153 games, although only 99 are given their own sections (of various sizes). The other 54 are listed on one page under the title ‘And There’s More...’. These were games known of, but not seen by the ODM team.Of those 153 games, 104 saw a Dreamcast release.17 of the released games were home platform exclusives, meaning they never saw release on any platform besides Dreamcast or in arcades. These are: NBA 2K1, POD: Speedzone, Illbleed, Sonic Shuffle, Super Runabout, Outtrigger, WWF: Royal Rumble, Alien Front Online, Tokyo Highway Challenge 2, Magic: The Gathering, Cannon Spike, Max Steel: Covert Missions, NFL 2K1, Super Magnetic Neo, D2, Floigan Brothers and Draconus: Cult Of The Wyrm. Who says the Dreamcast has no exclusives?!17 of the released games never ended up being released in PAL territories. These were: NBA 2K1, Illbleed, Sega Marine Fishing, World Series Baseball 2K1, Prince Of Persia: Arabian Nights, Alien Front Online, Magic: The Gathering, Seaman, Bang! - Gunship Elite, NFL Blitz 2001, Max Steel: Covert Missions, NFL 2K1, D2, Namco Museum, Demolition Racer: No Exit, Frogger 2, and Ms Pac-Man: Maze Madness.Evolution 2 was very nearly a Dreamcast exclusive, apart from a PC port released only in Taiwan.Of the 49 games from the feature that never saw release on the DC, 10 never saw the light of day on a home system at all (though Jambo! Safari and Brave Firefighters were released to arcades).A fair few of those that never saw release were due on both DC and PC, but a heist game titled Picassio started development on Dreamcast before moving to PS2 and finally GameCube before being shelved. The only one we know was only ever destined for Dreamcast in this list was Take The Bullet.The other 39 games originated on other systems or were eventually released on other platforms.Of the unreleased games in the ‘100+ New Games’ feature, 4 have some kind of version playable on Dreamcast today. You can download a fully working version of Half-Life thanks to review copies that were sent out before the completed game was ultimately pulled. Versions of Take The Bullet and Heroes of Might & Magic III have been found over the years, in various guises, though neither game is complete or fully playable. Colin McRae Rally 2.0 is known to have a version that is around 30% complete, though this isn’t available to the public (our own Tom Charnock was able to give it a go though).There are some games with either limited or no information known, such as Legend Of The Blade Masters, M.O.U.T.: Urban Warfare 2025 and Gorkamorka. It’d be great to find out more about titles like these.These are just games listed in one article too. We know there are many more games that were due to arrive on the Dreamcast but never did, however it’s very interesting to take a look back in time and see what might have been had the console's lifespan not come to such an abrupt end.[Image]See the full list of games mentioned in ‘100+ New Games’ via this link, or grab the PDF of the magazine (which we used to recreate some of the feature pages) here, and let us know which of them you would like to have seen come to fruition in the comments. If you have any information about any of these ‘lost’ games too, please hit us up!
posted by Andrew Dickinson at 10:00 on 15 Feb 2022
"Where Are They Now? Official UK Dreamcast Magazine's '100+ New Games'"
5 Comments -
Excellent, I completely missed the magazines at the time so had no idea this even existed.
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Great write up Andrew! Really amazing to see stuff like this all these years later. Alas, what could have been...
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Great article Andrew. I too have this issue and though I remember getting it at the time, I guess we just took for granted that everything would come out eventually. Now look at us poring over these pages like academics scouring lost artifacts in a museum laboratory. It’s awesome!
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
One of my favorite topics/researching since the day Dreamcast "dies". I remember that fateful day. I worked at a Heavy Metal CD store here in Brazil a that time and a friend who had the Dreamcast said "man, SEGA is going to stop manufacturing the Dreamcast. The news came out on GameSpot, IGN." I was devastated by the news. At first I thought it was a joke for him. It all seemed very strange to me because with the non-oficial CDRs the console seemed to do very well here and from the national game magazines and the amount of new games coming out at the end of 2000/beginning of 2001 I didn't expect that. my love affair with the company had come to a possible end (a love that started at the end of 1989, when my cousin got a Master System, shortly after its launch here. I only got mine in March 1991, at the exact moment of the explosion of the third generation of consoles here in Brazil. Very late compared to Japan/US/Europe, as usual). Since that day a part of my heart was broken and I kept mourning for years :-(. After this disappointment things got worse when I bought a magazine, 2 months later that said that Soul Reaver 2 had been canceled as a consequence. And things were just getting worse. On the bright side I almost jumped for joy when I found the Evil Twin (one of the games that makes me wonder with great expectations with its screenshots in the mid-2000 previews) to sell in a store, years later (2004). For me it had been canceled and I only discovered the savior an rare European version that day. To this day I celebrate with joy with every canceled game that leaks on the internet :-)
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Sunday, February 20, 2022