The American Launch - September 9th, 1999
The Launch
The next of the major Dreamcast launch regions was North America and Sega had learned from their mistakes of November 1998. It was to be one of the best console launches of all time, even the date gave a sense of magic to the launch, September 9th 1999, 9/9/99! They had also learned from the disaster of the Saturn's surprise May 1995 launch as Sega had 10 months to prepare for the September 1999 launch! For starters, Sega went all in with the advertising, spending $100 million to advertise the Dreamcast in the months leading to 9/9/99, creating massive hype but in some cases, the hype also had confusion, especially for the more cryptic Summer of 1999 ads, the "It's thinking" ads where it wasn't explained what a Dreamcast was. A selection of the Webmaster's favorite ads will be shown below!Even the print ads were strong, unlike the weird, sometimes oddly sexual Saturn ads, the Dreamcast ads were on-point!
Sega had to go through a few hoops in order to ensure that the Dreamcast launched well, the first was the retailers, in May 1995, the Saturn had a surprise launch which didn't include many retailers and was a botched launch for Sega. Sega also sold the Dreamcast at a loss for $199, C$299 in Canada, but they had intended to make up the losses with software sales and this $199 figure is a massive improvement over the $399 that the Saturn retailed at. Third party game developers were given development kits in February 1999, a massive boon to the development of new games and the bringing over of ports from other systems which was a massive problem for the hard-to-develop for Sega Saturn. With the aforementioned additional 10 months to work on getting titles for the launch, Sega ended up getting one of the most solid console launch lineups ever, to be seen below. This success meant that Sega was able to sell between 200'000 and 300'000 pre-order consoles in the months and weeks leading up to 9/9/99!
Luckily for Sega, launch day was an immense success and gamers were huge fans of the console. Within 24 hours, Sega had sold 225'132 Dreamcast consoles at the $199 retail price, netting $44'936'787 on consoles alone and a total, which includes games, controllers, VMUs and other stuff, of $97'904'618! In the next two weeks, Sega sold approximately 514'000 units and by November 4th, 1999, they had hit the 1 million units sold mark.
North American Launch Lineup
In contrast with the meager offerings that the Japanese launch had with only 4 titles for the entire launch of the Dreamcast, North America saw the Dreamcast launch with a whopping 19 titles. Key "heavy hitter" titles included games like Sonic Adventure, Sonic's much anticipated 3D game and Soul Caliber, a game praised for its amazing visuals on the Dreamcast. Three of these launch titles (Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur and NFL 2K) respectively occupy the number 1, number 2 and number 5 best selling Dreamcast game of all time slots, selling (worldwide that is) 2.5 million copies (1.27 million in the US, 440'000 in Japan and the other 790'000 likely in Europe and Canada), 1.3 million and 1.13 million respectively. Blue Stinger was supposedly available for purchase the day before the September 9th launch. While not a launch title, every Dreamcast console came with the first version of the Web Browser disc. The complete list of North American Launch titles is as follows:
| North American Launch Game Lineup | |
|---|---|
| Aero Wings | Air Force Delta |
| Blue Stinger | Expendable |
| Flag to Flag | Hydro Thunder |
| Monaco Grand Prix | Mortal Kombat Gold |
| NFL 2K | NFL Blitz 2000 |
| Pen Pen Tricelon | Power Stone |
| Ready 2 Rumble Boxing | Sonic Adventure |
| Soul Calibur | TNN MotorSports Hardcore Heat |
| Tokyo Xtreme Racer | The House of the Dead 2 |
| TrickStyle | — |
