Dreamcast Launches
For every console, launch day is the most important day in a console's life. Its a day to meet consumer expectations, to see if the hype was worth it. It is the day to make a big splash in the media, to generate as much buzz as possible for the console. Those first impressions of a console happen at launch and are extremely important to do well, as a badly executed launch can cast a lingering shadow over a console's reputation with gamers, the gaming press and third party developers. Sega already had a terrible launch with the North American launch of their previous console, the Sega Saturn in 1995. Other examples of badly done launches which hurt that console's success were the XBOX One's launch in 2013-2014 which was greatly hurt by the mandated inclusion of the Kinect as well as being online at all times and the Wii U.
Learning from the mediocre to awful launch of the Saturn, Sega went above and beyond, especially in North America for their Dreamcast. This page will cover the launch of the Dreamcast in the three major regions: Japan for its November 27th, 1998 launch, North America for its famous 9/9/99 launch and finally Europe for its October 14th, 1999 launch. These three pages will cover everthing from the building up of hype for the Dreamcast, to their launch line-ups, the advertisements used in each region as well as things like the original price of the console at launch.