My First Dreamcast Encounter

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June 27th, 2012

Posted in Features

This will be my first article for our website, It’s Still Thinking.

I remember the day I turned six, and walked out onto my back deck in summer of 2001. I was having a Dragon Ball themed party, because it (along with Sonic) was my favorite thing in the whole world. I had owned a Sega Genesis, a gift from my cousin who is the other editor of this site, and fell in love with Sonic at a very young age. But until this birthday, I had never seen any new games since the Genesis era and did not know how much they had progressed. It all changed that day, when after all my preceding presents, my parents pulled out a Sega Dreamcast from behind their chair.

The first game I immediately recognized they gave me was Sonic Adventure 2, and they had told me it was just released. Out of pure joy and excitement, I sprinted to my basement and had my dad help me hook up the system to the TV and I placed the game right into the tray the second I could. I saw the Dreamcast startup screen, with the dot bouncing on all the letters, then spiraling out; and I will never forget how cool I thought that it was. When the game started up, all I remember is a feeling in my body that I didn’t quite understand. As I saw Sonic jump from the helicopter and go “riding” down the hill in the highly detailed city, I couldn’t fathom what I was seeing. As a child, I didn’t quite understand the technicals of what was happening, all I knew was that I was playing a Sonic game in which you didn’t move sideways, but moved forward, and I remember nothing but joy when I saw it. I was feeling joy, bewilderment, and awe because I had never seen anything like it.

After playing a few levels of Sonic, I moved over to some of the other games I got, specifically Fur Fighters. This was the first introduction to a shooting game I ever had, as I didn’t even know they really existed. I instantly fell in love with the game, and it is one of those games that my connection hasn’t broke with since. I remember specifically playing “King Solomon’s Fluff,” the level that is based in an ancient civilization and has many secrets to it. I mastered that level. I would always grab the Freeze Gun and take out anyone who stepped in my way. It was these memories, that stuck to me, and made me feel connected to the console.

After a few hours of playing many different games (an extravaganza for my age) I finally had to go somewhere with my parents, and was devastated that I had to leave the system. But one thing I can recall profoundly, is me going to bed that night, with nothing running through my head but flashes of Sonic, with City Escape behind him; Nightmare lunging his massive sword at the enemies; and shooting other animals as Tweek the Dragon. All I could think about was going to my basement as soon as I woke up the next morning to go right back to playing. I had established a connection to a console that hadn’t happened to me before, and it felt as if it could never be broken.