Several years ago my older brother brought home a Sega Dreamcast.  At the time we were strictly a Nintendo family and bringing in a non-cartridged system was unheard of.  But there it was, in all its glory, clad in white with some sort of controller (if you could even call it one) that looked like a mini defibrillator.  I wondered why he brought in competition for our N64.  I was quite content with Starfox multiplayer skirmishes and GoldenEye trip mines; that is, until he opened up his CD binder.  In it was an excess amount of burned CDs with sharpie all over it.  Welcome to modding.

Many said the Dreamcast was ahead of its time.  Some called it the first true multiplayer experience because of its online capabilities.  Whatever you want to call it, the Dreamcast was Sega's last stand into the console business.

But what if Dreamcast was launched later? The Playstation 2 launched shortly a year after, Xbox hadn't made its debut yet, and the GameCube was released a year after PS2.  Critics and fans alike attribute the death of Dreamcast to Sony.

Intitally the Dreamcast made a stunning debut, with 500,000 units sold in two weeks.  "By hitting the one million units sold landmark, it is clear that the Sega Dreamcast consumer has moved beyond the hardcore gamer and into the mass market," said Chris Gilbert, senior vice president of sales, Sega of America.  With such a high amount of units sold, you would think that this console's staying power was nailed down.  Unfortunately, only two years after it was released, Sega decided to jump ship and leave the console biz forever.