(NOTE: This article was first published in November 2008 and is republished here to coincide with the DC’s US release, ten years ago today)

This week marks the tenth anniversary of Sega Dreamcast’s Japanese launch, a console whose passing I mourn with a deep and enduring sense of loss.

What the platform lacked in profitable software it more than made up with bold innovation and pitch perfect ports of the latest arcade releases of the late 90′s and early 2000s.

This was the system on which Sega’s various development teams demonstrated unrestrained creativity and inventiveness. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine any other system, past, preset or future, where an idea like Segagaga might blossom to market.

With that in mind the Dreamcast-branded canvas bag from GDC 2000 pictured above is pretty much the saddest thing. As an antidote to the half-truth tragedy of the bag’s slogan, here are ten of my favourite Dreamcast games. If you’ve never played them why not visit eBay this week and pick up a few. There’s no better time to investigate and celebrate one of gaming’s golden eras.

Jet Set Radio

Rollerskates, primary colour spraycans, and sugar-rush hip-hop, this is the game that birthed the cel-shading visual craze in gaming, one whose impact can be felt all the way up to tomorrow’s release of Prince of Persia.

It’s a crime game in that you terrorise the police with your street art, but this is a Children’s BBC and bubblegum brand of terrorism. And when you manage to chain together the architecture of Shibuya, jumping and sliding from rail to bus shelter to rooftop there’s a sense of flowing accomplishment that betters even the most slick and graceful moments in Mirror’s Edge.

Bangaioh

The recent DS sequel is a microtask reduction of gaming’s first principles and perfect for handheld play but it was the original console game where the love affair first started.

You control a giant robot, ten pixels high who can deploy 1000 screen filling missiles at the touch of a button. Part puzzle game, part shoot ‘em up, part fruit machine, it boasts a vibrancy and strength of character rare to videogames.

Allegedly, Treasure’s Japanese team translated the game into English themselves. When the mangled Japlish script arrived at Western publisher Conspiracy Entertainment’s offices they thought it was so funny they decided to leave it unmodified.

Cosmic Smash

This is squash, as played in a Tron nano-universe. While Cosmic Smash bears many visual similarities to that other Dreamcast work of abstract wonder, Rez, it’s underlying mechanics are much closer to air hockey and Virtua Tennis than interactive Kandinsky.

The game is a marvel of graphical restraint, the uncluttered menus, metro system game structure and sense of purpose narrow and tight in a way few games can dare to be today.

Cool Cool Toon

Created by SNK, a developer best known for its grim and technical beat ‘em series, King of Fighters, Cool Cool Toon was an unexpected burst of saccharine J-pop kawaii-ness.

It shares a few similarities with the excellent rhythm action dance game, Bust a Groove, but the eccentric character designs and pink napalm colouring take it somewhere wholly distinct.

Crazy Taxi

Many of the Dreamcast’s games enjoyed follow-up sequels that developed and extended the core idea. But there’s a simplicity and purity in the first release of Crazy Taxi, a game in which you deliver passengers around a city against the clock, that was lost in subsequent iterations.

As the arcade scene chokes and dies in front of us, there’s a game design ideology of short, sharp bursts of intense fun being lost in favour of drawn out epics. Crazy Taxi is one of the very best examples of bright, short-form inventiveness.

Rez

A game that inspired me, for better or worse to write this. It’s an over-written, sometimes fawning appraisal of the experience, but I stand by it.

“Even if you do ignore all the peripheral highbrow talk of Russian abstract painters and neurological foibles or the lowbrow hand-muffled giggling about a third-party sex toy peripheral and its rhythmic pulsing, the strong, assured core of this extraordinary game is somehow more than its constituent parts.

Yes, you sit on an esoteric rollercoaster picking off line-art cubes as they streak by, but perform that kind of critical reduction and you’ll not only miss Rez’s destination but you’ll also ruin the journey. And in Rez, the journey is everything.”

Sega Bass Fishing

This is the kind of curio that foreshadowed much of the gimmicky appeal of the contemporary Wii library, but who can forget the first time they saw the clunky, white and orange fishing rod peripheral the game came bundled with.

Of course, execution is everything and while Sega’s bright and breezy interpretation of bass fishing bears little in common with its slow-paced inspiration, the game is all the better for it.

Samba de Amigo

Another good game made brilliant by its peripheral as evidenced by the recent lacklustre Wii remake. So much of the game’s appeal comes from the feel of the instrument in your hand, the way the beads sound in the room as their weight shifts forwards and back in time with your movements that removing that part of the experience would always irrevocably damage the experience.

That the maraca peripheral is so accurate is testament to Sega’s expertise with arcade hardware. That the rictus-grin monkey who shakes them on screen is so mesmerising is testament to Sega’s flamboyant, often iconic character designs of the time.

Ikaruga

There’s a possibility that I like the idea of Ikaruga more than the reality, but either way this is an important and impressive videogame made by an implausibly small team. At the time of its re-release onto XBLA earlier this year I wrote this of the game:

“While broadening the definition of the genre, Treasure has also then, in a sense, narrowed it. This is a game of relentless, near-clinical precision, built for repeat-repeat-repeat-till you-get-it play that it will stifle players who don’t fully commit to developing and perfecting a strategy. Seasoned shmup players are often lukewarm towards the game because you can’t simply fall back on sharp reflexes and instinct alone. Success takes planning and practice.

Whereas in Radiant Silvergun the colour-matching mechanics were totally optional, allowing the game to be played as a straight shoot-’em-up, here understanding and mastering the core idea is the key to success, a decision that splits the audience neatly in two: black, white, black, white.”

Shenmue

Earlier this week my friend David McCarthy referred to the “modest beauty of Shenmue’s routine”, a perfect summary of this Japanese life-sim/ murder mystery’s pace and ambiance. It is, of course, the first entry to a series that contributed to Sega’s bowing out of the console hardware race, it’s giant snowballing budget and ambition eventually outstripping all feasibility.

Nevertheless, this is a game that offers a extraordinary snapshot of a developer struggling to break free of gaming’s previous constraints and in doing so, helping to define the new ones.