1999

The Sega Dreamcast was, by every technical measure that mattered in 1999, the right console. Its Hitachi SH-4 processor ran at 200 MHz, its PowerVR2 GPU could deliver polygon counts that exceeded the PlayStation (106 million per second theoretical), and its built-in 56K modem made it the first home console designed from the ground up for internet connectivity. Sega's online service, Sega Net (later SegaNet), offered online multiplayer for Dreamcast games, and titles like Quake III Arena and Phantasy Star Online demonstrated that console online gaming was not a theoretical possibility but an actual, functional experience. The Dreamcast was doing in 1999 what Xbox Live would do in 2002 and receive enormous credit for.

The 9/9/99 launch in North America was a genuine spectacle. Pre-orders exceeded 300,000 units. First-day sales of $98.4 million surpassed any previous game-hardware launch record. The launch software — Soulcalibur, Soul Reaver, Sonic Adventure, NFL 2K — was the strongest launch library any console had assembled. Soulcalibur in particular received perfect scores from publications that had given 10/10 to nothing else that year, and the game's visual fidelity — smooth, high-polygon character models with fluid animation — was a genuinely stunning demonstration of what Sega's hardware could achieve.

The tragedy of the Dreamcast is that all of this was not enough. Sony's announcement of the PlayStation 2, with its DVD player and promised technical superiority, cast a shadow over Dreamcast from the moment of its launch. Third-party developers — most critically Electronic Arts, which refused to develop for the platform — waited for the PS2 rather than committing to Dreamcast. Sega's financial position, weakened by the Saturn's commercial failure, was insufficient to sustain the marketing required to maintain momentum against a competitor of Sony's resources. The Dreamcast was discontinued in North America in March 2001 after selling 9.13 million units worldwide. It was the last console Sega would ever produce.

Planescape: Torment arrived in December 1999 as an argument against every assumption that the games industry had been developing about narrative. The games market of 1999 was moving rapidly toward short-session multiplayer experiences, licensed sports games, and cinematic action titles. Planescape: Torment offered none of these things: it was an isometric RPG set in the Planescape Dungeons & Dragons setting, featuring a protagonist who could not permanently die, a 40-60 hour narrative built primarily through dialogue, and a thematic seriousness that no video game had previously approached. The central character, the Nameless One, had lived and died and been resurrected so many times that he had become an entirely different person in each life, and the game's plot concerned his attempt to understand who he had been and who he was. "What can change the nature of a man?" was not a rhetorical question; the game offered multiple answers, each emerging from the choices the player made.

EverQuest, by contrast, was an argument about community. The massively multiplayer online RPG — a genre that text MUDs had established in the 1980s and Ultima Online had commercially validated in 1997 — found its mass-market form in EverQuest's persistent world of Norrath. The game required players to form groups to progress through its most challenging content, and the social bonds formed in those groups created a level of player investment that no single-player game could match. Players who cancelled their subscriptions sometimes reported feeling genuine grief at leaving the community they had built. The design was not without flaws — EverQuest's reputation for time commitment earned it the nickname "EverCrack" — but the basic model of subscription-funded persistent worlds would define online gaming for the following fifteen years.

The coexistence of Planescape: Torment and EverQuest in the same year was itself a statement about the range that PC gaming had achieved. One was a single-player narrative experience of unprecedented literary ambition; the other was a social world in which thousands of players coexisted simultaneously. Both found their audiences. Both influenced the medium profoundly. The PC gaming platform of 1999, served by a mature development community, powerful consumer hardware, and a distribution channel that still allowed small studios to compete with large publishers, was producing a diversity of experiences that no console platform could match. As the millennium approached, it was clear that games were not one thing but many — and that the medium had grown large enough to contain all of them.