Post 6: Dreamcast

In the late 90's, before the playstation 2 or xbox ever came out, sega unvailed its next generation system, the Dreamcast.

In the sands of time, the Dreamcast was ultimately a failure.  But the Dreamcast itself was pioneer of features that are now standard on all console platforms, and were merely dreams at the time of there release.

 First, besides the improved hardware and performance capabilities, the Dreamcast was the first system to support online multiplayer. Eventually, games were being released that had live updates and down-loadable content, just like all of the newest console games.  Many of the online multiplayers consisted of voice chat, a feature that was not supported for many of the next generation consoles until much later.

With all these new features, why did the Dreamcast fail?  The primary cause of failure was the lack of developer support for the use of the Dreamcast.  With the playstation 2 predicted to come out in the near future, with better hardware and performance capabilities, many developers decided to wait for these systems to come out to develop their games.  And since players didn't want to buy a system that wouldn't support the good games that might come out, they never bought the dream cast.  It was a vicious cycle.