On September 9, 1999, a console pulled in 98.4 million dollars in 24 hours, predicted the online future, solved controller drift, and beat the PlayStation 2 to market. Eighteen months later it took its company out of the hardware business forever. This episode explains the paradox of the Sega Dreamcast by starting with the trauma of the Saturn: a dual-CPU architecture that forced developers to hand-sync two processors fighting over one memory bus, a surprise E3 1995 launch that enraged retailers like KB Toys, and a market share that fell to 12 percent while Sony’s single-processor PlayStation swept up developers.

Sega ran two competing internal teams to design its successor, and when the Japanese team’s NEC and Hitachi design won, the losing graphics partner 3Dfx sued, and Electronic Arts refused to make a single Dreamcast game. The hosts detail the answers: an off-the-shelf Hitachi SH4 processor, Windows CE and DirectX on the discs, the gigabyte GD-ROM built with Yamaha, the VMU memory card with its own screen, Hall effect joysticks that used magnets instead of friction, and the 56K modem that chairman Isao Okawa forced into every unit at a 15 dollar loss. Then Sony announced the PS2 with backward compatibility and a DVD player, the market froze, SegaNet gave consoles away for 18-month dial-up contracts, and Sega posted a 400 million dollar loss.

• Why porting a PC game to Dreamcast took weeks instead of months
• NFL 2K, Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur, and the 19 launch titles behind the It’s Thinking campaign
• Okawa forgiving 695 million dollars of Sega’s debt before his death in 2001
• Shenmue’s rumored 50 million dollar budget, simulated daily schedules, and the birth of quick-time events
• Seaman, Samba de Amigo, Phantasy Star Online, and whether Sega was visionary or just going down swinging