Dream arena
The Dreamarena was the free online service for Sega's last game console, Dreamcast, and the European counterpart to SEGANet . In addition to the SEGANet, the Dreamarena was also the first coherent online network on a game console and existed years before Xbox Live or the Playstation network . The Dreamcast console was delivered with a 33.6k modem as standard, so the Dreamarena was also optimized for modem users. There was a separate Dreamarena ISP , Viag Interkom , through which Dreamarena users had to dial in automatically. It was opened with the appearance of Dreamcast on October 14, 1999 and met with great interest, so that even the servers were overloaded in the first few days.
The users were offered their own e-mail address on the Internet portal of the Dreamarena, there were competitions, discussion forums, a chat and current Dreamcast information. It wasn't until mid-2000 that the first online playable game, ChuChu Rocket, appeared, which was free for all Dreamarena users. This was followed by many more online games, including Quake III Arena and Phantasy Star Online , which were the most popular online games on the Dreamarena. A total of 10 online games were published in Europe. By October 2000, the Dreamarena had around 400,000 user accounts. By the time it closed in early 2003, it had reached nearly 600,000 registered users. With the end of Dreamcast production in early 2001, the Dreamarena lost constant active users. As a result, many NTSC games were no longer published in Europe, so that the Dreamarena also lacked powerful new online titles. Even the new edition of Phantasy Star Online at the beginning of 2002 could not change the situation. On February 28, 2003, the Dreamarena was closed. Before that, the DreamKey Browser 3.0 was released, with which it was finally possible to select your own ISP and thus retain the online functions of the Dreamcast console. Although the closure was not the end of all Dreamcast online games, over time the servers of almost all games were shut down. The servers of the PAL game, Phantasy Star Online, which was still running on official servers, were shut down on April 1, 2007. However, many games still have private servers that still have some fans playing.
DCArena.de in the German area and OnlineConsoles: Dreamcast in the English area are forums in which some fans still organize regular online game evenings.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christian Klaß: Dreamcast is well received - Internet problematic. Golem.de, October 22, 1999, accessed April 8, 2017 .
- ↑ Shahed Ahmed: Sega of Europe Confirms Chu Chu Date. GameSpot, accessed April 8, 2017 .
- ↑ Christian Klaß: Sega: One million Dreamcast sold in Europe. Golem.de, October 17, 2000, accessed April 8, 2017 .
- ↑ Dreamkey 3 time folks! ( Memento of January 7, 2002 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Dreamcast and Gamecube Server Shutdown. PSO-World.com, December 8, 2006, accessed April 8, 2017 .