It’s a gaming phenomenon: a high-fantasy adventure with a vibrantly distinct art style, attracting an unprecedented number of newcomers to the world of online gaming – the first of its kind to earn an Edge 9/10. Déjà vu? Before World Of WarCraft there was another game which swept an adoring audience before it: Sega’s masterful Phantasy Star Online.

On the face of it, it was a disastrous plan for an MMO. A console with no voice communication and no bundled keyboard. A time when most players had a pay-per-minute internet connection. A game aiming to hold players’ attention for dozens of hours that had only four different areas. Limited weapons, limited costumes, limited quests. Parties of four traversing the same territory over and over again. Expectations may have been lower in 2000, but it still sounded like an idea whose ambition outweighed the available technology. But that isn’t what people experienced. People still talk about Ragol like it’s real. People made friends they still talk to every day. People still stop in their tracks when they hear the music. That’s because the available technology, for all its limitations, provided extraordinary things. A truly international community, for one, allowing players to dip in and out of conversations across the globe. A world that crackled with colour and life.



It’s often hard to reconcile the two images we’re left with of the Dreamcast. For many, now, it’s a luminous memory – the last summer of a time when it really was all about the games. But its place in history is that of a failure – a squat, white albatross around the neck of Sega’s hardware hopes. But whether you look at the frustrating facts and ugly figures or instead remember the wonder and amazement, one thing can’t be denied. When someone got it right – and that someone was often, although not always, Sega – the Dreamcast enjoyed a kind of symbiosis with its software that few consoles could match. Super Mario 64 may have been the perfect expression of what made the N64 special, and a copy of Halo may be an essential component of the Xbox, but with the right game in the drive, the Dreamcast seemed to hum with renewed power.

How is it that titles as diverse as Jet Set Radio, Soul Calibur, Samba De Amigo, Shenmue, Skies Of Arcadia, Rez and Metropolis Street Racer can all feel like the defining Dreamcast game? No matter how ill-fated the console itself, there was always the sense that it had been designed around the company’s software ambitions. This wasn’t a machine put together by hardware experts, whose software would gradually explore its potential as it marched on towards inevitable obsolescence. This was kit assembled around a company whose teams were ready from the start to explode with creativity, taking the best of their arcade instincts and the freshest of their new ideas to reshape home console play.

The result was software like Phantasy Star Online. Unmistakably firstparty in its scope and excellence, making it nearly broke Yuji Naka. He still talks with exhaustion about trying to sustain the game in the face of the stress its players placed on it. His team’s efforts were worth it, however, producing a game of such irresistibly immersive solidity that players rose to the occasion whenever it fell short of all it might have been.



From the first moments, that attention to detail showed – the sound effects and loading screens creating the impression of a complete world waiting to be discovered, rather than a lumpy transition between reality and awkward fantasy. The characters waiting to be selected were a bizarrely eclectic cast – part android, part harlequin, part Camelot – but somehow everyone found something that suited them. The odd grace of the available avatars set the tone for people’s behaviour in-game. There was something peculiarly courtly about the long gowns and formal armour, and it encouraged a sense of chivalry from the off. And if players couldn’t quite fix on a combination which suited their tastes, they might find their personalities modulating to fit their eventual appearance.

The same was true of communicating within the game. Many players hadn’t invested in a Dreamcast keyboard, and relying on anything other than a few stock phrases was patently unrealistic when using the in-game typing system. Even if you were fully equipped, many early adopters found themselves playing with non-English speakers, communicating as best they could through gifts and clumsy smilies. And, even with a keyboard and an English-speaking party, there were few who could master playing while typing.

It should have put the game at a disadvantage, but instead became an unexpected strength. For a start, it effectively outlawed the kind of absent-minded chit-chat that can undermine the atmosphere of even the most sophisticated online world. Words were precious, not least because what you said would hover over your head for long seconds, potentially polluting with crass trivia a gameworld where every other pixel was deliberate and artful. It’s striking that even when the move to Xbox allowed voice communication, most PSO veterans shunned it. But, for many, finding a way to balance being a good player with being good company proved impossible to manage alone, and this brought a strange new community into the world of PSO: the typers. The beauty of Ragol meant spectating was such good sport that flatmates, girlfriends and boyfriends were willing to be drafted in as stenographers, taking dictation from players and adding their own occasional asides as they too became friends with the players (and typers) who made up the party.