On September 9, 1999, Sega launched the Dreamcast in North America, built around a marketing hook of “9/9/99 for $199.” The console broke the U.S. video game industry’s single-day sales record on arrival, selling more than 225,000 units and pulling in roughly $98.4 million in its first 24 hours, with 19 launch titles on shelves including Sonic Adventure and Soulcalibur.
The Dreamcast was the first console of what’s now called the sixth generation, beating both the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox to market, and it introduced ideas that felt ahead of their time: a built-in modem, online play baked into several launch games, and a slick visual memory card (the VMU) with its own tiny screen. Sales stayed hot through the end of 1999, with Sega crossing a million units sold in North America by early November and grabbing roughly 31% of the market by Christmas. It just wasn’t enough to hold off Sony’s PS2 juggernaut the following year, and Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in 2001, ending its run as a console maker for good.
Also on this day: September 9 has another well-known entry in tech folklore — in 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth jammed in one of its relays, an incident widely credited with popularizing the term “debugging.”
Source: Wikipedia
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
