On 9/9/09, the Sega Dreamcast celebrated its 10th anniversary. Got me to thinking a bit. While each of us at Self Aware has our own story about how we got into the game industry, mine starts with the Dreamcast. In 1999, I applied for a job at Sega - and in 2000, got a to work on the US version of a game called Seaman. You used a mic you could plug into the controller to talk to a churlish man-fish hybrid you kept in a tank.

Weird game, for sure - but a great experience, incredibly fun and satisfying, and it’s a game that people still remember almost a decade later.

And if you look at the Dreamcast, it was pretty cutting-edge at the time. Built in 56K modem! LCD screens on their portable storage, on which you could play little minigames. Analog triggers. And games like Soul Calibur looked so much better than anything else at the time, it made you wonder what the future held.

10 years later, we’re playing online multiplayer with friends across the nation at speeds that outstrip 56K, for sure, on 3D-enabled, wireless, motion-controlled devices that have orders and orders of magnitude more storage, that can be used as web browsers, music players, and telephones. And they fit in our pocket.

If you had asked me to guess whether such a thing would have been possible in 10 years when I was picking up my brand-spanking-new Dreamcast, I don’t know what I’d have said. But I definitely don’t think I would have imagined how much we’d take it for granted, now that technology like this is here.

I’m about to have my first kid. It’s a pretty bizarre experience in itself, but every once in a while, I wonder what kind of world he’ll grow up in. When I was 10, or thereabouts, I remember having played games on my C64, and I think at the time we had just gotten our very first PC. I’m pretty sure we still had a monochromatic orange screen at the time. We’ve come such a long way in the last 10 years. When my kid is 10… what kind of games will he play?