Dreamcast Aesthetics

It’s time to talk about Dreamcast Aesthetics.

The Dreamcast just turned 25 years old, which is incredible to think about because that means I’m almost thirty. The console lasted just barely two years in North America, and yet it’s still so fondly remembered today… It certainly has got the greatest cultural staying power for length on the market of any gaming console, and it’s probably up there for consumer electronics in general, too.

But I wanna talk about one thing specifically–Dreamcast Aesthetics.

The art and design and atmosphere of the years 1999 and 2000 (and the first eight months of 2001). The age where computer graphics got realer, but design philosophies got more surreal. The age where consumerism reigned supreme, and the sardonic Gen X slacker had her last gasp of prominence before unironic sentimentality took back over after 9/11. The age of the Dot Com Bubble and the first mainstream online communities.

There’s a ton of art from that era, some of it fantastic. Movies, in particular, had a major renaissance in 1999 that are celebrated to this day. But nothing epitomizes the era more than Dreamcast Aesthetics.

I love the Dreamcast, and I was so sad as a little kid that it ended. Sega has never been as strong as a third-party developer, and countless franchises it created have gathered dust ever since the transition. Why can’t we have this era back? I refuse to accept that it will never return. So, instead, I’ll just live in the world of Dreamcast Aesthetics and pretend it’s 1999 forever.

Let’s look at some of the coolest and strangest art of the era and appreciate what a wild couple of years we had back then: