On September 9, 1999, a console pulled in 98.4 million dollars in 24 hours, predicted the online future, solved controller drift, and beat the PlayStation 2 to market. Eighteen months later it took its company out of the hardware business forever. This episode explains the paradox of the Sega Dreamcast by starting with the trauma of the Saturn: a dual-CPU architecture that forced developers to hand-sync two processors fighting over one memory bus, a surprise E3 1995 launch that enraged retailers like KB Toys, and a market share that fell to 12 percent while Sony's single-processor PlayStation swept up developers.

Sega ran two competing internal teams to design its successor, and when the Japanese team's NEC and Hitachi design won, the losing graphics partner 3Dfx sued, and Electronic Arts refused to make a single Dreamcast game. The hosts d ...