Nine years ago today Sega introduced the little engine that couldn't quite to North American shores. The Dreamcast burst onto the video game scene with the roar of a lion, which unfortunately turned out to just be the noise the GD-ROM drive made when accessing a disc, spinning up, or idling. It brought with it the hope of a new era of online console gaming, and for the Phantasy Star Online fans out there it delivered. It gave us Soul Calibur, one of the greatest console fighting games of all time, Jet Grind Radio, which introduced the world to cel-shading, and Seaman, which completely creeped an entire generation the f*** out.

In some alternate reality somewhere we're currently playing the latest games on the Dreamcast 2 while Sony and Microsoft struggle to keep up and Nintendo has become a third-party software developer. Today is the day to indulge in this fantasy. Drag out your old Dreamcast, draw a big "2" on the lid with a sharpie, and pop in Soul Calibur, or Dragonriders of Pern, or Record of Lodoss War, and dream of console success, just like Sega did nine years ago.