This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
A few days ago I came across a video on the Modern Classic channel about what’s been happening in the games industry lately. Physical discs disappearing, film licences being pulled from people’s accounts, sudden restructurings at major publishers.
But the part that really got me was the way it reconstructs how we ended up here — specifically the section about the Dreamcast.
The business model the Dreamcast took to its grave
For the first twenty years of gaming, a console was the vehicle for the games of whoever built it. You bought an Atari to play Atari games, an Intellivision for Mattel games, a Super Nintendo for Mario and Zelda, a Genesis for Sonic. Third parties existed, but were sometimes seen as almost diluting the identity of the machine.
Then Sony arrived with the PlayStation, and from that point the console became a generic platform — the business was in royalties from third parties, and whoever had the most volume won.
The Dreamcast was the last system built seriously around the old model, grounded in a powerful arcade identity and a massive first-party catalogue. At the time it looked like a system that couldn’t lose.
And yet Sony simply squeezed Sega out of the hardware business through sheer size. Which is exactly why the Dreamcast’s failure still stings today: it’s the symbolic end of the idea that a console should have an identity, a personality, a reason to exist beyond “taking a cut of every sale”. From that point on, the video argues, everything drifted towards the bean counters — live service, monetising the same game indefinitely instead of making a great one and selling it.
Denshattack: that spirit isn’t entirely dead
The day after watching that video I bought Denshattack!, which came out on 15 July. The premise, in a single line, is gloriously absurd: it’s an action-platformer where you pilot an anti-gravity train that does tricks and grinds on rails like Tony Hawk, inside a wildly colourful Japanese fantasy, all in service of dismantling a corrupt corporation. “Tony Hawk, but your skateboard is a train.”
A small studio (Undercoders) believed in that idea, built a strong and instantly recognisable art direction around it, and made something designed simply to be played and to be fun from the very first minute.
Denshattack gave me the same physical feeling I had as a kid turning on the Dreamcast: an idea that exists because someone wanted it to exist, not because the market asked for it. Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5, Rez — these came from people who had a clear vision in their heads and an equally clear aesthetic, and pushed them out whole, without sanding down the edges.
An interesting case study
Two tools I often use when analysing a concept turn out to be directly relevant to this Dreamcast/Denshattack comparison.
The first is what I call fantasy extraction: before you even look at the systems, ask yourself who the player becomes and what they should feel in the best moments.
“You’re a train grinding rails to take down a corporation” is a fantasy you can’t mistake for anything else — exactly the same kind of clarity the Sega mascots of the Dreamcast era had.
The second is the novelty spectrum audit: every original concept sits somewhere between too familiar and too new, and the trick isn’t to maximise novelty for its own sake, but to understand what kind of innovation you’re actually doing. Denshattack recombines trick-based skating physics with a subject — the train, the dystopia — that nobody had ever thought to pair with it. It’s innovation by recombination: familiar enough to read in three seconds of trailer, strange enough to stick in your head.
“We’ve lost the reason consoles exist,” the video said in its conclusion. It leaves me with a very concrete urge to keep designing things with a sharp fantasy and genuine novelty, rather than filing them down until nobody finds them offensive. I hope Denshattack turns out to be proof that audiences reward that kind of thinking.