By: Erin
Posted: June 23, 2021
Click the thumbnails in this article to view them at full size!
Caps of Retro Gamer Issue 4 courtesy of archive.org
“What? How?” you ask. It is, after all, absurd to pin the demise of Sega’s 1999 machine on the shoulders of two cartoon characters – and children, at that! And to this I say, you’re right. But at the same time, it’s needed, because if you read on I will tell you the tale of how these two cartoon characters failed us.
When I was a child, I would spend two weeks of my summer visiting my nan in England. This started when I was in elementary school and mostly continued until 2009 until she passed away. I have a lot of memories of what I looked forward to and prioritized during those visits. Seeing Nan was, of course, number one, and number two was traveling to all my favorite towns and raiding their second-hand shops for new videos, but despite being last I considered number three just as essential.
Whenever I visited England, I made sure to stop by the newsstands (or “paper shop”, as Nan would call it) and get my hands on two major magazines. I could only do two, because my allowance in England was very low and had to last weeks. But I made every pence count because whenever I was there I would always get a copy of N64 Magazine (Later renamed NGC Magazine) and The Official Nintendo Magazine UK. Yeah, for some reason, despite loving all kinds of gaming systems, when it came to what I wanted to read about, it was always Nintendo. I blame the DS.
Two issues I owned and loved! Thanks, Out-of-Print Archive.
Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, I no longer have any issues of N64, NGC, or NOMUK lying around. Sometimes these magazines had to be what got lost in a move, and as far as I know only a few issues of various magazines I owned survived. I might do an article on them some day, but that’s only definite if I find any of my old copies.
Anyway, if this article isn’t about those magazines, what is it about? Well, I’ll tell you, dear reader! You see, some time in 2004, I went to the newsstand and was in awe as I stared at the one magazine that made me dig into my wallet for coins that didn’t exist. It was large – larger than your standard fare, at least – and it had a disc on the cover! The disc was in a DVD-esque case and boasted that it had classic game music and software! The cover of the mag promised to rank Nintendo’s greatest games and showed me a set of keyboards I had never seen before. It was shiny, it was colorful, it was enchanting – it was Retro Gamer.
The cover that changed my life.
Now, I’d love to draw your attention to all the things I love about this issue of Retro Gamer. It’s still an incredible issue, and I’m very pleased that the magazine is still going! You can subscribe to it physically or digitally! I sometimes pick up issues in bookshops when I go. Now, this article isn’t about Retro Gamer Issue 4, but I would love to pick parts of that out for a future article as well as explore the coverdisc both musically and with regard to the on-disc programs. Rather, this article starts in the back – in a section used for classified ads.
Well, I’m sold!
Nan did not have internet in her home until her last years. This means that in order to sate my burning curiosity as to what this mysterious website was it would have to wait at least a week, possibly a little longer depending on whether I was able to use the computer at home the day we returned or no. I am lucky that every other article in this magazine was eminently readable, but I must confess how brightly this desire burned. To me, the Dreamcast was a holy system, one I was only able to appreciate when at a friend’s house, one that housed magical experiences such as the cinematic Shenmue and allowed me to explore the past with collections that ported Vectorman or Streets of Rage 2. Like so many others, the Day the Dreamcast Died was traumatic and upsetting for me, a day where a little company we loved had made something truly mindblowing and now would never create again. Clearly this website is where I would find others as passionate about convincing Sega to revive their marvelous machine! But no, reader, as I settled into the family’s Computer Room in Florida to explore all the forbidden fruits of my copy of Retro Gamer, I was about to discover something so much more.
If you go to the archives, you’ll find a variety of sites I’ve attempted to archive to varying degrees of completion. Sadly, the only surviving remnant of this site are a few snapshots of the front page, and never exactly how I remember them. Rather than archive them on my space, I will link to the earliest snapshot that exists on the Wayback Machine, May 18th, 2004. Anyway, my bright young self logged on to this site expecting a fine Dreamcast fan site, and I was suddenly confronted by…them.
At the top of the page were two characters who would become the bane of my life. When I logged in, I saw the owner of this website positing that the Resurrect The Dream movement needed a mascot, and who better than Lilo & Stitch?
Who better, indeed. I continued to read.
“Hello and welcome to “resurrect the dream” ! This is the campaign to bring back the dreamcast video games console (of which was made by games console legends, sega) . The dreamcast is a great games console, it was born in 1999 (1998 in japan) and got discontinued either towards or shortly after mid 2002 (in japan, it is still going, in australia, it ceased production in late 2001) . Please help me revive such a great gaming machine
lilo & stitch: unofficial (so far) mascots of resurrect the dream!”
– The Webmaster, Resurrect The Dream
These words greeted my young self as I clicked around a page that has tragically been lost to time. It was on one of those pages that I learned Lilo & Stitch’s horrific plan to bring back the dream: On 9/9, the date the console released in North America, the webmaster wanted everyone to log onto Sega’s website so that it would get overwhelmed with traffic and crash.
I was agog. I was aghast! Could these friendly little characters really have such venom in their veins that they would sacrifice Sega’s servers for the sake of attention? And…could they really do it?
The answer, of course, was no. I stayed on Resurrect The Dream for a little longer, looking at the questions asked of Sonic, Tails, Lilo, & Stitch, and then I left, and though I never returned to this website as I found myself unimpressed with Lilo & Stitch’s plan, I could never get them out of my mind. There was so much boundless passion and sheer determination on this website – surely these lovable Disney characters could make it happen.
Years later, I wondered if I had dreamed the whole thing. Memory is funny like that, and it had been so long since I had read my beloved Issue 4. One day in 2014, after a conversation with Mandy about Lilo and Stitch, this whole core memory came flooding back to me and took me out. I had to get to the bottom of it all. What happened to the plan to Resurrect the Dream?
Back in those days you really had to dig for magazine scans, and if they existed past clips from enthusiasts you were very lucky. Well, good for me, because somehow Retro Gamer Issue 4 had been put online as a PDF. When I found the classifieds and went to the URL, I expected a 404 error at best. Instead, this is what I was greeted with:
Web design to be jealous of.
At some point between 2004 and 2014, the whole website was taken offline, Lilo & Stitch and all, and replaced with a redirect screen! If I had to guess based on context clues, this was February 2005, though the earliest archived snapshot of the page in this state was September 5, 2006. Well, I was upset to see the old site go down, but I had to see if it really was the same person running this new site. One look at the introduction text told me everything I needed to know.
“Aloha e komo mai to the web site of a new campaign: “Sega Saturn: the most misunderstood games console ever” . This campaign is to encourage SEGA to give thier unsuccessful Saturn console another chance.”
– The Webmaster, SEGA SATURN: the most misunderstood games console ever
Jackpot. No, there was no Lilo nor Stitch on this site, but this had to have been run by them. As I realized this, my stomach dropped to my feet, feeling as frozen as a crash-landed spaceship in the arctic. If Lilo & Stitch started a new SEGA website in 2005…did this mean they had given up on resurrecting the dream? Surely not! Surely the pages of the best Dreamcast games and advertisement in Retro Gamer had meant something. Surely they had managed to execute their plan on 9/9! Could we really be living in the timeline where they failed only to go back to the Saturn?
Unfortunately, yes. Lilo & Stitch’s plan failed. The Dreamcast is dead and will never return. And it’s all their fault. I have never forgiven them, nor will I ever forgive them. They had a golden opportunity in their hands, and they squandered it. Japan may love you, Stitch, and so may Tumblr, but I know the truth – you killed the Dreamcast. You did this. It is all your fault, Lilo, and you, Stitch. You turned your backs when we needed you the most – which is two years after the Dreamcast was canceled already.
On the new website, Lilo & Stitch said that “[t]he Playstation ohana is the biggest mistake made by any game company ever”. It’s a good thing you added that qualifier, you two, because I would say that you giving up on the Dreamcast is worse!
On a serious note, from what I can gather this person is from Australia and really just enjoys Sega consoles. I can respect that – I enjoy them too. I’m not sure why they moved from the Dreamcast to the Saturn, but if that’s what they wanted, then again, I respect it. It’s a shame most of the sites didn’t survive, but I’m glad these main pages all did. It’s fun to click around in there, especially when you uncover something like Boycott Buy Rite Games Dot Com (whose motto is “If you aren’t buying from Buy-Rite……GREAT!!”). But it’s funny how this weird little website in this corner of the internet can forever change my view on characters that really have, uh, absolutely nothing to do with the Sega Dreamcast.
Anyway, enough rambling about how Lilo & Stitch doomed us all. I have to go cancel my preorder.
Phew, that was close.