SEGA isn’t working on a Dreamcast successor after all

Fans of the beloved, yet unsuccessful Dreamcast were filled with excitement earlier today when talk of a Dreamcast 2 started popping up on social media, all thanks to team of fans going by the name of Project Dream. It was reported that the team plans to launch a crowd-funding campaign to fund the development of the successor to the sixth generation console underdog, and that it’s made some progress in reviving the Dreamcast brand. Unfortunately, it looks like the reality of the situation is far less hopeful, as Kotaku did a little digging and discovered that the team hasn’t even gotten into contact with SEGA, let alone secured permission to create a new Dreamcast. 

Today on Facebook, you might have seen an exciting little news nugget in the corner of your homepage. “Dreamcast 2,” it read, “Sega Reportedly to Release New PC-Console Hybrid.” All day, “Dreamcast 2” has been one of the top items on Facebook’s Trending Topics feature, which launched last year and has been particularly awful in recent months, helping propagate all sorts of half-truths and incorrect information on the world’s biggest media platform. The articles and trends showcased on this Facebook feature are frequently useless and sometimes misleading or straight-up false. Of course, this isn’t true, nor is it even rumored to be true, and it’s likely that many Facebook users will be in for some disappointment when they find out that this Sega Dreamcast successor isn’t going to happen. (A message I got from Jalopnik’s Mike Ballaban this morning: “jason is this real please let this be real.”) So what’s actually going on? Well, there’s a fan campaign, run by a group of Sega devotees who launched a change.org petition earlier this year in hopes of convincing the Japanese publisher to release an HD-supporting limited edition of the Dreamcast. The campaign, organized by a handful of people including Sega fans Ben Plato and Patrick Lawson, has a Facebook group called “Dreamcast Revival” with 882 members.