Hi there,
I am new to the forum and wanted to pick your collective brain if possible. I have a Dreamcast console that was given to me as a prize from Midway Games many years ago. A ‘System Disc 2’, ‘Boot Disc’, ‘2 x visual memory units’ and ‘2 x controllers’ also came with the console at the time. This was at a time when the Dreamcast was being phased out and the company was no longer developing / publishing for it. As such it would have previously been used by their production department.
As such there is a possibility that this console may be a debug / developer unit and might be considered rare. It is a NTSC-US version. I know that the release date for the Dreamcast in the US was apparently on 09.09.99.
From the label on the back of the console, the manufacture date is ‘May 1999’, so well ahead of official launch, which makes sense as Midway Games would have needed the console prior to mainstream release, so that they could already start working on game development (eg. Hydro Thunder, Ready 2 Rumble, etc.). I believe that early versions of the console would have been made available within the games industry for this purpose.
I have looked online for other examples of NTSC-US consoles and cannot find any other instances of such an early manufacture date, they are all typically in September 1999 or beyond. There is also a ‘TK’ next to the manufacture date on my console on the label. I assume that this may represent the area that it was manufactured in, I’m guessing Tokyo perhaps? Again, I can’t find any other examples of this online. Other consoles seem to have ‘WK’ or ‘AE’ on the label instead. Finally, on the back label there is a small rectangular box on the bottom right which states ‘NTSC – U’. To the left of this is a circle with a zero inside. Once again, this is the only example of this that I can find online, other Dreamcast consoles have either 1, 2, etc.
I would be grateful if anyone could tell me anything more about this item and whether it is likely to be a debug console. I would imagine that there must have been a pre-release limited run of Dreamcasts allocated to the games industry and that this may be one of them. Any information or thoughts on value on this and the system disc would be very welcome.
Best regards,
Daniel