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The Dreamcast, Console of the Avant-Garde

"The Dreamcast, Console of the-Avant-Garde"
Nick Montfort and Mia Consalvo
Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association

We argue that the Dreamcast hosted a remarkable amount of videogame development that went beyond the odd and unusual and is interesting considerd as avant-garde.

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We argue that the Dreamcast hosted a remarkable amount of videogame development that went beyond the odd and unusual and is interesting considerd as avant-garde. After characterizing the avant-garde, we investigate reasons that Sega’s position within the industry and their policies may have facilitated development that expressed itself in this way and was recieved by gamers using terms that are associated with avant-garde work. We describe five Dreamcast games (Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Rez, Seaman, and SGGG) and explain how the advances made by these industrially productions are related to the 20th century avant-garde’s less advances in the arts. We conclude by considering the contributions to gaming that were made on the Dreamcast and the areas of inquiry that remain to be explored by console videogame developers today.

This publication has been generously supported by Simon Fraser University through the Research Opportunities Committee, Faculty of Education and through a serial publications fund grant awarded by the University Publications Committee.

Nick Montfort
Written by
Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort, professor of digital media, uses computation to develop literary art. His work includes more than ten computer-generated print books (from seven presses), the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between, and Memory Slam: Batch-Era Text Generation. His most recent book of poetry is human-authored but written under constraint: All the Way for the Win (Penteract Press, 2025) consists entirely of three-letter words. Among Montfort’s MIT Press books are The Future and two co-edited volumes, The New Media Reader and Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. He’s also principal investigator in the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative. He directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank. For more, see Nick’s site, nickm.com.

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Written by
Mia Consalvo
Nick Montfort Written by Nick Montfort
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