Sega Looking at Bringing Dreamcast Games to Switch

SEGA Ages is bringing the company’s classic catalog to Nintendo’s Switch, but the catalog of those games may soon extend into their beloved Dreamcast games. Speaking in an interview with Japanese gaming outlet Famitsu, M2 president Naoki Horii and Sega AGES supervisor Yosuke Okunari revealed that Dreamcast games may end up coming to Nintendo’s hybrid console, too.

Apparently, if it does happen, Sega will be emulating the games, instead of porting them straight over, since it looks like they prefer the options to enhance and tweak the games that emulation provides over the relative faithfulness to the source code that simply porting it over would entail.

“At the time, it seemed likely that we’d be able to emulate Dreamcast software on the Nintendo Switch,” said Horii (translated by Nintendo Everything). “Depending on whether you’re emulating software or remaking the source code entirely, porting something is completely different. I think SEGA chose some of the titles based on that – no doubt emulation increased the number of titles they were able to choose from.”

Were it to happen, Sega still hasn’t decided on how it would want to distribute the Dreamcast games on Switch—it’s considering the Virtual Console approach and the 3D Classics approach (which it embraced fully on the 3DS) both, it seems.

“I think that this time the results of the survey influenced that as well. I haven’t really come to a conclusion yet, but I wonder if it’d be better to release more titles from the list in a manner similar to the Virtual Console (in their original state) or to hand-pick a select few with added features (like the Grantnoff boss in the 3DS version of Thunder Blade),” said Okunari.

No matter what it ends up being, I am sure may will be overjoyed simply at being able to play Dreamcast games on a modern system, and on the go. While Sega has ported the catalog on Genesis multiple times to newer systems, Dreamcast games have been relatively less widely disseminated. Hopefully this marks a move to change that.