>1995 - Saturn releases, was designed around a new Hitachi CPU, SH-2
>1996 - Bernie Stolar gave STI the NiGHTS engine to mess around with for a few weeks while they were making X-treme, but Yuji Naka threw a temper tantrum and threatened to quit Sega in response, so they had to let go of it
>1996 - Dreamcast with SH-4 as a joint venture between Sega and Hitachi.
>Sonic Jam is released for the Saturn, containing elements from the then-forthcoming Adventure
>Sonic Adventure begins development as a showcase for Dreamcast hardware. Transparencies, lighting, FMVs, voice acting, etc
>Chaos according to Iizuka the director was made to shock, surprise people, something you would say "this is only posible on the Dreamcast"
>Genesis can't do transparency, Saturn can't do transparency, Dreamcast goes all out on transparency and lighting, supports 8-bit destination alpha blending with 24-bit sourcing 32-bit z-buffer
>SA1-2 used diffuse+specular lightning based on palette indices like some Saturn games
>SA1 was a game made by a maximum of 100 people, and only 11 people went to the US. Then, it was no longer possible to make 2 on that scale. I was hoping to make a small-scale game in the U.S., but at the time, Naka told me, “You can take our Japanese members with you and just make 2.” So when it came time to make 2, the starting point of the project was “How can we make 2 with this (small) number of people?”
>1999 - Iizuka goes to USA to patch up SA1 and begin SA2
>Iizuka: I had these ideas in my mind from when I was making Sonic Adventure 1 that if I were to make a second game, I wanted to have a “rival character who looked exactly like Sonic” and to be able to play two scenarios, one with Sonic and the other with the rival character.
>2000 - Dreamcast was flopping hard. Iizuka was determined to sell it on the Dreamcast at any cost

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Was the Dreamcast and its 200Mhz SH4 CPU and whopping 16MB of system memory really impressive in 1998?