The Dreamcast is dead. Long live the Dreamcast! Sega's ill-fated home console continues to have a dedicated following despite the fact that it was tragically discontinued just a few years after it launched. We knew that new games were still coming out for it but, as of this past week, one of the games, an adventure title called Floigan Bros., actually received a year's worth of DLC it was supposed to receive way back in 2001.
Yeah, we were surprised, too. But again, few consoles have a fan base quite as dedicated as the Dreamcast. As we said, there are developers still making a few brand new games for the "dead" console to this day, and gamers have figured out a way to keep the online community alive and well in such games as Phantasy Star Online.
What we've never heard of, though, is a Dreamcast game (or any game on a discontinued console, really) receiving DLC nearly 17 years after it came out. And to be clear, this isn't some new content some dedicated fan crafted and figured out how to plug into the game, but, instead, legitimate DLC that was supposed to come out one piece at a time for Floigan Bros.
According to a report over on Retro Gaming Magazine, when Floigan Bros. first arrived on the Dreamcast, it came with the promise of one piece of DLC per month for a full year. Honestly, I didn't even realize DLC was a thing at that point in gaming's history, so that's pretty impressive in and of itself. You can take a look at a video about the release below:
As the story goes, only the first piece of DLC arrived in January of the game's first year on the market, and it was a knitted hat. Unlike modern DLC, these items were planned to be small accessories and a couple of in-game activities that were never meant to be charged for. Instead, you would simply click on a link each month within the Dreamcast's revolutionary web browser and, boom, you could download the new file to a VMU, what the Dreamcast used as memory cards. Items included stuff like a cinnamon candy you could give as a gift, a mini-game that lets you hunt Easter eggs, some fireworks to watch in the sky and a Pilgrim outfit.
It turns out that the DLC was built straight into the disc, with the download links planned to tell your copy of the game to unlock the content when the time was right. However, it was designed with safeguards to prevent people from hacking the game and DLC content, which is why folks haven't been able to simply unlock it up until now.
That's probably the coolest part of this story. Now, a good 16 years after the game first launched, original members of the development team Tim Meekins, John Elliot and Nick Jones have put in the work to create those proper download links and make them all available to folks still rocking the Dreamcast. Whether you're playing a physical machine or an emulator, you can download all of the DLC for Floigan Bros. by following this link.
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