US vice-president candidate Tim Walz says he thought that the Sega Dreamcast would “conquer the world” in the console wars.
In a stream ahead of election day alongside New York representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Walz outlines his gaming history over a match of Madden and a quick run at his beloved Crazy Taxi. Explaining to AOC that “I’m kinda the old-school guy in this,” Walz reveals that “I was of the age where Pong was coming online. I’m a first-generation gamer.”
Claiming to have mastered the likes of Asteroids, Missile Command, and Pac-Man in the arcades of his youth, Walz goes on to explain that it was a long time before he owned a home console. “We didn’t have games at home. There was a rich kid that got an Atari 2600. It was the original, kinda like wood grain. This kid was so rich that they had two floors in their house. That was something I couldn’t believe. If you had an upstairs, that was something.”
It wasn’t until after games moved from arcades to bars that Walz says he got into gaming consoles. “I was a Sega guy, a Dreamcast guy,” he says, once again outlining his deep affection for Sega’s console. Unfortunately, that does point to an element of limited foresight – “I thought it would conquer the world,” Walz says of his favorite console, which was a financial failure that marked Sega’s complete withdrawal from the console market, unable to stand up to Sony’s PS1 and its looming PS2 release.
The Dreamcast’s failure doesn’t seem to have dampened Walz’s fondness for its games, however, as he closed out his appearance on AOC’s stream with a chaotic Crazy Taxi run. During that, he revealed that his affinity for that particular game stemmed from his feelings that Grand Theft Auto might be “a bit harsh,” and perhaps something that it might not be befitting for a teacher to enjoy. Crazy Taxi is admittedly less violent than Rockstar’s series, but to watch Walz’s driving as he got to grips with a modern controller, you might not have guessed that.
Join Walz in a trip down memory lane with our list of the best Dreamcast games of all-time.
