Oh SLaVE… Where art thou? It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, and usually they’re based on commercial releases but let’s face facts – the Dreamcast has been around the block a fair few times now and has got to the point where even indie titles end up not showing up.
So then, SLaVe, a game that was to be published many, many years ago by the very first independent publishers on the console, GOAT Store LLC. GOAT were/are well known for 2003’s Feet of Fury as well as other simplistic yet fun releases for the Dreamcast which concluded with 2009’s Irides : Master of Blocks which was posh enough to ship with a cool metal coin and certificate. If we move forward to 2014, word broke that a new game would be coming, perhaps unlike anything GOAT had published before, an ambitious 3D arena cyber shooter with striking retro inspired graphics, the game looked and sounded promising but here’s where the problems began, 3D.
Keeping in mind that this was the early days of independent Dreamcast development and wasn’t like how it is today where we’ve had some great uses of the 3D capability of the console, back in 2014, this was far less common place and extremely ambitious based on the usage of 3rd party development tools as the Katana and Shinobi libraries owned by Sega to utilise the DC’s full power cannot be used on a commercial product without the licence. SLaVe was to use a game engine called 3DGE which was being coded by Isotope – the developers who were also working on a game called Hypertension which sadly, like SLaVE suffered the same fate of being stuck in an unreleased loop.
3DGE is mostly seen as the reason for why Isotope were having problems behind the scenes with SLaVE and most likely Hypertension. The engine itself wasn’t running very well on the DC, allowing for a rather critical memory leak and a general lack of knowledge of how to fix it. Keeping in mind that the game was meant to ship mere months after pre-orders started and now we’re almost ten years down the line, some would suggest with a general fading from the conscience of the average Dreamcast player’s mind that the game will never see the light of day.
There’s been a couple of times where SLaVE has made a surprise resurface, once in 2017 with Isotope’s Corbin Annis showing off some footage on Youtube, as shown below.
After missing a rumoured 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast launch, Dan Loosen of GOAT said a couple of years later in 2021 that the game was still being worked on behind closed doors but the website where over 400 gamers had pre-ordered the game would be revamped and wouldn’t take the existing data of these customers over with it – to me, this would be the writing on the wall for SLaVE, with no track of whose ordered it all those years ago and a far more crowded independent market for Dreamcast releases in 2024, could this game even be noticed if it did finally show up today? It would certainly be a huge shame if it didn’t make it in some way or another but even searching on Youtube for the once easy-to-find trailer proved tricky.
One thing is for sure, there isn’t another game quite like SLaVE for the Dreamcast, I hope that Corbin or GOAT pick up on this article as well as you as gamers and perhaps it’ll serve as just a little prod in the right direction to get this once promising title released.
Dreamcast Today 