I met my best friend when we were both six-years-old.
Like many of life's greatest things, it was completely accidental. The school basically paired us as deskmates because of the alphabetical proximity of our last names and enforced a seating scheme that was impossible to challenge or bend. For better or for worse, you were stuck with whoever they had assigned you to.
It worked pretty well for me because he did all the talking for the both us... and I know that it might seem weird to be reading this after seeing how active I am on the forums, but the case is that I was (and still am) a painfully shy person, so having someone drawing me out little by little helped me out a lot as a kid during the critical ages between six and twelve, at which point I was so comfortable around this dude that there was no topic I wouldn't dare touching when it was just the two us. That led us down a very exciting path that included me spending weekend after weekend at his house, playing Monopoly until 3 AM and watching incredibly bad movies and infomercials for a laugh, all whilst his parents joked that they should buy stock on the video store. It was great.
Because we were so close, I had little trouble talking him out of the idea of buying a PlayStation 2 as soon as he had saved enough money for it by working as a part-timer on his mother's clinic. My suggestion? "Buy a Dreamcast, dude!".
He was pretty unconvinced at first, but I had already mastered the used-car salesman routine and began listing all the perks and benefits that getting the DC over the PS2 would include, putting special emphasis on the price of the games (DVDs were very expensive at the time, whilst CDs were already dirt cheap). And once I told him that he wouldn't need to mod the DC? He acted unconvinced, but I could tell he was sold.
And so began an interesting saga... because, you see, internet marketplaces were still very much new at the time and they worked on the assumption that everyone was playing fair and square, so it wasn't actually uncommon to buy damaged goods and having to start an actual war with both the site and the seller in order to get refunded. The whole thing resembled a scam that had a chance of going well, really.
Looks... legit? Buying from places like this one honestly felt like playing roulette.
For those reasons it was particularly suspicious when we found a complete Dreamcast for about $200 Argentinean Pesos (dirt cheap for a product on that state). But without any other leads (and because I could tell that my friend was growing very impatient and was about to bail), I convinced him to pull the trigger on the whole thing.
We contacted the seller and agreed to meet near my friend's workplace (so we could test the console).
I was expecting a lot of things to happen as the day grew near, but I certainly wasn't ready to see an art student lugging several large bags full of goodies (none of which had been detailed on the sale). She told us that she had talked it over with her boyfriend and decided that they had no use for games and peripherals once the main console was gone, so they just threw them in... they were getting ready to move to a new apartment and could really do without the extra baggage, she said. My friend asked her how much this unexpected loot would cost, but she just shrugged and said that the asking price was enough for her.
This was my friend's original copy of Jet Grind Radio. He saw how much I enjoyed the game and simply gave it to me.
Even though we never said it out loud, my friend and I both thought that the console just wouldn't power on upon testing it. There was no way that someone would sell it for so cheap. Not in the middle of the "retro wave" of the early aughts, when everyone thought they were dealing in gold. But the console did power on, and it read all four games we tested perfectly. The girl was pretty amused by the whole thing, but was polite enough not to mock us for it (for which I'm thankful). She collected her money and left.
When my friend and I went back to his home and began unpacking, we found out that there was a lot of stuff on those boxes (and I do mean a lot).
Not only was the console perfectly packaged on its original box (which was not even mentioned on the sale page), but it also included four controllers, every single wire, four boxed VMUs (only two of which had been opened), the modem, and manuals for the whole thing. It even included two CDs designed to bypass whatever copy protection the console still had (to which purpose, we didn't know), and software for the modem. It felt like we robbed this girl, honestly.
But what about the games? There was a whole stack of them deep within the second bag. Around 50 or so.
Skies of Arcadia was the first Dreamcast game to truly impress me with both its story and gameplay. Too bad we didn't play it for long.
The next twelve hours or so were a blur, with us being completely hellbent on trying every single game and gadget the console came with. We made last-minute arrangements with our parents so I could spend the night at his house and ordered enough pizza and junk food to last us a week. We were hyped.
To me, one of the most memorable parts of the whole experience was hooking the Dreamcast to my friend's landline to get it online through the incredibly slow majesty of some dial-up server we had looked up beforehand. Seeing Yahoo!, Terra and Google come to life, pixel by pixel, through a freaking gaming console was extraordinarily surreal to me. It felt like the next big step. And guess what? I didn't even know what Google was before that night... so, yes, I first saw the world's leading search engine through some discontinued piece of hardware that could barely load it. In other words, magic.
The rest of that night was spent getting discs in and out the console like some demented DJs, goshing over the little displays on the VMUs and getting acquainted with games that would eventually become our absolute favorites, like Ready 2 Rumble and Soul Calibur (which ended up being our most-played Dreamcast game). By the time midnight had come and gone, we were tremendously engrossed on Resident Evil: Code Veronica (the metal detector puzzle had us completely stuck), had already tried around thirty games, and had put the console through the ultimate test: surviving all the greasy stains that resulted from grabbing the controllers whilst eating chips and pizza while downing unhealthy amounts of soda. There was even a funny sort of incident when my friend completely disregarded a game I suggested with nerdy enthusiasm and used the disc to cut himself another slice (don't worry, it was a CD-R with no label). He was being antagonistic for the sake of it and I loved it.
Soul Calibur wasn't so much a game as it was an excuse to laugh hysterically. We lived for getting those ring outs in the dumbest way possible.
It was actually very interesting seeing what appealed to each of us, because our tastes were so different and the options were so plentiful that consensus seemed unreachable: I was all about the likes of Jet Grind Radio, Sonic Adventure and Skies of Arcadia, whilst my friend preferred stuff like Crazy Taxi and TrickStyle. Agreeing on what to play next proved to be one of the night's biggest challenges, and we had to default to the CD pile more often than not, which was even funnier because we were going in completely blind.
At one point I was almost completely asleep when I got a sudden urge to go to the bathroom, so I got up without realizing that I was still holding my controller and the console ended up sliding through the floor a few feet before I realized what had happened... and we busted out laughing again. It was the kind of silliness that we lived for.
I really couldn't have asked for a better console debut.
What's funny is that that night, memorable as it was, was completely buried in my memory... but now that my friend told me that he's planning to move out of the country, I find myself returning to it more and more often. It's almost a guarantee that I won't see him again as soon as he boards that plane, so I cling to the memories of a shared childhood that started by some random school politic and that had us spending a lot of time together, from when we played Commander Keen 4 on a computer so old as to run on steam to our dealings with the PS4. It's honestly amazing just how much we shared while saying so little.
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. Also I loved that screenshot of mercado libre and it's true that site is a russian roulette. And I found the pictures that I took in 2019! And there was also a controller sealed with box and everything. 
