Ah, Dreamcast, the mere mention of your name brings a smile to my face and fills my mind with happy memories. Of all the games I've played on different consoles growing up, my Dreamcast years stand out as a golden age of gaming to me and my friends. Why? Because that's when we learned how to throw a lot of Hadoukens.

Dreamcast's library was expansive for sure, but what really made it stand out was its amazing selection of high-quality fighting games. Not only was the system powerful enough to run arcade-perfect ports of games from SNK's Neo Geo and Capcom's CPS2/CPS3 hardware, Sega's own NAOMI arcade board was designed to be Dreamcast's sister-in-hardware.  Games like Guilty Gear X which ran on the Naomi board could be ported painlessly to the Dreamcast. For the first time, that gaming experience so exclusive to arcades could properly be brought home.  In fact, the Naomi-based Marvel vs Capcom 2 was originally released to Japanese arcades on the same date that the Dreamcast version went on sale in stores.  Players could train up at home, saving their 100 yen coins, then take their skills to the arcades and throw down without having to compensate for deltas in game visuals or input timing for combos. Pretty revolutionary if you ask me.

Back when I worked at Electronics Boutique, one of my managers was completely obsessed with fighters. Each month he invited my friends and me to an all night fighting game tournament. We already knew Street Fighter, but everything on the Dreamcast opened our eyes to the addictive, competitive nature of fighting games.  As the months went on and new games were released, the games and systems in the lineup would evolve but but the Dreamcast was a permanent fixture without question.  From Street Fighter Alpha 3, King of Fighters '98, Rival Schools 2, Dead Or Alive 2, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Guilty Gear X, Marvel vs Capcom 2, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Capcom vs SNK 2, Last Blade 2, Soul Calibur, and the exquisite Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, my friends and I spent a collective number of years training, competing, learning, sharing, and enjoying each other's company as gamers -- all thanks to Dreamcast.

I consider myself a hardcore fighting gamer because of Dreamcast, and I know it transformed my friends as well.  Even my old manager eventually began losing to us (his pupils) as much as he won, forcing him to evolve his techniques too.  Few of us became good enough to be tournament players (though some have competed in Evo), but we all learned to appreciate the intricacies and attention to detail that go into fighting games because of Dreamcast.  So in honor of its tenth anniversary, challenge someone to Street Fighter 4, Soul Calibur 4, or BlazBlue.  Then while you're shaking hands after the match, remember that Dreamcast played a pivotal role in the history of each series. We might not have them today if Dreamcast had never been.