Unreleased Dreamcast game Dee Dee Planet online features finally running unofficially

The unreleased Sega Dreamcast game Dee Dee Planet has now had it’s online servers finally brought to life thanks to the efforts of the fan-run Dreamcast Live online service. Due to the game having been cancelled, it’s online multiplayer has never once been playable by the public until now. If you want to try it for yourself, you can download a version of Dee Dee Planet that’s been patched for Dreamcast Live functionality from Dreamcast Live’s downloads page. One of Dreamcast Live’s founders, and prominent Dreamcast superfan and preservationist, pcwzrd13, had previously gotten a hold of a nearly complete build of Dee Dee Planet last year, and now Dreamcast Live user Shuouma had been able to create server code for Dee Dee Planet using the server code from Chu Chu Rocket, one of the games previously brought back online through Dreamcast Live, as Dee Dee Planet was designed to use a very similar online server setup already.

Chances are many of you have no idea what Dee Dee Planet is, so check past the break for a brief history of both Dee Dee Planet and Dreamcast Live.

Dee Dee Planet was a multiplayer battle game similar to the Worms series, where you controlled small alien characters on a randomly generated series of mountains. Four players were tasked with firing bombs down on the other players and moving their tanks to avoid enemy shots and the last player standing would win a round. Power-ups would occasionally fall down from above for players to catch, which would give players certain advantages. Drops also fall down that increase the elevation in some spots of the ground area, changing the terrain. 

You might have also noticed the name sounds a bit similar to Chu Chu Rocket, a well-known Dreamcast game that did make it to market. That’s because Dee Dee Planet was made with similar intentions of being an easy to learn game for people to quickly take online for fun and fast multiplayer gameplay. Sega intended for this to be the second in a series of games known as “Easy Network”, to denote the pick-up-and-play online nature of the game, with Chu Chu Rocket being retroactively donated as the first game in that series. Think of it like how the 2009 Wii release “Sonic & The Black Knight” was branded as part of the Sonic Storybook series, with it’s 2006 predecessor “Sonic & The Secret Rings” then being dubbed as the first Sonic Storybook series game. Dee Dee Planet was delayed during development, citing a catastrophic “network bug” (Which Shuouma had seemingly identified and fixed), but would later be unceremoniously cancelled. It would most likely have released in 2000 or 2001 had nothing gone wrong behind the scenes.

That’s where Dreamcast Live comes in. Dreamcast Live is a fanmade online service for Dreamcast consoles, replacing the online servers by Sega and other game companies from the day. They have restored features like online multiplayer, leaderboards, DLC, and original game websites, all to be accessed from any online enabled Dreamcast console once again, to many beloved Dreamcast games. At one point, they’ve even gotten ahold of previously unreleased DLC and made it available for the first time ever. Part of how this works is through the use of a special device they’ve created called a DreamPi, a Raspberry Pi device that acts as a mediator between a Dreamcast’s 56K modem adaptor and a broadband modem. You can make a DreamPi yourself or buy pre-made ones occasionally available on the Dreamcast Live’s online store. (An August update finally enabled the use of the official Broadband adaptor to connect to Dreamcast Live in a more straightforward manner, in case you have one.)

Check out the Dreamcast Live website for more information, including a list of supported games, other updates, and guides on how to get set up. 

Here is a video from pcwzrd13, from his YouTube channel DreamcasticChannel, detailing Dee Dee Planet, as well as showing some online gameplay.

Would you be interested in going online with Dee Dee Planet or other games on Dreamcast Live? Have you connected to Dreamcast Live before? Are there any other Dreamcast games that had online features that you’d love to see brought online again with Dreamcast Live? Be sure to tell us in the comments below.

Finally, we’ll leave you with the game’s controls, just to help anyone running Dee Dee Planet with figuring out how to play. 

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