The moment the US console gaming press has been waiting for since the initial Japanese announcement last week about Dreamcast happened on Wednesday night in an invitation-only event in Atlanta.

　　Sega started the event with Saturday Night Live's Kevin Nealon doing his infamous weekend update with jokes about the Clinton administration and highlighted fictional game titles like Hillary's Wild Ride, Paula Jones: Virtual Makeover, and Kenneth Starcraft. The interesting part of Nealon's routine was that Sega wrote jokes making fun of itself citing humorous (and completely fictitious) events like a group finding Sega 32X systems inside one of the pyramids in Egypt.

　　Sega of America president, Bernie Stolar then took the stage and after talking about Sega as a whole, introduced the attendees to Dreamcast. He announced that the Dreamcast system would not be shown to E3 attendees as a whole this year and instead of showcasing it on the floor of the show, said that we would be among the first US media to see the exclusive footage. As he outlined what we already knew about the system, he announced that the SegaSoft and Heat.net would be the underlying provider for Dreamcast's multiplayer gaming service.

　　Although there wasn't a system at the conference, Stolar introduced Dreamcast footage from the Japan conference. The video only showed the island pictures from the Japan conference and while it looked nice, many in the room had already seen the pictures all over the Web. While the video was crisp and clear, you could tell by the vibe in the room that the attendees wanted something more. In a surprise showing, Stolar introduced footage of the first game being developed for the US Dreamcast. Stolar said that the game was only 20 percent complete. Then the game ran...

　　As the room became silent, the game being shown ran smoothly at 60 frames per second or more showcasing a first person shooter that looked a great deal like Panzer Dragoon. The graphics definitely made it stand out from anything we'd ever seen on a console, imagine if the graphics from Rage's Incoming were adopted for Dragoon. In the few short minutes of footage, the vibe in the room had switched to a lot of smiles and a lot of exclamations that the graphics were truly unreal. These shots, taken on a small digital camera at the conference, may be a little blurry but we hope to get some solid shots of the game sometime in the near future.

　　We'll have more complete coverage of Stolar's speech tomorrow. Stay tuned.