Skip to main content

Dust off your Sega Dreamcast: All ‘Floigan Bros.’ DLC is finally available 16 years later

Nearly 16 years after its launch, all of the DLC for the zany platformer Floigan Bros, is now available for Sega Dreamcast owners, thanks to a few of the game’s original developers: Tim Meekins, Nick Jones, and John Elliot.

Buy Now was unveiled early in the Sega Dreamcast’s lifecycle, but it didn’t launch until July 2001, four months after Sega’s final console ceased production worldwide. To be fair, the Dreamcast subsisted on North American shelves for less than two years, because of yet another round of underwhelming sales for a piece of Sega hardware that signaled the company’s continued difficulties in a post-Genesis world.

Recommended Videos

Many today, however, believe that the Sega Dreamcast was ahead of its time with a built-in modem and its status as the first console to feature online multiplayer.

Floigan Bros. benefited from the Dreamcast’s online features as it became one of the first console games to receive what is now commonly known as DLC. All of the content in the planned 12-month DLC cycle was actually stored on the disc, but was set to unlock gradually as time passed. Likely because of the discontinuation of the Dreamcast, only the January 2002 DLC, Knitted Hat, ever unlocked for Floigan Bros. players before now.

The other eleven pieces of DLC were unearthed by Dreamcast Live with help from the aforementioned members of the Visual Concepts development team at the time. Since the files were physically stored on the game disc via the Dreamcast’s Visual Memory Unit, the dedicated group worked with the sole piece of available DLC to gain access to the remaining lot. It wasn’t as simple as just tinkering with the time stamps, as security restraints installed by Sega and Visual Concepts to prevent this exact type of behavior needed to be bypassed.

The full DLC schedule can be downloaded directly in the console’s web browser by clicking on the VMI files over at Dreamcast Live. The files can also be downloaded on PC and transferred to Dreamcast.

Steven Petite
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Steven is a writer from Northeast Ohio currently based in Louisiana. He writes about video games and books, and consumes…
We need to start having real conversations about AI in gaming
Copilot Quake II game.

AI has become a dirty word across almost every discipline over the past few years. As big corporations keep pushing this technology forward, a vocal resistance among creatives, critics, and passionate communities has risen up in opposition. While every creative medium is at risk of AI influence now, gamers are particularly sensitive about this technology sucking the creativity and human element from our beloved medium. Even the mere mention of AI being used in game development triggers a massive backlash, but we need to start being more nuanced in how we talk about the ways AI should and should not be used. Because, like it or not, AI is going to become more ubiquitous in gaming. We can't keep talking about AI as though it is a black-and-white thing. It is a tool, and like any tool, there are ways it can be used appropriately.

The question we need to ask ourselves now is, when is it ethical to use and what crosses the line?

Read more
Mecha Break is the closest I’ve felt to piloting a real Gundam outside Japan
Key art for Mecha Break.

In 2015, in a mostly-empty arcade in Fukuoka, I slid into the pilot seat of a Gundam.

I pulled the door down, watching as it seamlessly merged with the rest of the wall and turned into a display of my surroundings. As I pulled the earpiece down, the radio crackled to life as other pilots greeted me through comms.

Read more
Still shopping? Amazon Prime Day deals going strong into day 4
We're bringing you the best Prime Day deals throughout the sales period
Best Prime Day Gift Card Deals

It’s the fourth and final day of the longest ever Amazon Prime Day event, and if you thought the best deals were behind us, think again. Amazon’s stretching this year’s event across four full days (July 8 -11 ) which means price drops are still rolling in hot, with fresh discounts landing on everything from big-name tech to everyday essentials.

There have been stellar savings so far, with the AirPods Pro 2 heading down to $149 as the best saving we've seen.

Read more