Floigan Bros. 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.
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.
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