Why does Europe (PAL) always get the dodgier looking logo? At least we got Sea Bass Fishing on Saturn… Mystery solved!

One console I don’t seem to spend nearly enough time with is the Sega Dreamcast. The pinnacle of Sega’s home console hardware, if we’re not counting all the wonderful arcade equipment they made. Today I’ve got a couple of Dreamcast arcade sticks to compare, and there’s something about them that’s been annoying me.

They’re very similar and both have that rather lovely chunky arcade-stick feel, but take a look at the Sega logos. They’re different! Little things like that bother me because now I’ve got to work out which one belongs to the PAL market and which one came from Japan or North America.

Maybe the stickers underneath will tell us something. Getting the things turned over is entertaining enough with those enormous joysticks sticking out, but once they’re upside down we can have a proper look at the labels.

One has a rather plain white sticker with a code that appears to begin with 016, while the other has several labels, including one with a code beginning with 918. Could those numbers tell us something about when the sticks were made?

If the first digit represents a year, perhaps we’re looking at one stick from 1999 and another from 2000. There might even be a week number hiding in there somewhere, but that’s really just me having a guess. Without knowing Sega’s numbering system, I wouldn’t put too much faith in that theory.

The black labels also have different numbers printed near the bottom. Perhaps a little research will tell us which is the PAL release. At the time of recording I hadn’t actually looked them up yet, so I can’t give you a definite answer.

Still, it’s interesting to see two otherwise very similar arcade sticks with these little manufacturing differences. Now I want to pull them apart and find out whether anything has changed on the inside!

Mystery solved? Not quite. But at least we’ve got two excellent Dreamcast arcade sticks to play with.