Next Wednesday will mark the Sega Dreamcast’s 10th birthday, having launched on September 9, 1999. Less than a year and a half later, Sega discontinued the console, facing competition from Sony’s Playstation 2, the looming threat of Microsoft’s Xbox and some friction within the company.

1UP editor Jeremy Parish is celebrating a little early with a retrospective. He does a good job of looking back on Sega the Console Maker, explaining why the Dreamcast was an important product — it had great games, mostly — and what led to its demise. But what really struck me while reading was how much the game console business has changed and solidified over the last 10 years.

Ever since Microsoft launched the Xbox in November 2001, we’ve been playing consoles from the same three manufacturers, with virtually no outside competition. That was unheard of in the 90s, which saw a handful of console makers come and go. The 3DO, Atari Jaguar, TurboGrafx-16 and Neo Geo all took a stab at the home console market, but either failed miserably or didn’t produce any progeny.

Sega was a different case because, as Parish points out, it had been around. Even before the Genesis fiercely competed with the Super Nintendo, there was the Sega Master System, and before the Dreamcast came the Sega Saturn. Sega’s exit from the console market was significant because it made room for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to dominate.

I don’t see any of those three manufacturers bowing out any time soon. If the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and the Wii all stick to their goals of a 10-year life cycle, we’ll be looking at 15 years with the same three brands. The only competitors I see on the horizon are cloud gaming services such as OnLive and Gaikai.

That’s not a bad thing as long as everyone’s innovating. It just underscores how console gaming is no longer a wild and unpredictable industry. By dropping the Dreamcast, Sega made the transformation possible.

If you’re like me, your fondest memories of LucasArts are rooted in the 1990s, with classic computer games like X-Wing, The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road and Star Wars: Dark Forces.

With any luck, those games will soon be available for purchase again through Valve’s Steam download service. Tomorrow, LucasArts will bring 10 classic games to the service, but none of the ones I mentioned above are among them. Included in the list are Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Dig, LOOM and Star Wars Battlefront II, plus six others. But, the company’s Twitter feed says this is “just the beginning” of plans for the publisher’s back catalog.

Even if you have old CD-ROMs of these games kicking around the house, you may have trouble getting them up and running on today’s machines. Assuming that you can still make it through LucasArts’ authentication hoops — I recall a Star Wars alphabet matching system for X-Wing — you’ll likely need extra software and a bit of technical know-how to experience the games as they were (check out DosBox for your pre-Windows titles).

Indeed, a hassle-free experience might be worth the cost of admission, though it’s worth noting that some of these re-releases will carry paper-form copy protection, but in printable digital files.

It looks like LucasArts doesn’t intend to stop with Steam, either. Apple policy discourages discussion of pre-release App plans, but LucasArts CEO Darrell Rodriguez literally said “wink wink, nod nod” to Joystiq after saying “it would make sense” for the company to release its old adventure games for the iPhone.

I see only good coming from LucasArts’ decision to dip into its back catalog and pushing it on new platforms. It just brings me that much closer to my dream of a multiplayer adaptation of X-Wing or Tie Fighter for one of the three gaming consoles.

You think the iPod’s iconic and enduring? Let’s talk come 2021, when it’ll have been around as long as Nintendo’s Game Boy, which turns twenty next Tuesday. To mark the occasion, Benj Edwards found an array of peculiar variations, offshoots, add-ons, and tributes. Never has one pocketable plaything been so many things to so many people.

Click here to view Game Boy Oddities slideshow.