Dee Dee Planet
Image: Sega

Update (Thu 29th Sep, 2022 15:40 BST):

According to Dreamcast Live, Dee Dee Planet is now back online and available for anyone to play! You can find the connection details and the patched ROM in the description of the video below. Interestingly, the network error has also been found after twenty-one years, with Dreamcast Live reporting that it was a problem with the leaderboards. As a result, they've been removed from the patched game.

Original Story (Mon 19th Sep, 2022 17:00 BST):

Many people will have heard of ChuChu Rocket!, the online Dreamcast game where you have to guide a group of mice to a rocket ship while avoiding a bunch of cats, but what you might not know is that it was actually planned as the first in a series of network titles.

The second game, Dori Dock's Dee Dee Planet, never saw the light of day, with network bugs being cited as the reason for this. Now it appears that a playable version might finally be made available soon, with the website Dreamcast Live tweeting that Shuouma_DC has been hard at work getting it ready to release online. This will undoubtedly be exciting news to Dreamcast fans, as it will mark the first time the game has ever been made available to play online.

On the surface, Dee Dee Planet appears quite similar to Team17's Worms, with four players battling it out with missiles and grenades on a piece of destructible terrain. Here, however, each player also possesses a health bar as well as a cooldown meter for when they can fire again.

The game was originally supposed to launch in 2001 in Japan before it was eventually shut down. And for many years, it was considered a lost cause. Then in 2021, the Dreamcast Live founder pcwzrd13 (known on YouTube as DreamcasticChannel) managed to obtain a near-complete beta of the game and upload it online. Interestingly, at the time, they claimed that the person who gave it to them said the network-related issues were actually on Sega's side, giving Dreamcast fans hope that someone might come along and try to get it back online.

Now it seems Shuouma_DC has done exactly that! We'll try and keep you posted on any updates when they occur.

Do you remember hearing about Dee Dee Planet back in the day? Let us know in the comments!

[source twitter.com]