Now we just want to know which Sega Dreamcast game Tim Walz was obsessed with

If yesterday’s revelation that someone involved in the messaging of the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz presidential campaign was way into dril tweets had you thinking it was going to be the most obscure intrusion of nerd-ery likely to occur during the 2024 election, that’s only because you hadn’t prepared yourself for today. I.e., the day the New York Times revealed that Walz, back before he was a governor, was apparently so obsessed with the Sega Dreamcast video game console that his wife once had to take it away from him.

In case the previous sentence made no sense to you, you have to understand the unique position that the Dreamcast holds in gaming culture: Released in 1999, when it soldiered along grimly for a year before Sony’s PlayStation 2 arrived to start putting it out of its misery, the Dreamcast was one of gaming’s great non-success stories, ultimately driving Sega completely out of the hardware business. This is despite having a small but potent library of cult games, of the kind that people who actually bought the damn thing will never stop telling you were great. Walz being obsessed with the console (“He regaled players with stories they found unusually relatable, like the time his wife had seized his Dreamcast, the Sega video game console, because he had been playing to excess”, The Times writes of the man’s high school football coaching career) is kind of like if Obama released one of his yearly round-ups of the year’s best books, and there were a ton of the sort of semi-obscure manga titles your one manga friend is always telling you “You gotta read” on there.

All of which has led many people on the internet to ask: Which Dreamcast games had their hooks in Walz? (It can’t be Madden, despite the football associations; EA Sports ditched the console before it was even released, infamously contributing to its downfall.) Was the almost stereotypically Midwestern Walz catching lunkers in Sega Bass Fishing? Grooving out on the space-based dance moves of Space Channel 5? Issuing voice commands to Seaman, the video game where you had to keep a terrifying fish-human hybrid alive through regular feeding and good mic technique? (Potentially good training for fostering and nurturing American democracy, a horrifying hybrid monster all its own.) Getting constituents to the Pizza Hut as quickly as possible in Crazy Taxi? And, look: We probably know it was something boring like football also-ran NFL 2K2, but we can dare to dream: Does Tim Walz know the high score strats in Ikaruga? If you sing Sonic Adventure 2‘s “Escape From The City” at him, will he visibly wince? Will he get our Shenmue “Sailors?” jokes? We understand (dimly) that there’s an election going on, but we really need someone to ask him about this.