The Dreamcast was a pivotal console for so many reasons. Its modular controller, ability to emulate games from other consoles, and a bevy of now-classic titles helped seal its place among the best of the best. Naturally, an iconic console deserves an equally iconic calling card, which is where this pair of startup sequences come in.

It's not all about kinetic graphics and catchy jingles. Nintendo's Game Boy needed but a single high-pitched tone to get our dopamine flowing. That tone did evolve over the years from the original Game Boy the Game Boy Advance, which showered customers with a more complex and nuanced jingle, but the idea was still there. This is a noise that could wake 10-year-old me out of a coma.

On the polar opposite end of the short-and-sweet spectrum where Game Boy's intro resides there's Sega Master's startup theme. This prolonged jingle and scenic ride through some kind of spaced out checker board landscape really gets the juices flowing. The solar winds are in our hair; the feel of chunky plastic on our finger tips; Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is booting up. All is well in the video game world.

The Halcyon, made by RDI Systems in 1985, may have been essentially dead-on-arrival, but that doesn't mean its legacy is forgotten. Theoretically, this interstellar animation would have been the first thing players saw before playing a game on the console. In reality, however, fewer than a dozen consoles were ever made and only two games planned for the console were released.

For this next entry, we're staying in space, except this time with a jingle that slaps harder than your thumb when you battle Metal Sonic. Sega CD brought us more than one memorable intro with stellar views of Earth and the Moon and more than one iconic musical intro theme. If these don't make you nostalgic for retro consoles we don't know what will.

A proper startup sound and its corresponding animation should be transportive. It should say, "here you are, in a moment of gaming pleasure, about to enjoy some freakin' Crash Bandicoot after school until it's time to do math homework you'll inevitably botch." Coincidentally, that's exactly what Sony did with its PlayStation opener. The ethereal chimes and bass-y, almost gong-like synth.

The original Xbox was huge, it was powerful, and it truly put the box in Xbox. Outside of being one of the most pivotal consoles ever released it also had an enrapturing opening sequence that depicted what we can only assume is some kind of plasma (likely a futuristic fuel source that powers the Xbox, though we're writers not scientists) and some warped synth groans. It screamed "this is the future." Its proclamations were correct.

You're probably waiting for us to justify this one, but honestly we don't have to. Just watch Nintendo's GameCube intro and tell us it's not immediately inviting. There were three iterations and all of them were equally as inviting, playful, and found a way to encapsulate the ethos of the system and its ecosystem of classic game franchises. If this isn't enough to convince you that GameCube deserves the number one spot, we have one last clip to sway you...