The very first Dragon Ball universe game was on a system that the average game has never heard of, the Super Cassette Vision, a console released in 1981 by an equally unknown company, Epoch. Needless to say, Dragonball Z games had a rocky start, considering the first Dragonball Z game released in North America was changed so drastically that the Dragonball Z name wasn't anywhere present, and all of the character names and designs were changed to appeal to the Western market.
Dragonball Z games didn't get another North American release until Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout, in 1997, a considerable amount of time after the entire series was shown in Japan, and the Dragon Ball Z show hadn't even been showing a year when this game was released, so there was no proper audience for the release.
It wasn't until after this that Dragon Ball Z blew up in the United States, and the first of the Budokai series was released in 2002 on the PS2, PSP and Gamecube; this is a considerable gap in console generations, so many of the classic Dragonball Z games were completely overlooked by American gamers; most aren't even widely available. There is an exception of course, as the world of game emulation really exposed the Western audience to the older Dragonball Z games for free. I won't go any further into console and game emulation, as it is somewhat illegal.
Though, on the legal side, there are free online Dragon Ball Z games in the form of your basic, primitive flash games here and there. These aren't the cream of the crop when it comes to Dragonball Z games, but they are certainly better than nothing. One extremely popular form of free online Dragon Ball Z games are through the BYOND (Build Your Own Net Dreams) program, which allows fans to make and play their own simplistic video games. Some are even quite complex and engaging, but they are few and far. Either way, they are certainly good ways to pass the time.
The franchise of Dragonball Z games in North America most probably peaked with the Budokai series, and not many other titles have garnered the amount of attention from the fans like the Budokai series. It seems the franchise of the games might have the same fate as the franchise of the series and just end up being an underground phenomena or even written off as a fad.
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