Did anyone have this? I always heard about it growing up in the late 1990s but never got to see anything or knew people who had it. I always assumed it was some sort of subscription channel or fee-driven programming (kind of like Pay-Per-View or specialty cable) where you spend more money to do....exactly what? I heard you could play Sega games on it, or whatever, but how would that happen? Early version of 'cloud gaming' didn't really exist back then either....or did it? I'm still just as confused about it now in 2024 regarding this mysterious service as I was confused about it back then in 1996.
It's basically just internet. You subscribed to it, and you connected to it, and it would download a game as you wanted. Certain games were only available at certain times.
As with most everything, Sega was a pioneer years ahead of everyone else, but they didn't reap the benefits. You can see this model is exactly what Microsoft's GamePass is.
What made it a problem back then was a combination of logistics and cost. A lot of houses weren't set up well to connect a video game to a cable or telephone line unless you had it hooked up to the main living room television. The X-Band also got screwed because of this. A solid peripheral but it would do a number on your phone bill. Frickers used to charge by the minute. When AOL became a thing parents were often willing to bite the bullet there because it was so incredibly versatile. But just for the Sega Genesis? A much harder sell.
So it’s basically the 1980’s-1990’s equivalent of NSO or GameFly?
I didn't have it because my cable provider didn't support it but from what I understand the unit you plugged into the system was essentially a big RAM cart that had a coaxial connection. You'd browse the Sega Channel page like a normal website and select whatever game you wanted and it downloaded to the on-board RAM, letting you play as if it were a regular cartridge. But once you turned the system off it disappeared. Some games were actually too big and they had to be split in half. Sonic 3D Blast, for example, only let you play half the game and then you had to download the second part to get the rest of the game.
Weird how both -Man games were Sega Channel exclusive in America, Megaman Wily Wars and Pulseman.
Also Alien Soldier Man.
Sega Channel was too brilliant for its' own good. I love the idea that it could just download game ROM's that are only MB's in size at breakneck speeds through a cable modem in the mid 90's. It was a concept that flat out could not be carried over to the 32bit generation of disc based consoles, because of the disc sizes and problems with harddrive storage space. There were games exclusively released on the Sega Channel that never got retail releases. Brilliant idea for content delivery.
>Sega Channel was too brilliant for its' own good
anon it was literally just a clone of shit that existed back on the atari
Thanks, post millennials have no memory of the early 80s.
>anon it was literally just a clone of shit that existed back on the atari
The Sega Channel connects to a cable modem, for 1994/ 1995, was pretty incredible. The idea has been tried before. Sadly my cable provider never had the service. But I would have signed up if it was available. The Sega Channel implementation also apparently had early prototypes, and exclusive games, like that Garfield expansion, Alien Soldier, Mega Man: The Wily Wars and Monster World IV were available through it.
I knew about the others, but I'd never heard that Monster World IV was on it.
>I knew about the others, but I'd never heard that Monster World IV was on it.
OK, I was wrong. There was no Monster World IV. I guess that first appeared with the Wii.
But I guess Golden Axe III, Maui Mallard (knew about that one), Pulseman, Dyna Brothers 2: The Sega Channel Special, Power Drive is kinda whatever. I had no idea Battle Frenzy was on the Sega Channel. It was an interesting way for Sega to release games that they might have passed on publishing themselves. Dyna Brothers 2: Sega Channel Special, and Garfield: The Lost Levels are some interesting Sega Channel exclusive content.
And I'm just now learning not only that Game no Kanzume got a Sega Channel release, but also that Sega Channel got a Japanese release. That's such a weird title to release on Sega Channel, considering it's already a compilation of games by itself.
I wonder if they used the Sega Channel as a test market for Japanese games they were deciding whether or not to localize as a physical cartridge. They probably had the stats for who downloaded what.
I think in Maui Mallards case, Nintendo exclusively published the SNES and GameBoy games themselves for the NA market. The game could not be published to the Genesis. So it went on Sega Channel.
Sega probably also just wasn't worried about publishing a brand new Genesis game in uh... 1997. Also, holy shit I had no idea that game was that late in the Genesis/SNES lifespan.
I don't think Garfield: The Lost Levels was ever dumped. It is a real curiosity. It is basically a lost game.
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Sega Channel was also the earliest service that got cable providers to upgrade their infrastructure to support transporting raw, digital data to the house well before cable internet became a prominent thing.
Like this-
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Not like that at all, because it was a cable modem. It was not 33k like the Saturn modem.The whole thing sounded amazing. Connect 'online' to a Sega network, via a cable TV line, view pages in 16bit Genesis graphics with FMsynth audio.
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I used to have this.
It was a big cartridge with a tv cable connected to it, and you'd have to download the game you wanted to play, each time you booted it up
The fact that it didn't store anything was the worst for preservation. The only reason we have as much as we do from the Satellaview is because people still had shit saved on those memory paks.
You had a modem cart that hooked up to your cable. You'd turn on you Sega and be offered different games to play. The games would change out each month although some would stay on there. You'd choose a game and then it would download a ROM of that game and be able to play it. The thing was pricey. You had to pay a monthly fee and there was an installation price. It was honestly cheaper to rent one game every weekend, which is what most kids did.
>How exactly did the 'Sega Channel' work?
Like Satellaview, except shittier.
"Like Nintendo but shittier" sounds like a Sega thing to do.
Thinking about it, yeah. Sega Channel really was just Satellaview, except you couldn't save a game for offline play (though Satellaview couldn't save most of the games you'd want a Satellaview to actually play, though).
And Satellaview could pair up games with live radio plays
>I heard you could play Sega games on it, or whatever, but how would that happen?
>early version of 'cloud gaming'
The sega channel just downloads the contents of a game to your sega genesis and your genesis is plays it. This is likely kilobytes in size. It is not streaming any video content or having a PC play the game in a data center somewhere or anything like that like a cloud gaming platform would nowadays. The latter requires a lot of bandwidth that only modern infrastructure and networking technologies can support.
It sounds weird but the ability to download a file over existing infrastructure like the telephone lines or cable tv was not unheard of, even though we mostly associate this technology with stuff from the late 90s/early 2000s. Computers were doing this way back in the 70s and became an accessible technology to those who owned a computer in the 80s.