Sega Channel: VGHF Recovers over 100 Sega Channel ROMs (and More) | Hacker News Reader

Sega Channel: VGHF Recovers over 100 Sega Channel ROMs (and More)

gamehistory.org

286 pointswicket45 comments

One of the most interesting things in this release IMO is the internal documents from Sega Channel management. For example, in this binder https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/ef6246e4-79be-4b02-b262... there's a bunch of research documents trying to figure out how to turn the service around after it began underperforming their expectations.

It seems like the main problem they ran into was that the service appealed mainly to the small minority of "heavy players" (who they defined as playing more than 14 hours per week). Their original projections were that they could target cable subscribers who own Genesis systems and play games more than 4 hours a week, but they found that most people who weren't gaming fanatics preferred to own a few games and rent games as needed rather than subscribe to Sega Channel.

The other big problem they ran into was parental resistance. A large amount of parents they talked to viewed Sega Channel as an "open tap" that would increase their child's time spent playing games. An ongoing subscription also was only a one-time "give" from the parent to the child, whereas buying/renting games was one "give" per occasion, which was more psychologically attractive to the parents.

It was impossible to compete with blockbuster at the time. They had walls of games to rent and rent we did.

In addition to rentals, around maybe 1994-1995, some stores (I don’t remember where) would have bargain bins or racks with some older games that were really inexpensive on CD-ROMs, and this continued for years. I remember snapping up some great old games this way.

Much earlier, as a kid I’d sometimes get games on cassette tapes in the bookstore and Radio Shack. Later it was great going to software stores that had games on 5 1/4” floppy diskettes in boxes. That stuff rocked.

I have had little interest in the games since then. Everything seems the same: mostly FPS / 3D crap. I don’t see any escape from this in the world building AI space either; they just added goggles.

The document includes musings about a PC version of Sega Channel. So, kind of like Steam, but in 1996.

"Sega broke ground in the late 90s with one of the first digital game distribution systems for consoles."

By the time this came on to the scene the idea was already 14 years old. Intellivision was doing it in 1980: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayCable

The idea blows people's minds if they think of a TV channel as just a channel for delivering TV, but the concept is not that hard if you realize it's just a way to broadcast data, most of which happens to be television video signals. The problem is making it cost-effective for a console to have an amount of RAM normally associated with a cartridge. For most of console gaming's lifespan cart size completely outclassed RAM size so storing a full cartridge image in RAM was expensive for what was generally the low end of the market. Plus the RAM you could stick in the receiver put a firm upper limit on how large a cart you could broadcast, and in an era still undeniably ruled by Moore's Law the size of the more desirable carts tended to outrun the RAM put in these things so they tended to become rapidly unable to keep up with the cart sizes.

That's got to be a good part of it. And to top it off, there wasn't persistent storage available locally, so you couldn't build up a little library of playable content you received from such a service, having to sacrifice the old stuff to get something new, and if they didn't rebroadcast that item, you would never see it again.

I'm sure to some kinds of people that was fine, but I think people kind of don't like having to delete something they like even a little -- even if they won't play it again, they'd rather know they can.

some months they had General Chaos and some they didnt. perhaps the coolest thing was only my one friend had it so we had to go over to his house to play it not like today where I would just passively consume it in a sad room all alone.

Couldn't they just have released a "blank" cartridge with RAM?

The main cartridge (with the cable modem) was presumably heavily subsidized by the expected recurring revenue, which relies on the ephemeralness of the games. Offering RAM carts (even at cost) would threaten that revenue as people can stock up on games and cancel their subscription once they've built up their collection.

That's essentially what the Sega Channel adapter was. The service didn't rely on something like you'd expect from a modern cable modem. The games were broadcast in a round-robin fashion (presumably broken up into blocks, as I remember the time to initiate a download was never super long, but the whole process to play a game did take a small amount of time). The adapter thus needed hardware and software in order to decode with the one-way signal to download the menu and game data.

This is awesome! I used to have sega channel as a kid. I never had a game console and a Sega is the only one my mom ever bought us. We were fortunate enough to have cable TV from TCI cable and they had Sega channel. Every month we'd get new games and eventually they changed it to 2 weeks.

We were also on TCI when I was a kid. I begged for Sega Channel. My mom tried to sign us up, but being across the river from the city meant we got half the TV channels, no PPV, and no Sega Channel.

Interested in the Lost World: Jurassic park variants. I was 5 when that came out in 1997 and it was an odd release since barely anyone had a Megadrive anymore but we had one and my parents wouldn’t buy me a PlayStation, so they relented and bought me that as I loved dinosaurs. It is honestly such a great game and was really underappreciated since it was so late in the release cycle for that console.

Cool, it's nice that they're sharing them instead of adding them to Frank's private collection.

I felt like the coolest kid in the neighborhood with Sega Channel. It was so cool to have a dozen or so new games every month. There was a stunt car driving game that was on there at one point. I have no idea what it was called, I couldn't really explain it anymore than that, but whew was it a great time when it was there!

Race Drivin' maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fsCDXk-pk (sound level is high) ... or maybe the earlier game Hard Drivin'

That is 100% it! Time to fire up an emulator.

Sega Channel cut my game rental costs in half (sorry Blockbuster) and I played so many games I would have never bothered renting. Good times.

And now blockbuster is out of business, thanks a lot empressplay.

Blockbuster went out of business because they made the video rental market incredibly boring and had no vision for the future. Once they got market dominance it became just 500 copies of the first fast and furious as a guaranteed rental, and all the cool and interesting stuff gone.

I’m pretty sure it was people playing sega channel games.

Observationally, their model was roughly like this:

* For hit movies buy an obscene number of copies to rent month 1

* Sell off some for a discount as the rentals dwindled

* Discount anything over a reasonable backlog / duplicates set shortly after

Offhand I think they tried to time this to end well enough before the release windows slid to TV + Ads distribution.

* Rent the backlog until dead or until they sold in a discount bin

Some independent shops also competed. I recall my parents kindly rented a few less popular games they happened to carry. Not sure about videos, might have been better for stuff not mainstream enough at the big national chain.

Oh man. Yeah, Sega Channel was amazing. It's true that it came pretty late in the Genesis' life and by that time, Sega was prioritizing Saturn but man, I loved SC and looked forward to the first of the month when all of the menus would switch.

I remember my cousin excitedly telling me that his mom had got him Sega Channel. My mind was blown. However it was soon taken away per parental discretion and I never got a chance to visit and play it. Back to Sonic 2, and Eternal Champions.

This is very neat, though the difficulty and time it took to get all this material speaks to the problems with subscription services and game preservation. As more and more services and games move to subscription-only models where individuals do not own or even control local copies of the games they play, once those services shut down (or specific titles are pulled) more and more games will be locked away, forgotten, and then lost forever.

If it was Nintendo instead of Sega, everyone would be slapped with a cease-and-desist backed up with the threat of lawsuits.

Growing up, the Sega Channel was something I desperately wanted as a kid. Unfortunately, I did not have a Genesis, we did not have cable TV, and our parents would have balked at spending $40/month (adjusted for inflation) on a service to keep us from going outside to play.

Very cool, I wonder why the service was never updated to work with saturn. No hdd would be my guess. with no hdd games have to be absurdly small to fit in ram.

I will note that as I was reading the saturn specs(I am unfamiliar with the system) I found that there are save cartridges and a saturn modem. Everything needed hardware wise. It looks like they made a internet(dialup) based version for saturn.

And final thoughts: It would be neat to see what sort of back end services they were using if those were in the recovered backup tapes. probably quite a bit more sensitive than releasing roms so may not happen.

There should be some kind of video game preservation law.

If you stop selling a game, you're obligated to release it for free, including any server code that game depends on.

Wow, I thought those would be as lost as the Doctor Who episodes. Kudos for the great research and archive work!

In a previous work life, I remember working on a Sega Channel/XBAND hybrid.

This sounds amazing, I’m a big fan of the tech that went into both the Sega Channel and XBAND platforms.

Any more information you’d be willing to share about your work?

It was a joint Catapult/Scientific Atlanta thing - I don’t think it actually went anywhere beyond some prototyping of server streaming and client encryption.

Wow, I never heard of that before today. Sega Genesis was my first console. I still remember the six button controller. It worked well for Mortal Kombat 3.

I still think the Genesis 6 button and the Saturn 6 button are the best controllers ever made.

If you want a modern version, get yourself an 8bitdo M30, it is really good.

we had this in college. It failed to work more often than it worked, but when it worked it was awesome and way ahead of its time.

Sega Channel was so ahead of its time

> The Berenstain Bears’ A School Day

Given how often people love to swear with certainty that they remember Berenstain spelled as Berenstein [0], I find it kind of neat/interesting when this sort of digital archaeology refutes the silliness with undeniable proof.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstain_Bears#Name_discrepa...

Edit: that's one of the ROMs they recovered from tape backup -- wanted to add context since, if you don't actively expand the list in the article, my comment appears wildly non-sequitur

To me, it's part satire and part arrogance. Some people find it so hard to understand that their memory can be faulty that they'll construct a whole theory around something in order to avoid doing so. Others capitalized on that in a humorous way to contribute further to the "Mandela effect".

Of course, the silliness has always been refuted, since nobody has an authentic example of "Berenstein" that isn't itself an error or misprint.

It also touches on the lack of care that people tend to have when it comes to getting names right. The creators of the Bears dealt with this in school, with a teacher who absolutely refused to believe that the A spelling was correct, asserting "there is no such name". A very large number of people throughout history have suffered similar fates, where others would dispute the spelling of their name, or indeed their entire name.

The Mandela Effect isn't used to describe coping mechanisms around the faulty recollection of an individual; rather it categorises a systemic and widespread incidence of false collective memories.

There's no satirical or arrogant component inherent in this phenomenon. For example, pick any five people at random in your life and ask them if they remember any of the following iconic lines:

* Snow White "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" * ST:TOS "Beam me up, Scotty" * Star Wars "Luke, I am your Father" * Wizard of Oz "Fly my pretties, fly" * Casablanca "Play it again, Sam."

I've done about 50-100 of these 5x5 samples in casual groups/workshops and have never had a single all-negative response. Problem is, none of the lines above were ever said.

The Mandela Effect itself is not meant to be humorous, no, but inevitably a non-zero number of participants are involved for humorous reasons.

> I find it kind of neat/interesting when this sort of digital archaeology refutes the silliness with undeniable proof.

Undeniable proof that the conspiracy goes so deep it altered tapes as they were read. :P

I think it's a "mental autocorrect"; there's far more names ending in -stein than -stain. You may amuse yourself by clicking on these links sequentially:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstain

From Wikipedia:

> The Sega Channel was an online game service developed by Sega for the Sega Genesis video game console, serving as a content delivery system. Launched on December 12, 1994, the Sega Channel was provided to the public by TCI and Time Warner Cable through cable television services by way of coaxial cable. It was a pay to play service, through which customers could access Genesis games online, play game demos, and get cheat codes. Lasting until July 31, 1998, the Sega Channel operated three years after the release of Sega's next generation console, the Sega Saturn. Though criticized for its poorly timed launch and costly subscription fee, the Sega Channel has been praised for its innovations in downloadable content and impact on online game services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel

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