Hacker News Reader

Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

> Satellaview, a satellite modem launched in 1995 that could receive new game data as it was broadcast. Although the cost of the system and the monthly subscription fees were high, the system was successful—it enjoyed a five-year run before it was discontinued in 2000.

I would never imagine such thing - games via satellite - ever existed, let alone for Famicom!

Living in Japan in the 90's might be have been pretty amazing, it was like living in a retro version of the future. I remember when my friend came back from Japan and brought payphone cards, something I would only see again 10 years later in my country.

View on HN

So, it was before Satellaview, but I lived in Japan in 1993 when I was sixteen, and it was the best time in my life. But I also was a giant f*ing nerd. Here are some things I remember, with regard to "retrofuturism": a Blockbuster video VHS kiosk that rented you movies, ala Redbox (in 1993!); Minidisc everywhere; waitstaff with wireless "notepads" that looked like old TI calculators, to type in your order that would send it back to the kitchen automatically. Akihabara was literally like being in a cyberpunk novel, I would drift past a salvage electronics part store, squeeze between some shops and up a darkened, narrow staircase and wander into a backroom stuffed to the ceiling with laserdiscs and commercial 8MM video cassettes.

On the other hand, most places didn't take credit cards and I saw very few personal computers compared to the USA at the time. So it really was a strange, uneven retrofuturism.

One of the neat aspects of retrofuturism is you can imagine worlds where the personal computer was never invented (for example). So it wasn't necessarily "wrong" retrofuturism.

I really really really wish I'd lived in Tokyo at that time. This was slightly after the bubble had reached its 'hookers and blow' phase where something like a fifth of the buildings in midtown Manhattan were owned by companies in Japan. The bubble had burst, but society hadn't caught up to it.

Look at all the accessories coming you could get for the PC Engine (Turbo Graphics 16), and how they all hooked up, were powered, and what it took to play some of these games. All this for a consumer device, and NEC expected to turn a profit.

All in all just technology for technology's sake.

Japan in the 80s and into the 90s was like a vision of a an alternate future where technology could keep growing and happening infinitely. Some really interesting features from that time period. If people in the West thought all the 8-bit micro computers was hard to deal with, in Japan there were nearly countless models by many companies, sometimes competing with themselves! This went on into the 16 and 32-bit eras even. Japan really had a stunning alternative view of the future.

Do you want to buy a NEC PC-9801 or a Sharp X68000? How about a nice FM Towns from Fujitsu, the first home computer with a built in optical drive? But all my friends have a MSX computers! Okay, should I get the MSX 2+ or the turboR, from which manufacturer? I like Panasonic's model, but I heard Yamaha's has a good music interface. My friend has an old Fujitsu FM-7, but man the X1 Twin looks cool with it's integrated PC Engine! http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/JPNcomputers/Japanesecomput...

Amazingly, not a single one of these machines made it to the U.S. Commodore and Atari were simply far too dominant. Jack Tramiel even addresses keeping the Japanese out of the U.S. market as a principle concern. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gmODkpnjO0

Also, not a single one of these architectures lives on today. I think the FM-Towns (an almost PC clone) and the Sharp X68k series went on the longest. But it's a tremendous surprise that so many personal computers were available, in a country that's never really been known for personal computer ownership. Even today, the typical Japanese office space is piled full of file cabinets and paper. It's like something right out of the 1970s and 80s. http://www.accountant-tokyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/J...

All of the basic system architectures dead-ended. Most were using Z80s, which never evolved beyond the 16-bit-ish R800. 6502 variants were common, the NES ran on this, the SNES ran on a 16-bit variant 65C816. But that's it. The X68000 series ran on the Motorola 68k chips, which as we all know dead ended with the switch to the PowerPC line (which BTW, still powers all sorts of consoles today). The only system which picked up on the Intel lines was the FMTowns, but architecturally deviated from normal PCs enough that it's not compatible.

Japan during during and right after the bubble was amazing.

http://www.thebubblebubble.com/japan-bubble/

I played games on an FM-Towns Marty :-) I never met anybody who had any of those other systems, unfortunately.

A similarly poorly received service existed for the Sega Genesis, distributed over cable instead of satellite.

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

Poorly received and awesome. My parents were divorced and I had a SNES at one parent's and a Genesis with Sega Channel at the other. The breadth of the Genesis library I became familiar with was really something (and introduced me to Phantasy Star, still my favorite JRPG series of the era).

Interestingly, there was a game related to Chrono Trigger that was distributed by Satellaview: Radical Dreamers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Dreamers). I found funny that the article doesn't mention it, although I guess that the book will talk about it.

I just returned from a trip to Japan 2 weeks ago, and I immediately felt exactly that; transported to the future, as imagined by the 90s.

> I would never imagine such thing - games via satellite - ever existed, let alone for Famicom!

And the UK had BASIC games for the BBC Micro broadcast over terrestrial analog TV. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesoftware

can you imagine the same thing on atari 2600? in 1983? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameLine

Truly pioneer. It took Valve's Steam, 20 years later, to realize the concept.

That shows how sometimes the market potential is there, but the technology is not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com