6 ms·

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

286 points by wicket 9mo ago

empressplay 9mo ago
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.
- nickpeterson 9mo ago
  And now blockbuster is out of business, thanks a lot empressplay.
  - jdubs1984 9mo ago
    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.
    - nickpeterson 9mo ago
      I’m pretty sure it was people playing sega channel games.
    - mjevans 9mo ago
      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.
nubinetwork 9mo ago
Cool, it's nice that they're sharing them instead of adding them to Frank's private collection.
millzlane 9mo ago
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.
- marpstar 9mo ago
  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.
Melatonic 9mo ago
Sega Channel was so ahead of its time
exogeny 9mo ago
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.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
kevinsync 9mo ago
> 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_discrepancy 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
- LocalH 9mo ago
  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.
  - piltdownman 9mo ago
    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.
Jeremy1026 9mo ago
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!
- toast0 9mo ago
  Race Drivin' maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fsCDXk-pk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fsCDXk-pk (sound level is high) ... or maybe the earlier game Hard Drivin'
  - Jeremy1026 9mo ago
    That is 100% it! Time to fire up an emulator.
Aissen 9mo ago
Wow, I thought those would be as lost as the Doctor Who episodes. Kudos for the great research and archive work!
nomilk 9mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel
bityard 9mo ago
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.
devinprater 9mo ago
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.
- pram 9mo ago
  I still think the Genesis 6 button and the Saturn 6 button are the best controllers ever made.
  - pezezin 9mo ago
    If you want a modern version, get yourself an 8bitdo M30, it is really good.
darepublic 9mo ago
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.
jerf 9mo ago
"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 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.
- xp84 9mo ago
  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.
  - dr-detroit 9mo ago
    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.
- Melatonic 9mo ago
  Couldn't they just have released a "blank" cartridge with RAM?
jghn 9mo ago
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.
ndiddy 9mo ago
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-af2881fdc16d 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.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  It was impossible to compete with blockbuster at the time. They had walls of games to rent and rent we did.
  - pooyan93 9mo ago
    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.
- zorked 9mo ago
physicsguy 9mo ago
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.
jakedata 9mo ago
If it was Nintendo instead of Sega, everyone would be slapped with a cease-and-desist backed up with the threat of lawsuits.
garciansmith 9mo ago
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.
pinewurst 9mo ago
In a previous work life, I remember working on a Sega Channel/XBAND hybrid.
- Famicoman 9mo ago
  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?
  - pinewurst 9mo ago
    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.
aussieguy1234 9mo ago
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.
somat 9mo ago
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.

286 points by wicket 9mo ago

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.

nickpeterson 9mo ago
And now blockbuster is out of business, thanks a lot empressplay.
- jdubs1984 9mo ago
  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.
  - nickpeterson 9mo ago
    I’m pretty sure it was people playing sega channel games.
  - mjevans 9mo ago
    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.

nubinetwork 9mo ago

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

millzlane 9mo ago

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.

marpstar 9mo ago
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.

Melatonic 9mo ago

Sega Channel was so ahead of its time

exogeny 9mo ago

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.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

kevinsync 9mo ago

> 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_discrepancy 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

LocalH 9mo ago
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.
- piltdownman 9mo ago
  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.

Jeremy1026 9mo ago

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!

toast0 9mo ago
Race Drivin' maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fsCDXk-pk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fsCDXk-pk (sound level is high) ... or maybe the earlier game Hard Drivin'
- Jeremy1026 9mo ago
  That is 100% it! Time to fire up an emulator.

Aissen 9mo ago

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

nomilk 9mo ago

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

bityard 9mo ago

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.

devinprater 9mo ago

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.

pram 9mo ago
I still think the Genesis 6 button and the Saturn 6 button are the best controllers ever made.
- pezezin 9mo ago
  If you want a modern version, get yourself an 8bitdo M30, it is really good.

darepublic 9mo ago

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.

jerf 9mo ago

"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 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.

xp84 9mo ago
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.
- dr-detroit 9mo ago
  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.
Melatonic 9mo ago
Couldn't they just have released a "blank" cartridge with RAM?

jghn 9mo ago

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.

ndiddy 9mo ago

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-af2881fdc16d 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.

reactordev 9mo ago
It was impossible to compete with blockbuster at the time. They had walls of games to rent and rent we did.
- pooyan93 9mo ago
  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.
zorked 9mo ago

physicsguy 9mo ago

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.

jakedata 9mo ago

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

garciansmith 9mo ago

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.

pinewurst 9mo ago

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

Famicoman 9mo ago
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?
- pinewurst 9mo ago
  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.

aussieguy1234 9mo ago

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.

somat 9mo ago

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.