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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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