Ok, so I knew one person with one of these a long time back. Their family was fairly well off and well, I obviously was not.
I thought that this was cool as hell that you could "order" a game. Even with everything I know now I would never have had one of these, it just didn't seem worth it. It is kind of funny that (((they))) have been trying to make games "stream to play" for like 30-ish years at this point. It keeps failing for a reason....
You know, there was a time you could "download" games by recording them on a cassette tape. If you don't know what that is you need to read more.
Archive: https://archive.today/0ViPV
From the post:
>Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable subscribers would be given an adapter cartridge that would connect their Genesis to a cable TV line. On boot, the cartridge would search for the Sega Channel signal, then download the game menu (this process typically took around 20 seconds). After this, the user would pick a game and then wait about a minute for it to be downloaded to the adapter's RAM. At this point, the game would function exactly the same as a retail cartridge game. Turning the system off or pressing the Sega Channel menu button would erase the downloaded game, but game save data was retained unless the user downloaded a different game. Besides retail games, Sega Channel offered a "Test Drives" section where users could play time or content restricted versions of games before they got a retail release. There were also a number of games that were only available via Sega Channel, although it seems that most of them were titles where either Sega or the publisher weren't confident enough in their quality to give them a physical cartridge release. Sega Channel was a modest success, peaking at around 250,000 subscribers.
Ok, so I knew one person with one of these a long time back. Their family was fairly well off and well, I obviously was not.
I thought that this was cool as hell that you could "order" a game. Even with everything I know now I would never have had one of these, it just didn't seem worth it. It is kind of funny that (((they))) have been trying to make games "stream to play" for like 30-ish years at this point. It keeps failing for a reason....
You know, there was a time you could "download" games by recording them on a cassette tape. If you don't know what that is you need to read more.
Archive: https://archive.today/0ViPV
From the post:
>>Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable subscribers would be given an adapter cartridge that would connect their Genesis to a cable TV line. On boot, the cartridge would search for the Sega Channel signal, then download the game menu (this process typically took around 20 seconds). After this, the user would pick a game and then wait about a minute for it to be downloaded to the adapter's RAM. At this point, the game would function exactly the same as a retail cartridge game. Turning the system off or pressing the Sega Channel menu button would erase the downloaded game, but game save data was retained unless the user downloaded a different game. Besides retail games, Sega Channel offered a "Test Drives" section where users could play time or content restricted versions of games before they got a retail release. There were also a number of games that were only available via Sega Channel, although it seems that most of them were titles where either Sega or the publisher weren't confident enough in their quality to give them a physical cartridge release. Sega Channel was a modest success, peaking at around 250,000 subscribers.
