Nostalgia: Sega Channel

The Roots of Digital Distribution

        The internet seems to be slowly making its way to being the only way to buy games these days. With services like Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, WiiWare, and Steam, the video game industry is moving more and more towards digital distribution. These services, though, are not the firsts of their kind. Way before Steam and XBLA got their start in the early 2000s, Sega was putting itself out there in the digital front in 1994 with Sega Channel.

        Sega Channel was Sega's first attempt at creating a digital download service, but in a time when the internet was almost unheard of, how would it be possible to download games onto a console through digital space? Well, that's where the "channel" part of the name comes in. The games were downloaded through the cable services.

        The way the whole thing worked was people would pay for a subscription to Sega Channel and for an adapter that would attach to the Genesis like a regular cartridge. The difference was the adapter was much larger than a cartridge and had a wire that connected to the cable outlet making a typical Genesis look like a homemade bomb. It would take a tad longer than a regular Genesis game to load everything up, and when it did, owners could choose from a wide variety of games that rotated every so often. Once the game of choice was selected, it would be downloaded onto the adapter and be ready to be played. The game could be played as long as desired, but if the system was turned off the game would have to be re-downloaded.

-IGN

         The most important aspect of Sega Channel was its ability to deliver games straight to people's houses whenever they wanted. The games were divided up into different categories and switched out every so often. It also provided special demos for games that had yet to be released and featured some games that were not available anywhere else in the U.S. like Alien Soldier and Game Freak's pre-Pokémon game Pulseman.

        Sega Channel allowed a child like myself, who only had a few games, to discover everything the Genesis had to offer. Because of Sega Channel, I was introduced to awesome games like Vectorman, Quackshot, Mega Man: The Wily Wars, Mega Bomberman, Ristar, Sonic 3D Blast, Earthworm Jim as well as less than awesome games like Ecco the Dolphin and The Flinstones. The large amount of games I had a chance to play meant that Sega Channel became the center of my video game world.

        But eventually, Sega Channel became too expensive for my parents to keep paying for, and we had to return it. By 1998 everyone else had to say goodbye to Sega Channel as Sega was beginning to suffer from its failures like the 32X and Saturn. Sega continued to experiment with digital distribution, but they never saw the same kind of success that Sega Channel had. However, certain key ideas still live on in modern day distribution services like demos and subscription based gaming. Its most important contribution to the video game industry, though, was paving the way for the wonderfully successful internet services of today. Sega Channel was way ahead of its time, but it seems that now the rest of the world has finally caught up.

         If you want to know more about Sega Channel, my sources, IGN and Sega Retro, have a large amount of information regarding Sega Channel.