The SEGA Channel, released nationally in North America in 1994, was an exceedingly innovative delivery system for games -- quite prescient to what's happening now with services like Wii Ware, XBLA, and the PlayStation Network. Instead of using the Internet (which was in its pop culture infancy in 1994), SEGA teamed with Time Warner Cable and TCI -- both cable giants in the nineties -- to deliver games over regular coaxial cable.
For a monthly fee (that depended on location, but was approximately $15) and a $25 activation fee that also provided the necessary hardware, Genesis owners received a SEGA Channel adapter that fit into the console's cartridge slot and access to upwards of 50 games. The games were often rotated and shuffled every month, with some updates happening every other week. The game line-up included catalog titles from SEGA and other third-party publishers, but it also offered demos for upcoming games and, like the Virtual Console, access to games that were not released in America, such as Alien Soldier.
At the height of the service, the SEGA Channel had over 250,000 subscribers. But as the Genesis entered its sunset phase with the rise of the 32-bit generation and the SNES managing to finally take a permanent hold on the majority share of the 16-bit market, the SEGA Channel faded. The service officially ended on July 31, 1998 -- three years into the Saturn's lifecycle.
The Technology
Even though the SEGA Channel was broadcast over coaxial cable, not entirely unlike a cable modem, the service was not like the Internet. The SEGA Channel was a one-way street, sending a broadcast signal into the adapter in your Genesis. The adapter itself was pretty much a blank slate. When you started up the Genesis and cued up the SEGA Channel, the front-end menu system for the service was loaded into the adapter. That took approximately 30 seconds.
Once you were at the main menu, you could start navigating through the different areas. Once you selected the game you wanted to play, the code was broadcast over the cable and "downloaded" into the memory of the adapter. Since Genesis games weren't exactly mammoth data entities, this usually only took a few minutes at the most. Once the game was in memory, you could play it as long as you liked (unless the game was a timed demo). However, the moment you turned off the Genesis, the game was wiped from memory and had to be re-downloaded. This was a good way to not only combat potential piracy, but also a small roadblock that was designed to push you toward buying the actual cartridges of the games you liked the most. In essence, this was a "try before you buy" service.
But some of the tech happening behind the scenes of the SEGA Channel is just as interesting. In order for the SEGA Channel to work properly, the signal coming over the coaxial had to be relatively "clean" -- something that plagued older cable systems. Noise on the cable -- any sort of interference -- would terminate the download.
To combat the problem, cable providers had to take steps to clean their signal. This was part of a major overhaul of American cable systems in the nineties, which lead the way to advancements in digital cable, which is so prevalent now in households.
The Games
The SEGA Channel was a portal for Genesis gamers to download new games or catalog titles directly to their homes. At any given time, the SEGA Channel hosted approximately 50 games spread across a number of categories, such as Arcade, Wings & Wheels, Disney picks, and Sports Arena. According to a web snapshot of the SEGA Channel website in April of 1997, the Arcade area line-up consisted of: Bubsy II, Chakan, Dinosaurs for Hire, Dynamite Heady, Earthworm Jim 2, El Viento, Eternal Champions, Gunstar Heroes, Heavy Nova, Mortal Kombat 3, Revenge of Shinobi, Sonic & Knuckles, Space Harrier II, Virtua Fighter II, and VR Troopers. The Disney Picks included: Aladdin, Bonkers, Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow, Pinocchio, and World of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Obviously, this was a great way for gamers to maximize their gaming dollars as well as try out games prior to purchase. But the SEGA Channel also offered demo downloads for new games, such as Primal Rage.
The SEGA Channel also hosted games not available in specific territories. For example, the American SEGA Channel has an International area of the games service that hosted titles like Pulseman and Alien Soldier. (Alien Soldier is actually now available for download via the Virtual Console.)
Jeremy Dunham, Games Editorial Manager at IGN, remembers: "The SEGA channel was ahead of its time -- and it was awesome; it was the only place I ever got to play the Genesis version of Mega Man, and gave me access to games that were otherwise hard to find or that I never got around to playing on my own. Thanks to the SEGA Channel, I now know that The Ooze was doing Katamari in 2D long before Namco did, and thanks to the SEGA channel, I was able to play through Vectorman without having to worry about returning it to the video store on time."
The End
Unfortunately, despite its forward-looking premise and relative popularity (that install base was nothing to sneeze at in the late nineties), the SEGA Channel was eventually put to pasture. When SEGA refocused all of its efforts on the Saturn, dumping the still-popular but waning Genesis and the disastrous 32X, the SEGA Channel first entered its spiral. And, as SEGA's fortunes changed for the worse due to the failure of the Saturn, the SEGA Channel was an expendable loss.
Perhaps if the SEGA Channel had been released earlier in the console's lifecycle -- the Genesis launched in 1989 in America -- things might have turned out differently. After all, the service did gain notice for its advancement of gaming and technology. Popular Science awarded the SEGA Channel one of it's "Best of What's New" awards for 1994.
However, SEGA and the entire industry learned important lessons from the SEGA Channel. SEGA was still committed to the idea of downloads and online, as evidenced by the Dreamcast's SegaNet. (It's hard to really gauge SEGA's commitment to the Saturn's NetLink, especially in America where it absolutely floundered.) You can also see the DNA of early services like the SEGA Channel in modern portals like XBLA and PSN, where demos are now a staple. Of course, downloads have now been monetized instead of just part of a subscription fee, like what you find on GameTap.
If you still have a SEGA Channel adapter, it's essentially a brick, but there is an aftermarket for SEGA collectors. Some us actually believed the local cable company when they said they needed the adapter back.
