The Untold Story of Online Gaming on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis | XBAND
Wrestling With Gaming4 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2020
documentary · general · evergreen · 2019–2020 on HN
A one-hour documentary on XBAND, the 1994 modem network for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It covers matchmaking, chat, email, leaderboards and how games were patched at runtime to cope with lag.
HN recommends it as a fascinating engineering story of early console online play, including a working demo.
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5 comments from Hacker News
It was. Very much so. I have a lot of fond memories of playing Kirby's Avalanche and Killer Instinct on the SNES over the phone lines. I could not fathom why more people didn't flock to the XBAND. It represented everything I ever wanted as a kid gamer. They had the right idea. Way before its time unfortunately, and shockingly. I still don't really understand why it didn't take off. Luckily, just last month (May 2019) there was a one hour documentary on it that covered a lot of the development of the unit. Well worth watching. ▶ this video
There's an excellent retrospective on YouTube about the xband and how it was built. It was a product ahead of its time. For example, the way they got games that weren't built for laggy multiplayer to work was unbelievable: they recognized the cartridge and patched the code. Yes, that means every game that worked was a result of a custom built patching of that game's code at run time! ▶ this video
If this is interesting to you, I recommend this (1) documentary on XBAND, a peripheral used to access an Xbox Live-like service for the Super Nintendo. It's a fascinating piece of engineering for the time. (1) - ▶ this video
Amazingly enough, link has a working implementation of XBAND. You can see a demo of it in the excellent Wrestling With Gaming documentary on XBAND: ▶ this video
The video documentary on XBAND mentions that players started forming clans with clan tags using the player chat ▶ this video