The Sega Channel was pretty much the greatest thing to own as a kid growing up with a Sega Genesis. It was a monthly subscription based game service that allowed you to play up to 50 games each month, with new games added each month. And you pretty much could play the entire game free, right from the box. Not a lot of people were lucky enough to even have this service offered in their area, and if so, I never talk to many people who have even heard of it. But The Sega Channel was a successful experiment, and it proves, if anything, that a service like this will be both popular and successful with the right company backing it (the company being Time Warner in this case).
When seeing this commercial, or other similar ones, as a kid, it’s hard NOT to get excited and beg your parents for this. Honestly, this was such a great deal; you payed a pretty low price for a service that allowed you to play a bunch of full Genesis games. Some of them were trials, but most were the entire game from start to finish. I discovered so many great games through this service, like Dynamite Headdy, Ristar, Shining Force, Earthworm Jim, and oh so many more. I think one of the main reasons I would put the Sega Genesis as my favorite game console of all time is because of this service. You even had games never released in the U.S. but available only on the Genesis, such as Mega Man: The Wily Wars, Golden Axe III, and Alien Soldier.
Now, normally I would go on to talk about how the game I am featuring holds up today. Well, since this isn’t a game, and it is a discontinued service, there is really no way to do that. But I can say that back when this launched, it proved to a lot of people that services like this were both A) Easy to do, and B) Pretty popular. We now have services like Gametap, which work in a pretty similar fashion and have garnered a decent amount of popularity. But then we have the upcoming On Live service, which promises to do basically the same thing done by the Sega Channel.
So, in short, the Sega Channel was pretty much the greatest thing to have growing up with a Genesis, and it helped me discover so many great games for the system that I never would have learned about otherwise. Sure, a lot of these games were later packaged in things like Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, but it makes playing through those collections even better having previously played those games. Whether or not a service like On Live will be as successful as Sega Channel was is still to be determined, but it definitely pathed the way for an interesting new way to play games.
