The beginning of online console gaming

I came across a couple of interesting articles about a modem developed for the NES, Genesis and SNES in the early ' 90s -- the Teleplay --that almost made it to the market, but was scuttled by indifference from Nintendo and Sega, intellectual thievery from AT&T, and squirrely investors.

What' s especially interesting to me is that this product, which was fully developed and ready to roll, offered cross-platform play. Someone with an NES could play against someone with a Genesis. It also enabled keyboard connectivity.



Vintage Computing and Gaming has a scan of an advertisement that ran in EGM circa 1992.

LostLevels.org has an article by Frank Cifaldi with an interview with the lead developer of the Teleplay modem, Keith Rupp -- plus screenshots, additional scans of ads, and photos of the Teleplay unit itself.

Just think about how the Teleplay could have changed the history of console gaming. Cross-platform play is something that lots of gamers still want.

Another example of a groundbreaking idea that came too early. Mind you we were playing Quake online at the time, so they didn' t have the excuse that it wasn' t a working technology.

Maybe Sega and Nintendo were just afraid of the slow speed and scarcity of internet connections those days.

I remember only having a 32k internet connection at that time!

Quake didnt take off online at first due to the tunneling protocols that wernt included - along with non-existent client side prediction - that was included in the Quake World upgrades which evolved into Quake spy / game spy.

But that wasnt until 1996. At the time of these scans you would have been playing net games using IPX protocol and hogging network resources of any lan you played on! Many big companies such as Intel banned any form of lan gaming in these early years, not so much as a policy but as a necessity.

The nature of the network cards available at this time meant that the resources were completely hogged to a point where some machines (not involved in gaming) elswhere on the network were not able to blink a cursor and would hang periodically!

The modem upgrades for MD and Saturn in Japan at least had a modicum of success. I remember the early days of online gaming, where you paid $5-10 an hour!

I remember this from when I was a child. I thought it was the coolest thing since having a dog( I was 6). However, being a child, my attention span for such things was basically non existent, and I forgot all about it after a week when my parents threw out the magazine the ad was in.

I hadn' t even though about the thing until I saw this. Good find man.