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Anybody else old enough to remember the Sega Channel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel

An early harbinger of streaming services, the Sega Channel was amazingly decent - dare I say "good" - for the time. As this system likely will be, the "play all you want" model relied on a few dozen games at a time being available and then they'd cycle out every month or so.

For someone who was a kid that played a lot of video games, this was ideal. My father once relayed to me that we'd rented Super Mario Bros 2 enough times to have purchased it 3 times over.

The resale market for video games is pretty absurd. Here, of course, is where I admit that even though I've cracked 30 I'm still playing a lot of video games. If I plop down $60-$70 on a game it's not a recoupible expense in any way, and in the days of all digital everything, this feels ludicrous.

The fact that consoles are still relying on DRM media is an amazing but predictable anachronism, and it feels like it exists solely because the game companies cannot figure out how to properly handle this model.

Having used the new Adobe Creative Cloud for a while, I find it's a really nice approach that doesn't end up costing any less but gives me some flexibility.




My father worked for a cable company, so I was familiar with the Sega Channel. Blew my mind that you could deliver Sonic over a cable line. We didn't have dial-up at home, let alone broadband (did cable internet exist then?). I didn't know how it worked and I didn't care. I didn't get a new console until the Sega Channel shut down.


I can never resist linking this whenever this comes up: http://classicgames.about.com/od/history/p/Playcable-For-Int...


I retract my "anybody old enough to remember" comment then. :)


I'm not 30 yet but I suspect I'll still be playing video games at 30 too. ;)

They are fun to relax and no worse than TV. :D

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

2.8hrs of TV / day is the average for people 15+.




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