This was the menu for August 1995. I remember this and many more menus from my time with Sega Channel. I always hoped I could see them and hear their music again. This was so damn awesome back in the day.
They do not load up games, but maybe some day someone will be able to link them together again for a fuller experience.
Check out this article and video for more info.
Talk about a piece of history that was waaay ahead of its time.
It uses the same technology to do the same thing that Mattel's Intellivision did 14 years earlier.
Atari had a similar service using a moden 11 years earlier.
The Mega Drive had a modem that allowed games to be downloaded 4 years earler.
Were any before Sega Channel as popular, mainstream, long lasting? It was pretty well known and used in one of the biggest countries on earth. Sega should have ran a similar service for the Saturn and Dreamcast like Xbox Arcade. I know they had downloadable roms for PC Engine in Japan on Dreamcast.
Saturn and dreamcast was not feasible for something like this because the speed was slower than dial-up internet and broadband wasn't going to be in everyone's house for several more years. Think 1KB to 2KB a second and then downloading anywhere from 100MB up to 1GB. It would take forever.
These new Sega Channel roms don't show how long it really took. In my video, that title menu was over in just a couple seconds, but I can remember waiting for several minutes for the menu to load. Navigating the menu was as easy as you see here, but loading a game could be like watching paint dry. It had a progress bar to really drive it home and there were times where it would just error out.
I was talking about Xbox Arcade type games. Or less. Like 16 bit games like the pc engine which did happen in Japan on the Dreamcast. And dial up was not that slow that classic games couldn't be downloaded in a decent amount of time, especially on Dreamcast. Saturn would struggle with its slower modem but something could have been done. Dreamcast did get a broadband adapter and if they ever released the zip drive, we could have really seen a service like this. Maybe not full games but stages or games in pieces, exactly as done on the original Sega channel. Imagine being able to download extended demos before the demos arrived with a magazine subscription and it had longer gameplay. Dreamcast did have a kaoroke service of downloading music over the slower Japanese dial up. Nothing was off the table because of the hardware available to Sega. It was a money decision.
The zip drive or even a hard drive attachment to Dreamcast would have been a game changer had the Dreamcast been a massive runaway success. Sad it never happened.
I could see that working if the Saturn or Dreamcast was backwards compatible with Sega's 16bit and even 8bit libraries.
Via emulation it could work. Modern emulators for Dreamcast show that was possible. Genesis runs excellent and the weaker Turbo Grafx / PC Engine runs excellent too. 8 but is not an issue at all. Obviously as we saw, even Playstation games ran at better than full speed on Dreamcast through Bleem. Games could have been relatively small if instead of redbook audio, the Dreamcast's sound hardware synthesizer was used to generate music. There was always a way. Money was the issue.
To be fair. Nintendo (NES) had a disk drive you could walk to your electronics store and download a game. It would save to your disk.
AND snes had a Nintendo Channel thing as well in Japan that did Sega chanel type stuff.
There was a 16 bit version of the first Zelda that was only on "Nintendo Channel"
the word you're looking for is satellaview i think
Yeah…it’s both very different and kinda similar
have you tried the Sega Channel Revival project by BillyTimeGames? He re-creates the sega channel experience by having the games load in the menus with extras.
I remember seeing this but I haven't tried it yet. I was hoping for these later menus to see the light of day again so they could be used.
It amazing how these things keep being found, decades after they basically vanished and went away.
The interesting part of how this worked too was that the time it took to download a game varied depending on where in the data loop the broadcast was at the time. This wasn't like downloads today where you request and receive, this was a looping data broadcast, your Sega channel unit was tuned to that channel and reading the data loop, once the loop got to that game the Sega channel unit would begin storing the data it read.
That explains the inconsistency of it. I can remember the menu loading quick, or taking forever, or even erroring out. Same for the games.
Is that how that worked? Thats super interesting lol
That start up brings back memories.
Sega was always ahead of its time with technology.
Great memories! Never expected to hear this again.
Interesting Sega used a Genesis 1 in the intro graphics in 1995, while using genesis 2 exclusively in marketing for things like the 32x at the same time. Neat music!
I always heard about it back then but never saw it in action. I love the fact that there are people out there with the skills and passion to keep these memories alive via preservation.
I can't believe I can recall all the music and intros to Sega Channel. Incredible work to bring this back.
Huge nostalgia trip!!! My brother and I (born in '82 and '84) stayed up past midnight at the end of a Summer month think June 30th - July 1st to load up the Sega Channel as the menu changed every month. However, the change must've happened in the early morning as our experiment failed and we couldn't stay up later but it was different in the morning. I'd surf the menus just as much as I played the games!
I remember doing that for a few menus! I imagine every cable company was different with when they switched it over.
I also remember it changing when I wasn't done playing a game and the game was gone until it showed up again in a different month.
Mine always seemed to update 6am Eastern on the 1st of every month
Man, this is so gooooood
This takes me back
There’s a sega channel?!
Well, there was. It was active for a few years in the mid 90s. It was a subscription service through your local cable provider and not every cable company offered it. You were given a special cartridge adapter that plugged into the Genesis game slot. That adapter was hooked up to your cable connection. It started up with these menus and you had access to about 40 to 50 games a month.
I love seeing all these lost, unreleased games coming back. If only more of those games could have come on on sega Channel, maybe today we could be playing unreleased games like Namco's Pac-In-Time, Toaplan's Teki-Paki, or even that Bean Ball Benny game.
My uncle was a higher-up for a local cable company and he let me test it out for a couple weeks, it was cool. I didnt have the wherewithal to appreciate it for the technology. It was kind of a pain to set up, I remember my Dad and my cousin setting it up
Me and my older brother had the Sega Channel back in 1995 through the cable company we had in Oklahoma at the time. And somehow we had a cdx or whatever it was and I remember playing Vectorman 2 on it before it was even available in the stores. It was so freaking cool! Most people don't remember it at all but I have fond memories of it
How slow was the process back in the day when you actually booted this up and selected a game? I never had access to this in Australia when I was growing up
For me it was mixed and it was certainly my provider who was always pretty bad.
Games could take a few minutes to load or there were times it'd be like 10min + or it'd fail and say try again. Naturally when we had the technician come in to fix some things and the Sega Channel- it was working fine.
Back then it was great since some of those games were insanely expensive. But thanks to it I got to play games like Phantasy Star 4 and Beyond Oasis, games I never knew existed and wouldn't be able to afford.
Every time a SC topic comes up I bring up that there's several YT vids I've seen that say you couldn't save your game. You absolutely could or my brother n' me would never have beaten those RPGs.
You could only save one specific game at a time. So if you wanted to play another RPG? You'd have to erase your old data and that'd be done by saving a game in the new one.
Which, limited what you could do but I guess you'd commit to beating that RPG vs jumping around.
Other fun fact was you could hit directions and buttons to change the SEGA Channel logo when it was loading. Which said logo was also updated over the time I had the service.
As far as saving games goes; as far as I could tell if a game was big enough, it would erase your old save data even if it didn't create its own. I remember getting very far into Shining Force 2 and then coming home from school one day to see my older brother and my cousin playing Mortal Kombat 3. Sure enough, when I opened SF2 back up there was no save.
But yeah in general you were safe to play other games, you just couldnt have multiple saves going. I was still generall cautious about what games I loaded if I was trying to beat an RPG, though.
Shining Force 2 was notorious for deleting your saves, well in my exp anyway. I had a cart that deleted at least 2 saves, I legit just started using the other save slot as back up and even when emulating the damned thing I use save states.
Friend had the same issue too. IDK what is with that game. Worst part is it plays the panic music to tell you that your save is deleted. One of my earliest jumpscares and it's from a flippin' error.
It never took more than a few minutes and some times a smaller game would load within 30-seconds. I remember Earthworm Jim 2 taking a bit to load back in the day.
Aussie here too - I was curious and looked it up. Google says about 30secs for menu and 1-2min per game. Impressive stuff for the mid 90’s if true.
It was fairly slow but the main thing I remember is it had a fairly high fail rate and you would have to retry downloading the game multiple times.
Question. Why is everyone hyped about Garfield: Caught in the Act? Hasn't that ROM been available for ages? Is it a different version or something?
Yeah, it it had an exclusive level for the Sega Channel version. There were a few games that either only released on Sega Channel in the US (like Golden Axe 3) or released on Sega Channel with some kind of exclusive content.
It's the Lost Levels version. It has some levels that weren't included in the final retail game. This is the first time they have been available since this service was active. There is also the Flinstones game based on the movie.
Wow! I forgot all about the start up screen. I'm pretty sure all I really ever played was Shining Force 2 and Time Killers.
So when are we going to get an updated version? Would it be possible for someone to create and send out a new, regular monthly update that you could download and plug in to the “OS”?
It's possible but highly unlikely. There is a revival project that has been working on simulating the experience. We probably won't ever see "new" content except for potentially finding more older rom data.
So what am I missing to be able to play this with the start up screen and menus, and not just all the separate roms that are included?
These are not working in that manner right now. BillyTimeGames has been working on a revival project to replicate that experience and I hope they can update the project to include these new menus and games.
Gotcha, thanks for the info.
Any rom dumps yet?
all the recent rom dumps are available on gamingalexandria
i’d recommend checking out the video game history foundation’s video on the sega channel theres some really cool info there of the sega channel
Link pls and yes i will!
here you go
video game history foundation’s video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CWCUmTTVjMY
rom dumps: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2025/12/sega-channel-prototype-sega-genesis-roms/
That reminds me I still have the Sega Channel adapter. I need to figure out what to do with it.
Right now, it's a paperweight. I have both versions of the adapter and they startup but error out when they try to connect to the cable. There may be a day when we can fully recreate the experience and use them again.
A little flash dongle that connects to cable port of the adapter and fakes a game server with full library would be nice.
My cousins had this growing up, I was too poor. I wish I could have experienced this
The most recent episode of Post Games featured an interview between host Chris Plant and Video Game History Foundation librarian Phil Salvador and how the content of the channel was recovered. Recommend giving it a listen… or visiting the website OP shared!
If they ever make these fully functional with the games I will want to make every single one into a custom cart 😅
I played a lot of Sega Channel with my cousin back in the day since there was this local rental store that would rent out the hardware. They specialized in renting out the types of things you didn't normally see in rental stores (at least around here) like Saturn, Game Gear, 32X, Virtual Boy, Game Boy, 3DO, Jaguar, etc...
Could you save your games?
You couldn't download and store them for offline use. I believe the device saved the last game you played for easy access back to it, but you still had to go through the menu to access it which also means you still needed the active cable subscription. It stored save game files, but I don't know how many it could store. I don't recall ever losing a save file unless the game went away the next month.
If you have nostalgia for them then sure.
But they weren't a thing where I live.
Same, but I still find it amazing that this stuff is being found and released 30+ years later