GameLine

~ the obit ~

The first time I heard of GameLine it was a footnote in an account of where AOL came from, which is how most people meet it now. The company failed so completely that the failure became the only reason anybody kept the name.

Control Video Corporation sold a cartridge called the Master Module. There was a modem in it and a small block of storage, and it went into the slot on an Atari 2600 the way any other cartridge did. You dialed a toll-free number, the console talked to CVC's machines in Virginia, and a game came down the phone line into the cartridge. It stayed there for something like a week, or five to ten plays, whichever ran out first.

GameLine died in 1984, when I was an infant in Turkey, so there is no honest way for me to claim a memory of it. What I can say is that by the time I had a phone line of my own, in 1998, the thing GameLine was trying to sell had turned into an ordinary fact of life and nobody used its name for it. Software that arrives down a wire and stops working when you stop paying. GameLine had the shape right and was fourteen years early, which in this business is the same as being wrong.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it cost ~

The Master Module ran about sixty dollars. Membership was another fifteen, and every download after that was a dollar. Against a shelf where a cartridge cost thirty dollars or more, renting one for a dollar looked like a deal, right up until you noticed you were going to rent it again next week and the week after that.

There is a version of this that works, and it needs a household to already own a modem for some other reason. In 1983 almost nobody did. GameLine was asking families to buy a piece of telecom hardware whose only purpose was to buy more GameLine.

~ the licensing wall ~

CVC could not get the publishers that mattered. Atari would not license to it and neither would Activision, and the rest of the front rank stayed out alongside them. What was left was a library of smaller titles that nobody was subscribing to a service to reach, which turned the whole pitch inside out. The technology was the interesting part and the catalog was the product, and CVC only had one of those.

~ what it became ~

William von Meister had already tried to send music down cable lines before this, and had been left holding a delivery mechanism with nothing to deliver. GameLine was the second attempt at finding cargo for the same pipe. When the console market fell apart in 1984 the company was close to gone, and von Meister was out by early 1985.

What survived was the people and the dial-up infrastructure underneath them. Jim Kimsey founded Quantum Computer Services out of the wreckage on 24 May 1985 and pointed the same technology at the Commodore 64 as Quantum Link, with Steve Case already inside the building from a marketing consultancy that had started at CVC in January 1983. Quantum renamed itself America Online in October 1991. The largest consumer internet company of the decade that followed is what you get when a games rental service fails and the survivors keep the phone lines.

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