Net Jet

~ the goodbye ~

This was sold to american tweens whose family had one computer and no console, at a price a relative could pay without thinking about it. In 2007 I was twenty three, on TTNet broadband, and the machine I played on was a PC that I had put together myself. A twenty five dollar controller from the toy aisle was aimed at a household several rooms and one continent away from mine.

The hardware was genuinely strange. The Net Jet had no processor, no graphics chip and no sound. It was a seven-button gamepad with a d-pad and a thumbstick, and when you plugged it into a USB port it mounted a 400K virtual CD-ROM, pulled its own software down over the internet, and let the host PC do all the work. Windows did not see a game controller at all. It saw a USB hub with a toy attached.

The other half was the game key. You bought a small plastic key at retail and pushed it into the slot on top of the controller, and that unlocked a game that had already been downloaded onto the hard drive. The key held no game data. It was a jumper block with a 1K EEPROM in it, remembering only which three bonus titles you had picked. Tiger had built physical DRM and put it in a blister pack next to the Transformers figures.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

Tiger Electronics spent the nineties selling handhelds with the game soldered into them. A Tiger LCD game from 1992 still works, because there is nothing in it that can stop working. Fifteen years later the same brand shipped a product where the plastic you paid for was an activation switch, the game lived on somebody else's server, and the whole thing needed a live internet connection to show you a menu.

The catalog was pure 2007 kids television: Fairly OddParents, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, SpongeBob, Littlest Pet Shop, Transformers. A demo key gave you thirty minutes with each game before it locked. Later the demo key was dropped in favor of bundling a marquee title, because thirty free minutes turns out to be a good way to find out you do not want the thing.

~ the long tail ~

Support ended on 31 december 2009, less than three years after the national launch, and the servers came down after it. Because nothing was ever stored on the key and the client had to phone home to build its menu, a boxed unit bought today is inert. The twelve retail titles were never ported anywhere else and were never archived by the publisher. Some of the smaller flash and Java games it streamed also ran on ordinary web portals and survived that way, by accident rather than by anyone's plan.

Preservation people class the Net Jet catalog as partially lost, which is the accurate description of a library that only ever existed as a download. Hasbro was doing in a toy aisle in 2007 what the rest of the industry would spend the next fifteen years arguing about, and the argument still has not produced a better answer than the one this controller gives you when you plug it in now, which is nothing.

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