PlayCable

~ the obituary ~

PlayCable ended around the year I was born, in a country that had no cable television and did not get any until about 1990. There was nothing here for it to run on and nobody here who could have subscribed. So this is a grave I read my way into rather than remembered, and what I found on the other side was a games subscription service operating in 1980, on a console that could hold exactly one game at a time.

Mattel and General Instrument built it together and launched in June 1980, after announcing test markets the year before. A PDP-11 sat at the cable company's head end with the month's library loaded onto it, broadcasting that library continuously as an FM signal riding alongside the television channels. In the house you plugged a PlayCable adapter into the Intellivision cartridge slot. Inside the adapter was an FM receiver, a small ROM and 8K of RAM, and it listened to the stream until the game you picked came back around, which took ten to twenty seconds.

Twenty titles were available at a time and the lineup rotated monthly. Forty-seven of Mattel's sixty-one games fit the format. You paid a monthly fee, you owned no cartridges, and the catalog changed without you lifting a finger. Mattel told itself there would be a million subscribers inside five years. By spring 1983 fewer than three homes in a hundred that could receive PlayCable had signed up.

~ the case file ~

~ how it actually worked ~

The download was not a download in any sense we use the word now. Nothing was stored and nothing was requested. The head end pushed the whole library in a loop and your adapter waited for its turn, which is closer to tuning a radio than to fetching a file. Cable ran one direction only, so the box in your living room had no way of telling the computer at the other end what it wanted.

That design is why the 8K ceiling mattered so much. The adapter had to hold an entire game in memory before the console could see any of it, and 8K was the number Mattel picked in 1979 for a machine whose cartridges were then 4K. In 1983 the good Intellivision releases went past 8K and PlayCable could not carry them at all. The service was left advertising a catalog that was visibly behind the shelf at the toy store.

~ why nobody bought it ~

A cable operator had to buy a minicomputer, then rent adapters to households, then hand over channel capacity permanently. In 1980 that looked like a reasonable trade because cable systems had spare bandwidth sitting there. By 1983 every operator wanted those megahertz back for another channel, since a channel earned money from every household on the system instead of from the small fraction with an Intellivision under the television.

There was a second worry inside Mattel that reads strangely today. People had already reverse engineered the stream, and management decided that shipping a decoder into thousands of homes amounted to a free education in how Intellivision cartridges were built. The service was teaching its competitors the format.

~ the year nobody agrees on ~

Wikipedia's infobox says 1984 and so does the body of the article. The Blue Sky Rangers, who are the Mattel Electronics programmers writing their own history, say 1983, and the category footer at the bottom of that same Wikipedia page says 1983 too. Both can be right in the way these things usually are, with the last cable system still carrying it in 1984 and the company having stopped caring the year before.

What nobody disputes is August 1983, when Mattel Electronics halted all new hardware development because the video game crash was costing it millions a month. PlayCable was hardware in two places at once, in the home and at the head end, and after that month nobody was paid to keep either end current. It got to thirteen cities and stopped there. Renting a rotating library of games instead of owning them went back in the drawer for twenty-five years.

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