Sega Net Link

» see segasaturn.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the net link needed one thing turkey did not have, which was a local phone call that cost nothing to leave open. american dial-up in 1996 ran on flat-rate local calling, so an hour spent browsing on a console cost an hour of your isp plan and not a lira more. on a turkish line the call itself was metered by the minute on top of whatever the isp was charging. a games console that browses the web is a completely different proposition when there is a meter running underneath it.

i also did not know a single person with a saturn. the console sold roughly 1.8 million units in the united states across its entire life, and the net link was an accessory sold against that number rather than against the japanese install base where the saturn actually did well.

the hardware was a sensible piece of engineering. a 28.8k modem and a custom interface chip in a cartridge, plus a planetweb browser that fit inside about five hundred and seventy kilobytes and anti-aliased its text so the page stayed legible on a television seen from a sofa. it launched in october 1996 at one hundred and ninety-nine dollars. the japanese version was fifteen thousand yen and shipped at 14.4k instead.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it could actually do ~

mail and the open web, on a television, in 1996. that is genuinely early, and sega deserves the credit for it. it also did head-to-head play, and the way it did head-to-head play is the part worth writing down: two saturns dialed each other directly, phone to phone, with no server anywhere in the middle. sega rally, virtual on, daytona usa and duke nukem 3d picked up net link support in late 1997.

there was a central hub called the net link zone, an irc-based lobby where you found an opponent and then hung up in order to call them. that is the correct architecture for 1996 and it is also exactly why the whole thing felt like a hobby rather than a service.

~ the numbers ~

fewer than one percent of saturn owners bought one in the launch year. across the life of the product about fifty thousand units sold in north america against a target of one hundred thousand. sega placed eleven hundred of them into schools through a partnership called projectneat, which is the sort of thing a company does with inventory rather than with a product.

two hundred dollars in 1996 for a modem that worked only inside a console you already owned, to reach a web that was mostly text and mostly not designed to be read across a living room. the price was less of a problem than the shape of the offer.

~ the day it died ~

sega discontinued the saturn in north america in march 1998, and in europe the same year, keeping it alive in japan until 2000. the net link was american hardware sold against an american install base, so march 1998 is where it stops. the net link zone lobby carried on running until 2001, three years after the console it existed to serve had been pulled, which is a longer afterlife than most accessories are granted.

planetweb went on to write the dreamcast browser, and that is where the real inheritance sits. sega tried console internet twice and the second attempt, seganet, has its own grave. the net link came first and was right about where consoles were going. it just arrived on the wrong console at the wrong price.

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