XBAND

~ the obit ~

XBAND was an American product at the telephone-company layer, which is the hardest kind of regional there is. The cartridge worked by dialing a local number, and local meant a Catapult access node inside your own area code. There was never going to be one in Turkey, and no amount of wanting it would have changed that. This is a grave for something whose entire premise was the price of a domestic phone call.

Catapult Entertainment was in Cupertino and shipped the Genesis version on 17 November 1994, the Super NES version in June 1995, and a Super Famicom version in Japan in April 1996. The device was a pass-through cartridge with a 2400 bit/s modem in it. Your game went into the top of it and the whole stack went into the console. From there it intercepted the two-player code the way a Game Genie intercepted anything else it wanted to change.

It cost $19.99 at Blockbuster Video, which is the detail that says the most about what it was trying to be. Not a peripheral you ordered from a catalog, a thing on a rack next to the rentals. Five dollars a month bought fifty connections with fifteen cents for each one over. Ten bought unlimited. Playing somebody outside your rate band ran $3.95 an hour on top, which meant the network had a geography and you could feel it in the bill.

The nearest thing I ever had to this was the room itself. Turkish internet cafes between 2002 and 2005 put twenty machines on one switch, and the opponent was four seats away with no modem involved and no per-minute charge for reaching them. XBAND was solving over a phone line the problem that a LAN solved by not having it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

The cartridge held up to four player profiles, each carrying a friends list and a win-loss record, with an avatar picked from forty presets. That is a social layer on a machine with no operating system and no hard drive, built into the same plastic as the modem. A 1995 industry review singled out the latency, which is the correct thing to have singled out, because a fighting game over 2400 baud either works on the first frame or is worthless.

Only a limited set of games ever spoke to it, since each one needed the interception patched by hand. That put Catapult in the position of asking publishers for cooperation on a feature the publishers had their own plans for. Most of them said no politely and went off to design something proprietary that also never shipped.

~ the cracks ~

In August 1995 Catapult's business development VP was publicly projecting seventy-five to a hundred thousand users by the end of that year. The real ceiling turned out to be about fifteen thousand, ever. By 1996 the numbers had stopped moving and the company was not making money at any point on the curve.

The deeper problem was calendar. The PlayStation reached American shelves in September 1995, ten months after XBAND launched on the Genesis. Everything XBAND depended on, the install base and the shelf space it came with, was attached to the machine that was being replaced. It was a network for hardware that had started its retirement.

~ what it became ~

Catapult merged into Mpath Interactive, whose own service Mplayer.com was the PC version of the same bet and folded into GameSpy Arcade by 2001. The XBAND network went off on 30 April 1997, which is nearly five years before Xbox Live and about eight before console matchmaking became something nobody thinks about.

The postscript is better than the ending. Hobbyists have since reconstructed a server, and cartridges pulled out of storage will dial in and find each other again over modern phone equipment. The hardware was always fine. What it needed was somewhere to call.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »