XBAND: The Online Gaming Network for Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo from 1994

November 1994. Your Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive, depending on your region) rests near the television with a cartridge plugged in. Last weekend you destroyed a couple of controllers playing with your friends, and a strange idea crosses your mind: What would it be like to play with someone across the country without leaving home? The XBAND service from Catapult Entertainment answered that question with quality connections, low latency, support for both major consoles of the market (Genesis and SNES), and an overall experience very similar to a modern gaming network.

What Options Did Players Have?

Everything we hear today about gaming networks revolves around price increases, technical problems, cyberattacks, resistance to crossplay (yes Sony, that's you), and other inconveniences. Playing on a console has its advantages, but the whims of manufacturers can become frustrating in record time. That's when nostalgia hooks you and makes you think past times were better. What options were there? Basically, connecting a modem to our consoles to expand their functionality. Atari had its GameLine, and the Famicom offered its Family Computer Network System in Japan, but in November 1994 something much better appeared: XBAND.

The Birth of XBAND

XBAND was the creation of two men, Steve Perlman and Steve Roskowski, who had the assistance of an Apple engineer named Konstantin Othmer. The two Steves founded Catapult Entertainment in early 1994, and from there, the pace of development was almost obsessive. Very few believed that Catapult's team could have their product ready before the end of the year, but XBAND arrived on Sega Genesis in November, and on the Super Nintendo seven months later. Viacom began investing heavily in Catapult, and Blockbuster handled the initial distribution of the modem.

The maximum transfer speed of XBAND modems was 2,400 bits per second, a true torture for any computer user, but more than enough when it came to processing commands in PvP games. The service cost $5 for 50 connections per month, or $10 for unlimited access, and an additional charge of $4 per hour was applied when connecting with players located outside the local area. Users could receive news and download email in addition to playing against other opponents. The modem stored friends lists, mailbox, player rankings, a small user profile, and their avatar.

The Technical Challenge: Patching Games

At its peak, XBAND had more than 15,000 users. The technical effort to make games work was impressive. Let's think about it for a moment: None of the cartridges had an official 'multiplayer' mode, so the solution was to apply specific patches to the games in the best Game Genie style, manipulating memory so that the game never registered that there were two modems between both players. Initially, the patches were not very clean (in the worst case, they hung the consoles), but over time they gained stability, especially among the most popular games (the NBA saga, for example).

Even so, XBAND was not free of complaints, and three complaints got all the attention: Lack of players, a very limited list of compatible games (don't forget that developers had to create dedicated hacks), and the worst: The 'cord-pulling'. In essence, when one of the players was losing, they disconnected the phone line from the modem or pressed the reset button on the console, causing their loss and the opponent's victory to never be recorded in the statistics. Catapult fought with all its might against cord-pulling, and although it reached an acceptable balance (awarding a win to the victim and ignoring the culprit), this was one of several nails in its coffin.

The Fall of XBAND

In March 1997, the XBAND service was restricted to local area calls, and on April 30 of that same year it ceased activity completely. Limited resources, lower than expected revenue, little exposure, cord-pulling, lack of support among game developers, the natural rejection of hardware manufacturers (who were trying to offer their own subscription-based services) and the advance of 32-bit consoles sealed its fate. For a moment it was believed that Electronic Arts would come to XBAND's rescue, but its virtual war with Blockbuster (which rented EA games instead of selling them) prevented it. In the end, Catapult ended up under the wing of Mpath, which declared computers as its only interest, and XBAND never found a place among them.

In the documentary dedicated to XBAND published by the YouTuber Wrestling With Gaming a few days ago (shared above), we can see the frustration and disappointment of the developers who believed in the service until the end. They knew they had in their hands a revolutionary technology that, on one hand, was too ahead of its time, and on the other, too behind the influence of 32-bit. However, the affection of users for the service never disappeared, and we can even find hacks that reconnect the XBAND service over the Internet.