Downloading Games In 1983?

[matmico399]

I don't ever remember hearing about this that I recall. On the 2600 you could download the games. Wow. The link below gives you at peek at it. I would have gone nuts for this in '83.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NKj6Xa5V4Ww

[ActRaiser]

That may have been the cheapest way to ever pay for college! I love it.

[Stalvern]

I was wondering if the company behind this service went down with the crash, and it did... but immediately restructured into the company that became AOL. Don't know how I didn't know about this before.

[MaverickMoPete]

I think a lot of these services were writing checks the technology at the time couldn't cash.

[newmodelarmy]

I may totally have this wrong but I believe in the mid-80's you could save games down to a floppy disk on your C-64 from connecting to what essentially was a rudimentary server that hosted games. This was done via modem. I was never into it but some of my fellow C-64 buddies were at the time. It has been decades since I even thought about this so I could have it all wrong.

[GStratos]

There were even games that allowed for online play in the 80's. It was just niche because not many people had access to the internet, something that really only changed from the mid 90s to the mid 2000s depending on the region of the world.

[Quick_Man]

The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive had the Sega Channel, a way to view news, play full games as well as demos of upcoming ones, etc.

Fellow Mega Man nuts like myself will remember this internet service as the only official release of Mega Man: The Wily Wars outside of Japan for DECADES. It was essentially a remake of the first three games, but with an awesome fourth game where you could mix and match a custom loadout from any of the weapons from the three games. That is to this day one of the most awesome ideas they've ever had and I don't know why some kind of "Mega Man Megamix" or whatever has never happened where you get to build your own loadout from the past, like, 80 weapons.

[helmet]

There were even games that allowed for online play in the 80's. It was just niche because not many people had access to the internet, something that really only changed from the mid 90s to the mid 2000s depending on the region of the world.

In the 80s the Internet was not yet readily accessible to the greater public. There were commercial networks as well (with the French consumer facing Minitel standing out), but all very expensive and not standardized.

There was a lot of dial-in mailboxes and chats, but these were mostly unconnected. One connected to the respective server over a phone line. And these servers could only handle a few concurrent connections at a time, limited by how many phone lines could be attached and handled, so many of those only allowed being connected to for a few minutes at a time. So online gaming had to be niche in those days, as it simply couldn't be delivered cheaply.

[Anchoa79]

The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive had the Sega Channel, a way to view news, play full games as well as demos of upcoming ones, etc.

Fellow Mega Man nuts like myself will remember this internet service as the only official release of Mega Man: The Wily Wars outside of Japan for DECADES. It was essentially a remake of the first three games, but with an awesome fourth game where you could mix and match a custom loadout from any of the weapons from the three games. That is to this day one of the most awesome ideas they've ever had and I don't know why some kind of "Mega Man Megamix" or whatever has never happened where you get to build your own loadout from the past, like, 80 weapons.

That Mega Man game was also released physically in PAL territories, one of the few moments we were a bit lucky.

[C64_Critic]

I may totally have this wrong but I believe in the mid-80's you could save games down to a floppy disk on your C-64 from connecting to what essentially was a rudimentary server that hosted games. This was done via modem. I was never into it but some of my fellow C-64 buddies were at the time. It has been decades since I even thought about this so I could have it all wrong.

Can confirm! There was a computer store near my house where you could rent a 300-baud dial up modem for up to 3 days at a time, and on at least a couple of occasions I would rent one and frantically spend all weekend trying to download as many games as I could from the 6 or 7 dial-up BBS's that I knew of. Given the speed of the modem, that probably amounted to about 2 and a half games over a 72 hour time span. And that was IF your dumb sister didn't pick up an extension somewhere else in the house and screw up your connection. Which she always did.