Gather around, children, and I’ll tell you a story about the Great War. Its name was true to its nature – it pitted man against man, red against blue, and blast processing verses brand name. This was the Great War –– The Console War.

Without a doubt, it’s one of the earliest successful digital distribution models ever achieved on a console. Before Xbox Live, before the Virtual Console, and long before Playstation Home came every 12-year-old’s dream come true – through an unwieldy black brick: The Sega Channel.

I remember it so clearly – it was in the very beginning of 1994’s brutal summer, and my family fawned over its aging Sega Genesis console, tucked quietly beneath our living room TV. Oh, the attention it got back then. We had mountains of cartridges at the ready to feed into its svelte black frame: Scads of Sonic games, Phantasy Star 4, Kid Chameleon, Altered Beast, Shining Force 2 – they were, without a doubt, fun for my entire family. But, as it aged, so did the games. I began to spend more time with my SNES, eventually ending with a 4-hour session of Mario Paint – I was becoming too far gone to return to my Sega Genesis.

But that summer, then-popular Suburban Cable rolled out a deal with Time Warner Cable to provide a new service to our sleepy Philadelphian suburb – the infamous Sega Channel. My mom, the impulsive spender that she is, didn’t even hear the end of the contract before she’d signed us up. In the beginning of June, we’d be one of the first homes in our neighborhood to have about 100 free games a month pumped into our Genesis by a thick black wire. Imagine my surprise.

For the uninitiated, Sega Channel was a subscription service that Sega developed for the US. When you signed up with Time Warner cable, the cable company would come down to your house, split your cable TV connection, and then connected that to a gigantic badonkadonk cartridge. As you’d start the system up, it’d make a connection to the cable company, which would be routed to Sega – and when that’s done, it brings your system a list of every game they had on tap that month.

Can you imagine how much of a big deal that is for a pre-pubescent gamer? $15 a month for over 100 games? When my big brother told me about it, I swear, I almost crapped my pants.

The problem with Sega Channel in my eyes, though, is that I’d never even heard of a digital distribution concept in my natural life before – when someone said “Sega Channel,” I thought that it was a home shopping network on TV. The tellers would tell you about a specific game, then you’d order it over the phone and have it rushed to your door. But, of course, as I saw it demonstrated the day it was installed, I had a “oh! of course!” moment right there on the spot. You turn the system on, file through the colorful, themed menu, and pick a game that fits your fancy. Simple. Genius.

In June of 1994, I had Sega Channel.

I couldn’t even tell you how many restless nights during that summer that I spent sitting on my duff and playing the crap out of every game that I could. My best friend at the time and I would stare at the screen and discover incredible games that I could never have afforded – and beat them in one sitting. As I remember saying, “playing outside is for stupid people. I’ve got Sega Channel.” To make things even worse, they’d change the swatch of games every month – so at the end of the month, I’d stay awake until midnight and watch the themed list of games switch. When your entire existence is rooted in suburbia, nothing else matters. Playing Sega Channel was pretty much all I wanted to do with my life.

But of course, as the Sega Genesis squeaked like a deflating balloon in its winter years, so too did the Sega Channel – and my opinion of it. I’d essentially completed every game that it’d offered (including the Wily Wars, and several other games that made their US debuts through the Sega Channel; Golden Axe III, Pulseman), and as I was approaching my rebellious years, I decided that Sega Channel sucked. Looking back, I regret being such a stupid little kid. How could I hate something that provided so many hours of enjoyment? Kids are just weird, I guess.

In late 1996, we canceled our Sega Channel subscription – and I remember saying, “oh, good riddance. Sega Channel sucked.” Ugh. If I ever had access to a time machine, I’d go back to when I said that and slap myself in the mouth. What a stupid kid I was.

When Intellivision released their PlayCable in 1981, they experimented with an unheard of model of game distribution: data. The PlayCable failed for a number of technical reasons, but where it died, Sega lived. Sega was the first big name to dip into something that companies then daydreamed about for ages afterwards – their success made the pipe-dream of cable-based game subscriptions a vague reality. Nintendo too followed suit with its incredible – but ill-tempered – Satellaview system.

But even in the days of broadband connections growing from trees and Xbox Live practically providing free back massages, I don’t think anything can quite match the elegance that Sega Channel had. With only 16 bits to work with, Sega managed to imbue their “online” marketplace with more humanity than any other online marketplace has found itself able to.

So, this one’s for you, Sega Channel. Thanks for pioneering the future of games, 13 years ago.