Sega broke ground in the late 90s with one of the first digital game distribution systems for consoles. Sega Channel offered access to a rotating library of Sega Genesis titles, along with game tips, demos, and even a few exclusive games that never came out in the United States in any other format. In an era of dial-up internet, Sega Channel delivered game data over television cable — a novel approach that gave the service its name.
In the years since, Sega Channel has been shrouded in a bit of mystery. The service was discontinued in 1998, and the lack of retrievable game data and documentation around Sega Channel has led to decades of speculation about it. We’ve mostly been left with magazine articles and second-hand accounts. Once in a while, one or two Sega Channel ROMs will show up online. How do you preserve a service like Sega Channel?
For the last two years, we’ve been working on a large-scale project to preserve the history of Sega Channel. Today, we unveiled our findings in a new YouTube video.
We’ll cut to the chase: In collaboration with multiple parties, we have recovered over 100 new Sega Channel ROMs, including system data, exclusive games, and even prototypes that were never published. We’ve also digitized internal paperwork and correspondence that reveals how Sega Channel operated, how it was marketed, and what would’ve come next for the service.
Michael Shorrock was surprisingly easygoing about finding a picture of himself in a museum exhibit.
This project kicked off in 2024, when we met former Sega Channel vice president of programming Michael Shorrock at the Game Developers Expo. Our booth that year highlighted interesting games from outside the traditional game industry, including Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?, which our director Frank Cifaldi recovered back in 2016.
By complete coincidence, one of the items we put out was a promotional brochure for Broderbund Software… featuring Michael Shorrock on the cover! We got talking with Michael about our work, and we realized we both wanted to preserve and celebrate the history of Sega Channel.
At the same time this was happening, we were contacted by a community member named Ray (going by the pseudonym Sega Channel Guy). He had been contacting former Sega Channel staff to see if they still had any old swag or had saved things from the company. In the process, he came into possession of a collection of tape backups containing an unquantifiable amount of internal data from Sega Channel… including a significant number of game and system ROMs.
We realized we could put these two threads together! With Michael’s own collection and Ray’s data backups, we could tell a cohesive, wide-ranging story about what Sega Channel was and that was actually distributed through this service.
There are two end products from this process. The first is the Michael Shorrock collection, a new collection in our digital library. You can view the correspondence, notes, and presentations from Michael Shorrock’s personal collection, which shed light on the formation of Sega Channel and their audience. From these papers, you can also learn about Express Games: an unannounced successor that would have brought Sega’s cable data delivery service to computers and replaced Sega Channel entirely.
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