Back in 1996…
SEGA brought Saturn multi-player action ONLINE with the NetLink Modem in the US and the SegaSaturn Networks Modem in Japan!
In true SEGA form, it was ahead of it’s time and ahead of the kind of mass market adoption that would later come with consoles like the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 & XBox. However, folks who bought into the dream enjoyed broadened horizons as a world of early cutting-edge online console gameplay opened up to them.
So… How did NetLink work in 1996..?
Simply put, all Saturn gamers had to do was plug their NetLink Modems into an analog telephone wall outlet (via phone cable) and use the XBand software (included on the game’s disc) to dial the phone number of a gamer in another location to connect for a “direct-dial match-up”. The NetLink Modem would convert all player input/game sync data into an uncompressed analog signal that would travel over traditional analog phone lines to another Saturn where the receiving NetLink Modem would convert that signal back into digital bits of data to be read by the console.
Today, this old analog phone system is referred to as a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), and while it’s increasingly rare, it can still be found in certain areas across the globe. If you’re currently able to subscribe to a POTS, you could actually use and enjoy NetLink today exactly as gamers did back in 1996!
However, most modern telephone infrastructure has since been converted over to VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), a technology resulting in significant compression and data loss, to the point of rendering acceptable NetLink play virtually impractical… While the advent of VoIP has been a vital advancement to our modern age of communication, it is designed with a high tolerance for latency, which is the exact opposite of what NetLink needs in order to perform well…