¡Viva la Satellaview!
¡Viva la Satellaview!
Oh, right. Since this is primarily a Western-oriented site, you likely don’t know what the Satellaview was (and still is, in some form) unless you’re a big-time gaming history buff. Even then, you might not have a clue what I’m talking about.
The System
So what exactly was this Satellaview thing, you might ask? Well, as the name suggests, it was a satellite-based add-on for the Super Famicom, Japan’s direct equivalent of what the rest of us know as the Super Nintendo, released in 1995. It was a virtual "town", news wire, satellite radio, and game distribution service all in one, and offered to Japanese Famicom owners for a rather steep fee. The service was offered in conjunction with a now-defunct Japanese New Age radio station known as St.GIGA, and customers who were not already subscribers to St.GIGA’s broadcast services had to purchase a tuner separately for 33,000 yen. That’s roughly US$490.06, adjusted for inflation. It’s about US$346.26 in non-adjusted nominal amounts.
Games on the service were largely powered by St.GIGA’s satellite broadcasts, owing to Nintendo’s collaboration with them for the service. Games varied from re-released copies of already established Super Famicom titles to special remakes of popular titles (many denoted by “BS” prefixes before their names), with some - notably BS The Legend of Zelda - featuring real-time live narration at certain times throughout the day. These games were never re-released in any other form for any other Nintendo console or peripheral after the Satellaview, Japanese or otherwise.
Beyond that, the Satellaview mostly functioned as a rudimentary online interface for the Super Famicom. Players of the Satellaview were given their own character to create - male or female, with a customer name (thereafter addressed as “[NAME]-san”) - and, after being given a brief introduction by a mildly disturbing-looking talking television, were promptly dropped into an isometric 16-bit town known literally as “The Town Whose Name Has Been Stolen”. The town was stereotypical Nintendo cutesiness with a slight hint of Earthbound, with each “shop” within the city functioning as a place to download data or read news about the gaming world.
The System's Eventual EndDespite the aforementioned exorbitant fees associated with owning a Satellaview, especially if the owner in question was not already the owner of a St.GIGA tuner, St.GIGA subscriptions steadily rose from the Satellaview’s introduction on April 23, 1995 to a peak of 116,378 households in March of 1997, nine months after the Nintendo 64 was put on the market in Japan.
From March of 1997 on, however, it was basically all downhill. The number of St.GIGA subscriptions slowly eroded over the next two years, and after a nasty fight and ensuing rift in April of 1999, Nintendo officially dropped their support for the Satellaview. St.GIGA then took over the service exclusively under their own wing for the next year until ending transmissions on June 30, 2000. With the Satellaview’s demise went another chapter in the long and winding story of Nintendo’s corporate history, a failure that may have simply died of its own high price more than anything. It seems that this is where the story would end for good, with nothing else left to say...
A New Hope?OR NOT, BITCH! Far from it, in fact. Well, maybe not that far, but I don’t feel like wasting my time debating semantics, so whatever.
Either way, the Satellaview first came into prominence in my mind around the summer of 2007. I was bored as usual one summer night, with nothing much to do, and decided for whatever reason to read about Nintendo’s past product releases on Wikipedia. Yeah, I know.
I ended up getting fixated on the Satellaview’s article for reasons unknown - perhaps it’s because I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a retrocomputing enthusiast - and it’s stuck with me, sort of, ever since. I’ve always been intrigued by what the game’s experience was truly like, since words rarely if ever do justice to the true feeling of just about anything.
These wishes went predictably unanswered until one unseasonably cold day in June of 2009, when I decided to scour the Internet for a BIOS of the Satellaview. After spending a good fifteen minutes plunging into the depths of Google, past the derelicts of the Web and babies having babies, I found...
A SATELLAVIEW ROM!
Yeehaw! So, without any further bullshitting, what follows is my experience (or lack thereof) with the closest I’ll ever get to a Satellaview.
Finally, the Satellaview! Although St.GIGA’s transmissions ended nearly a decade ago, the “BS-X” town itself is still accessible, albeit with not much to do except walk around.
Either way, my emulator’s (SNES9X ftw) checksum has gone as planned, and I’m ready to roll.
The first screen I’m treated to, along with some New Age-y background music, is an intro screen reading “BS-X”, with a scrolling cityscape behind said letters. I must say, this intro’s actually not half bad for 1995.
Seriously.
The second screen is...indescribable. Seriously. I’ll let the image off to the right speak for itself on this one. I would like to know what the hell those things protruding off of his arms are, though.
The next screen I’m presented with by the intensely disturbing talking television is a prompt to create my character. Okay...how about a girl named AAAAA-san?
After clicking through a series of dialogue that I can’t make head or tail of for the life of me since I do not speak any Japanese, AAAAA-san is placed in the fabled Town Whose Name Has Been Stolen. As mentioned earlier, it’s cutesy and full of 16-bit Earthboundy goodness.
Cheer up, buddy. Well...maybe not.
AAAAA-san stares contemplatively into the ocean.
Maybe she'll have her day once again in the future?
However, this is pretty much where the entertainment value of what’s left of the Satellaview ends. I mean, I’m standing in the BS-X town now, then walking around...and...well...what the hell else can I do? There’s a distinct lack of non-satellite features here, aside from the “feature” you get of a creepy and sort of sad-looking crying satellite if you try to connect to a satellite-based feature without a now non-existent connection.
That about does it for my sorry excuse for an “experience”, I’d imagine. It’d be cool to connect to something, but alas, I’m nearly a decade late on that. C’est la vie.
EpilogueExtortionary costs aside, the service (which I, for obvious reasons, was never able to play while it was truly around) sounds like it was awesome, especially for 1995. I’d imagine that the best aspect of the Satellaview was its live broadcasts, even if you were required to structure your schedule around them coming on. I’ve never been particularly big on New Age music (which is what St.GIGA broadcasted, aside from the Satellaview’s transmissions), but the fact that it also functioned as a satellite radio sounds like it was cool, too.
All in all, while I’d love for Nintendo to try something like this again on the Wii, I can see why they wouldn’t want to. The Wii already has a pretty solid online interface already, and seeing that the Satellaview was a costly and abject failure, a revival of sorts would most likely be a significant financial blmish on a company that is flying high at the moment. Besides, current visual online communities on the Internet are hemorrhaging money as we speak.
The only way to revive the Satellaview, in my opinion, would be to turn it into an open source project similar to OpenTTD. The technology is certainly there, as ROM editors for the SNES (for translation and maybe to add functionalities) and even ROMs of Satellaview games, most notably BS The Legend of Zelda, are freely floating around on the Internet. I don’t have the time, patience, or expertise (especially as far as translating the Japanese into English goes), so I guess that would have to be left off to the same kind of people who did OpenTTD, who are probably not as enthusiastic about the Satellaview’s limited legacy as I am.
So, that about does it for this highly epic article. By now, you’ll most likely know what the hell someone is talking about if they ever happen to exclaim to you:
¡VIVA LA SATELLAVIEW!Got any questions, corrections, or other concerns about the Satellaview and/or my article on it? Send an email to captainnosebleed (at) electronicrenaissance (dot) com, and your comments could end up in the next edition of Captain's Mailbox.
You can also discuss this article at its associated forum topic.
We've also got a t-shirt of the face from the disturbing talking Satellaview television on sale now at the store, for men and women.
