The 90s Online Network For Super Nintendo & Sega Genesis You Never Heard Of | The Story Of XBAND

Update May 2020: retro.live/ is not currently available but some of the people who worked it are making an online gaming network for retro consoles using more modern tech. You can find them at retro.link/ ------------------------------ Thanks to everyone for being patient in between uploads. This video was a beast to make but I'm pretty happy with the result. If you're more interested in how it work that kind of stuff gets broken down in part 2 around the 16:53 mark. I'll be uploading regularly again now that my magnum opus is done lol.

I've had people request this topic quite a bit and I always knew you were working on this. I just kept telling them "Wrestling With Gaming is on the case!" This did not disappoint. Well done, sir.

2 frames latency? Pretty much a 33ms ping over dial-up. Simply amazing.

I loved how everything in the 90s was labeled "X" something lol. Good ol days!

this is such an important story in the history of gaming, thank you for telling it

My handle was "Havok" and I formed a clan with someone who named himself "Kayos". Our clan was called the White Lotus society based on some mortal-kombat lore we read in the instruction manual. I was pretty good at the game so I got recruited into a more prestigious clan by someone called "the emperor". He required I rename my account to a star-wars related name, and I only knew Luke Skywalker basically, but he was strictly empire-themed. So he suggested I spell it "Luuke" with two U's based off of the evil clone of Luke Skywalker in the Timothy Zahn books (that I didn't read till years later). He did make one exception to his empire-themed rule which was his real-life girlfriend named "Leia". I haven't even thought of those times for the last 20 years, but this video brought back a bunch of nostalgic memories. Memories of clan wars, talking in chat after games, mail-bombing, and more. Honestly, if all Xband did was connect you to a random person to play without the communication aspects, it wouldn't be anywhere near the same experience. Communicating with other humans who share a common interest with you is the back-bone of a feeling of "community". It's something very special to experience, and I'm glad I started my teenage years with that unique experience that is taken for granted by today's youth.

"an hour an 4 mins? I don't have time for this!"...an hour and 4 mins later "that was a good doc!"

So happy I was able to experience this back in the 90’s. Even had the keyboard. Good times! I loved XBAND.

My family was so poor during this era. I always wished I could try out the xband so this documentary is bittersweet. Great job as always!

holy crap, you even got ex devs to talk about this! The first time I heard about this, my mind was blown. There was a device, years prior to the Dreamcast that made it possible to play online games on the console. And no one outside of the US knows that such a thing ever existed? It had so much personality with more features than some of the paid online services 25 years later. But I couldn't find that much stuff about XBand besides the couple of uploads on youtube and screenshots from magazines. The fact that you could fill an hour with information and even dug up much new stuff is amazing!

Oh wow! Used to have one of these for my Sega Genesis. My brother and I spent hours playing Madden, NBA Live and Mortal Kombat II online. It was incredible. There was also a trick/exploit for it. If both players picked up the phone after a game and waited for the static to clear, they'd be connected for a regular phone call.

Everybody involved with the XBand seems so fun! They all seem like truly good people.

My parents were so mad when they got their bill. I was one of those guys who made accounts just to update the clan. Lol.

Man, the XBand brings back all kinds of memories for me. I grew up in the southeast USA, but due to having older friends through my sister, I was into stuff like anime (which was mostly unknown then), Dungeons and Dragons, etc. All of these things made me weird to my middle school. When I got an XBand, I played the online games a little bit but it was really hard to find players locally and I couldn't call long distance. But what I did figure out pretty quickly is that people were using all 4 player profiles to create what were essentially news letters or even little proto-websites. You would save your last profile to give "links" to other users in the same topic who were also running news sites on their 4 profiles, and they would link back to you. That and the email soon became my main usage of XBand and pretty quickly, I quit even looking for online games. I would spend hours reading people's sites, emailing them back and forth and generally talking with other people who were passionate about the same things I was which as amazing. I was so heart broken when XBand closed but switched almost immediately to the internet on my PC. But, believe it or not, it actually felt empty compared to XBand. It was missing the community. Everyone who was into these topics knew each other and it almost felt like a family. There was tons more content on the internet but it wasn't social at that time. You were simply pulling up static webpages and looking at them. Forum software was still very, very new and few people had the technical abilities to set them up and run them so they were extremely rare. Eventually I did settle into the web and internet and it did become more compelling as social experiences started getting more common. Today I am a professional software developer and I have to believe on some level that XBand was one of the things that started me on that path, because creating software that creates social experiences and communities is extremely exciting to me and what drove me to start programming. So on the off-chance that any of the Catapult team may read this wall of text: Thank you! It really meant the world to me!

Fun fact: The company that created the GameLine was Control Data Corporation, which then renamed itself to Quantum Computer Services. It then became AOL in 1991. So yes, AOL made the gameline

Thank you so much for this documentary, it was an awesome trip down memory lane! I too was one of those who racked up a huge phone bill playing MK2 nationwide. Shortly after that the "local" phone area got expanded for my state and I could find local matches....man great times!

Much respect to these legends who brought me hours of fun at 14.

My main username on the SNES format was King Werewolf. I remember finding an exploit in the tournament/contest system and used it to get selected for pretty much every one that I planned on: The server would select from a list of people in queue who were waiting for an opponent. Most of the time, these people would get an opponent before the computer would select them and they would miss out. I found that in my local area, nobody would be in queue, so I would queue up in my local area and sit there for several minutes. This brute-forced the XBAND server to pick me for contests every time I tried it. I remember beating the editor of EGM magazine at MKII because he wasn't used to the 2-second lag time, so I would fake a move, make him throw up a block, and then buffer the move in such that it would execute right as he let go of the block button. Worked like a charm! Later on though, I got waxed by Nintendo's Killer Instinct champion (as did everyone else that night). Fun times.

this is insane, both the xband concept itself and the quality of this documentary. awesome work. the interviews are an amazing touch,

SNES KI on the XBAND kicked ass. Many sleepless nights battling it out. My friend was the first to get one, and I thought he was full of shit. When I went to his house and found that this actually existed and it worked, I was blown away.