Hackaday on Sega Meganet

For Hackaday, Zoe Skyforest wrote about Sega Meganet, an online service for the Sega Mega Drive launching in Japan in 1990. You hooked up your (Japanese) Mega Drive to the internet with the Mega Modem and you’d basically pay to play: […] The initial Mega Net kit cost ¥12,800, which included the Mega Modem accessory—a simple 1,200 bps dial-up modem which plugged into the “EXT” DE-9 port on the back of the Model 1 Mega Drive. Access to Mega Net service came at a cost of ¥800 a month. Users got a copy of Nikkan Sports Pro Baseball VAN, which provided live updates and statistics on baseball matches when connected to the service. […] Users could also engage in multiplayer gaming with certain cartridge-based titles. However, this was not using a server-based online system. Instead, this merely consisted of point-to-point dial-up play between two consoles equipped with the Mega Modem. Despite the novel concept for the time, it didn’t really work out and Sega discontinued the service but it…