The Way of all Tech

In the spring of 2007 I took a class on signal processing, and the hardware simplicity of seemingly complex goals left me dumbfounded. Three components gets you a band-pass filter, it turns out, and that’s the key to decades-old radio technology. It was here that an old hobby came up - downsampling technology to move it backward in time. You’ve probably seen this in the form of Steampunk, where everything from airplanes to operating systems is projected onto a romanticized Victorian era. I tend to work less conspicuously, fitting good ideas back into the past where they might have truly existed, only to be forgotten as yet another half-baked failure. This story is proof that truth is almost always stranger than fiction, and often more interesting.

The fiction: the Atari Teleplay, presented in the style of a historical blurb in a gaming magazine: “The idea was simple - move the joystick input over a phone line. This could just barely be done digitally with a 300-baud modem, a recent improvement at the time of its 1982 release that allowed only one non-controller bit per frame. Earlier designs based on analog signal generators and gates at either end produced sloppy results with average latency. The $150 device was a squat brown tray with a space for the full-size 2600 to sit. On its front were two joystick outputs with six-inch cords, a joystick input, and a power switch reminiscent of the Atari’s. The plugs were designed to curl up and plug into the console’s joystick ports - one would be the local player’s input with a delay, and the other would be the remote player’s input with unavoidable latency. It would be left up to the players to follow their manuals’ instructions and ensure that the plugs were arranged correctly - one player with straight lines, the other with crossed lines.

“To help this setup and allow “collaboration” (read: bragging, trash talk, idle chatter), to the left of the Atari sat a space for a common phone handset, complete with touch-tone number pad. The phone was also needed to set up games, since the units operated ad-hoc. One simply called a friend, arranged a game, and then called him again using the Teleplay. The handset was inoperable while the game was on - not enough room, to put it simply. Voice over data was a joke, and analog frequency-compression methods tested early on gave both players Vocoder-like voices, an unintended effect that kids described as cool and adults described as creepy. The system paused whenever either handset was picked up, an effect accomplished thanks to a pass-through which sat between the Atari and the cartridge to be played. The pass-through connected to the Teleplay over the back of the Atari via a standard SCSI ribbon cable. It contained no electronics, simply putting the Teleplay ‘between’ the game and the console. This additionally allowed the consoles to synchronize, sending the entire 128 bytes of the 2600’s RAM in a paltry five seconds. These synchronizations happened whenever the handsets were set down and once automatically every minute.

“There was nothing game-specific about the device. Input was simply transferred over the phone with reasonable accuracy and speed, regardless of even the presence of a game cartridge. If both players plugged in different games, they would both be confused, but their controls would transmit. If the game used was something single-player like Adventure, then the player who called got to play and the player who picked up got to watch. The manual contained a list of games known to work well, poorly, or not at all with the device, and the company’s 800 number would readily inform players of compatibility as new games came out.

This was all arranged on the backsides of handouts, improved by degrees every time my mind drifted from the lectures. I tried to make it as believable as possible - I can imagine gamers in the early 80s setting up social networks, perhaps sharing phone numbers and game lists in their local Radio Shacks or arcades. It would’ve been an X-Band fifteen years early, without the subscription fees and game-specific problems. It would still have problems, of course, they’d just be more general. With a bit of tweaking on the date, the cost, and the public reception, it could be spun as a failed concept killed in ‘82 or a market failure caught in the ‘83 crash.

Except it actually happened.

Not the Teleplay specifically, or even a real approximation, but a network device for the Atari 2600. The Control Video Corporation’s 1983 Gameline allowed owners to download games for a fee, with a limited number of plays on each download. It even had a members-only magazine

Even earlier than that, there was the PlayCable for the Intellivision, which did what the 1994 Sega Channel did back in 1981. The SNES got in on the act in Japan with the 1995 Satellaview. Both the SNES and the Genesis had the XBAND, of course, which was my initial muse for the fictional Teleplay. I don’t think there was any push for the technology during the Playstation-Saturn-N64 years, probably wise given the rising popularity of the internet and online PC gaming, but the idea picked back up when the Dreamcast rolled out. Sega repurposed their PC gaming service Heat into SegaNet, which was mildly successful during the consoles unfortunately short lifespan. The PS2 didn’t have any amazing gaming service, but it did have a port of FFXI which is probably the primary reason the slim PS2 has an inbuilt modem. By the time Microsoft’s runaway hit Xbox Live service landed in 2002, it did all of the above and then some. What they brought to the table more than anything else was standardization and a first-party hook. I, as a gamer, thought was a port of six-year-old PC innovations. The 21-year history of network gaming services clearly demonstrates otherwise.

Not to steal James Burke’s routine, but the history of anything is almost never as deep as you think. So often are things mired in predecessors and followed by copycats that when something really original comes around, people take notice. Truth, as usual, is stranger than fiction.

This entry was posted on 3. October 2007 at 03:53 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.