Sega broke ground in the late 90s with one of the first digital game distribution systems for consoles. Sega Channel offered access to a rotating library of Sega Genesis titles, along with game tips, demos, and even a few exclusive games that never came out in the United States in any other format. In an era of dial-up internet, Sega Channel delivered game data over television cable — a novel approach that gave the service its name.
In the years since, Sega Channel has been shrouded in a bit of mystery. The service was discontinued in 1998, and the lack of retrievable game data and documentation around Sega Channel has led to decades of speculation about it. We’ve mostly been left with magazine articles and second-hand accounts. Once in a while, one or two Sega Channel ROMs will show up online. How do you preserve a service like Sega Channel?
For the last two years, we’ve been working on a large-scale project to preserve the history of Sega Channel. Today, we unveiled our findings in a new YouTube video.
We’ll cut to the chase: In collaboration with multiple parties, we have recovered over 100 new Sega Channel ROMs, including system data, exclusive games, and even prototypes that were never published. We’ve also digitized internal paperwork and correspondence that reveals how Sega Channel operated, how it was marketed, and what would’ve come next for the service.
This project kicked off in 2024, when we met former Sega Channel vice president of programming Michael Shorrock at the Game Developers Expo. Our booth that year highlighted interesting games from outside the traditional game industry, including Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?, which our director Frank Cifaldi recovered back in 2016.
By complete coincidence, one of the items we put out was a promotional brochure for Broderbund Software… featuring Michael Shorrock on the cover! We got talking with Michael about our work, and we realized we both wanted to preserve and celebrate the history of Sega Channel.
At the same time this was happening, we were contacted by a community member named Ray (going by the pseudonym Sega Channel Guy). He had been contacting former Sega Channel staff to see if they still had any old swag or had saved things from the company. In the process, he came into possession of a collection of tape backups containing an unquantifiable amount of internal data from Sega Channel… including a significant number of game and system ROMs.
We realized we could put these two threads together! With Michael’s own collection and Ray’s data backups, we could tell a cohesive, wide-ranging story about what Sega Channel was and that was actually distributed through this service.
There are two end products from this process. The first is the Michael Shorrock collection, a new collection in our digital library. You can view the correspondence, notes, and presentations from Michael Shorrock’s personal collection, which shed light on the formation of Sega Channel and their audience. From these papers, you can also learn about Express Games: an unannounced successor that would have brought Sega’s cable data delivery service to computers and replaced Sega Channel entirely.
The other output here is the collection of Sega Channel ROM data. We’ve donated the data from the 144* new ROMs we recovered to the team at Gaming Alexandria, which will be sharing access to the files.
* Our video states that we recovered 142 unique ROMs. However, after uploading the video, we realized we miscounted! There are two additional Sega Channel variant ROM in this collection. The actual total is 144. This does not include the two outliers mentioned in the video, which were previously recovered by users on Sonic Retro in November 2024 but went mostly unreported.
This collection includes nearly 100 unique system ROMs, covering almost every version of the system that was distributed to consumers from 1994 to mid-1997. This batch also includes system ROM prototypes and some truly unusual experiments, like a Sega Genesis web browser that would’ve delivered compressed, static websites over television cable.
Of great interest to fans, this collection of ROMs also has dozens of previously undumped game variants and Sega Channel exclusives. This includes Garfield: Caught in the Act – The Lost Levels and The Flintstones, two games that were previously believed to be permanently lost and unrecoverable. These are both interesting from a development standpoint; both games appear to have their roots as abandoned projects that were repurposed as Sega Channel-exclusive content.
Also included are the previously unpreserved limited editions of Sega Genesis games. These versions have been cut down to fit within Sega Channel’s filesize limit, sometimes omitting content or splitting the game into multiple parts. We’re not sure anyone is especially eager to play a version of Super Street Fighter II missing half the characters, but we’re glad to have it documented.
With a few exceptions, this recovery project has accounted for almost all outstanding Sega Channel games. We believe this also means there are now digital backup copies of every unique Sega Genesis game released in the United States.
This has been a years-long project that wouldn’t have been possible without support from the broader gaming community. Besides Michael Shorrock and Ray, we want to give special thanks to:
- Sega Retro, The Cutting Room Floor, and Hidden Palace for documenting everything we’ve known about Sega Channel up to this point.
- RisingFromRuins and Nathan Misner (infochunk) for putting all the pieces together to crack the Sega Channel data formats.
- Dustin Hubbard (Hubz) from Gaming Alexandria for working with us to share this ROM data.
- Rob Curl from the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, who flagged us down at GDC to let us know that Michael Shorrock had seen a picture of himself at our booth and brought him over to say hello.
We also want to give a special thanks to Chuck Guzis, a long-time expert on data tapes, who digitized Ray’s Sega Channel backups for us in 2024. Chuck’s business Sydex was, for a long time, the go-to vendor for working with data tapes, and we’ve used his services in the past.
Shortly before launching this project, we learned that Chuck passed away over the summer. His death leaves a hole in our community and our collective expertise. We know that the gaming community (and specifically the Sega community) will be excited by all this new documentation and data; we hope that their excitement is a testament to what Chuck’s work meant to the digital preservation community.
Complete list of recovered titles
This is a list of all Sega Channel-specific game data recovered from this project and shared with Gaming Alexandria. This does not include the 97 unique pieces of menu data ROMs and system software that were also recovered.
Game list
Unique Sega Channel exclusive games:
- The Berenstain Bears’ A School Day
- BreakThru
- The Flintstones
- Garfield: Caught in the Act – The Lost Levels
- Iron Hammer
- Waterworld
Sega Channel variants:
- The Adventures of Batman and Robin, Test Drive version
- Comix Zone, Test Drive version (1)
- Comix Zone, Test Drive version (2)
- Earthworm Jim, Test Drive version
- Earthworm Jim VideoHints (1)
- Earthworm Jim VideoHints (2)
- The Great Earthworm Jim Race
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Part A
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Part B
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Test Drive version
- NCAA Final Four Basketball: Special Edition (1)
- NCAA Final Four Basketball: Special Edition (2)
- Mortal Kombat 3, Part A
- Mortal Kombat 3, Part B
- Scholastic’s The Magic School Bus: Space Exploration Game, Test Drive version
- Sonic 3D Blast, Part A
- Sonic 3D Blast, Part B
- Super Street Fighter II: Limited Edition
- Triple Play Baseball 96: Special Edition
- Virtua Fighter 2, Part A
- Virtua Fighter 2, Part B
- World Series Baseball ’96: Limited Edition*
- X-Men 2: Clone Wars, Test Drive version
Prototypes received by Sega Channel:
- Al Unser Jr.’s Road to the Top
- Dan Marino Football
- Light Crusader
- Nick Faldo’s Championship Golf
- Popeye in High Seas High-Jinks
- Shadows of the Wind
- WildSnake
- Wrath of the Demon
- Yogi Bear [Yogi Bear’s Cartoon Capers]
Data differences:
- Body Count (US revision)
- Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow
- Primal Rage
- Pulseman
- Richard Scarry’s Busytown*
- Shining Force II
Header differences only:
- Battle Frenzy (US header)
- Power Drive (US header)
- QuackShot
- Super Hang-On
- Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio
- X-Men 2: Clone Wars
* These games were previously found on a CD obtained by a user on the Sonic Retro forums in November 2024. However, these ROMs were overshadowed by the recovery of the Sega Channel exclusive games The Chessmaster and Klondike from the same CD. Although our copies of these ROMs are not unique, we included them on this list to make sure their existence doesn’t get lost.
A footnote for hardcore Sega fans
We believe this recovery project accounts for all unique Sega Channel exclusive games. But the most hardcore fans might be wondering: What about Ozone Kid? In a feature article on Sega Channel from the June 1995 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly (p.29), Ozone Kid was identified as the first Sega Channel exclusive.
We can confirm that this game was never actually distributed through Sega Channel. According to data recovered by Ray, The Environmental Detective (as it was titled prior to cancellation) was slated for release alongside the Sega Channel test markets, but it was pulled from their programming plans in July 1994.
Reading the between the lines in Sega Channel’s internal project tracking, the game appears to have suffered from a variety of problems over several months. When the game was finally shelved, Sega issued a “partial test report based on items found at the time code was pulled,” suggesting there were still major issues when it was removed from their plans.