Sonic Mania
Image: @BillytimeG

If you've been following the site for a while, you'll know that we're more than a little obsessed with Sega Channel — Sega's long-defunct cable-based video game service for the Mega Drive that was active throughout the mid to late '90s.

So, understandably, we always like to keep an eye open for any news relating to the ahead-of-its-time service, and any ongoing preservation efforts that are underway to try to document it in the modern day.

Last month, for example, we reported on the fact that the Video Game History Foundation had managed to recover the ROM of the incredibly sought-after Sega Channel exclusive Garfield Caught in the Act: The Lost Levels and that it had displayed the game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2024. And it appears that this month, we have even more newly recovered Sega Channel material to feast our eyes upon, with @GhostCorpsGen and @BillytimeG publishing 15 incredible VHS rips giving a closer look at the service during its heyday.

These videos show the changing look of Sega Channel throughout 1997 and 1998, with the first upload containing footage from the weekly video game review show Twitch (which aired between 1995 to 1997), as well as a bunch of b-roll from Game Freak's 1994 Mega Drive title Pulseman.

In case you're not familiar with the story behind Pulseman, it was essentially a game that was only ever distributed in North America at the time via Sega Channel, despite it originally getting a cartridge release in Japan. The ROM of the Sega Channel version has never been recovered or posted online, and footage of it is pretty rare to come by today, leading some to mistakenly believe this North American version was given the localization treatment ahead of its Western release. But, interestingly, as these videos seem to confirm, this doesn't seem to be the case, with the game simply retaining the Japanese subtitles as opposed to localized text.

This wasn't the only thing to catch our attention either, with the other VHS uploads offering a fascinating glimpse at some of the player guides and video game descriptions provided as part of the service, as well as an interestingly named "Sonic Mania" section devoted to downloading a range of Sonic titles (including Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Sonic & Knuckles, and Sonic Spinball). As you'll no doubt know, Sonic Mania later went on to become the name of a 2017 Sonic game, led by members of the Sonic fangame community including Christian Whitehead.

You can watch the full list of videos over on BillyTime!Games YouTube channel.

[source youtu.be]