Guess what console was the first to offer some form of DLC. The XBOX right? With the launch of the Xbox Live service, people where finally able to pay $5 and get some Pacmans. Wrong! How about the SNES back in 1995. Shenanigans you cry. I did too. But we're both wrong.



Behold the Satellaview, in all its glory. It was only released in Japan, but after first hearing about this elusive add-on, i had to go home and flip over my SNES. Guess what? There's a little connector on the bottom i never noticed. Not sure if it was intended for the Satellaview to grace our shores, but i don't remember any peripherals released here that used it.

So what was the Satellaview? It's actually named the BS-X, which stands for broadcast satellite transfer. it was basically a receiver that plugged into your snes and allowed you to pull content off a satellite broadcast and save it to the equivalent of a flash cart. When you purchased the receiver you also received an 8 megabit flashcard to store your titles. They ranged from remakes of classic games, down to new titles designed specifically for the service.

Another very cool feature was interactive layers added to games, such as streaming audio. The catch was, that at the time, you could not store the audio on the included cards, they would be broadcast similar to a standard radio show. So you'd have to game between certain hours of the day to have this functionality added. Really cool stuff. Way ahead of its time, and definitely not what you'd expect from a company that seems to have botched the online gameplay of today to a point that makes most gamers mutter words that start with F and end with K.



I could rewrite the wiki, but i'm not going to, i'll just link to it here. Just a little something i knew nothing about, hopefully you learned something today too :)