Back in 1995, Nintendo released a satellite modem peripheral for the Super Famicom in Japan called the Satellaview, allowing the console to receive data transmissions at any given time. Bundled with this peripheral was a game called BS-X: The Story of The Town Whose Name Was Stolen, and sure enough, Nintendo sent magical waves of data to the game through the ether every day for five years.
Naturally, this game operated very differently to the titles usually found on a gaming console at the time, with regular updates and in-game changes being possible through these data transmissions, rather than simply already having all of the content on the cartridge (think of it as a very early exploration into modern-day game patching). As an experiment, Bertrand Fan - an engineer working for collaboration tool Slack - wanted to see if he could make the app communicate with the game today, essentially making his own text appear inside the SNES title.
Sadly, and understandably, Fan didn't have access to an original Satellaview and a copy of the Japanese game, so had to use a variety of emulation workarounds instead, including a software tool which allows you to generate your own Satellaview files. According to Fan, the tool allows you to "take one of the buildings in BS-X, set its name, and list items for sale in the building" He goes on to explain that "each item has a name and a description. If we stretch our imagination a bit, the name can be the time and sender and the description can be the text of the message".
The video below shows the whole thing in action, with Fan typing text into Slack which can then appear in the game. If you're interested in the technicalities of how this works and want to explore the topic in a little more detail, you can find Fan's blog on the subject here.
For pretty obvious reasons, it's probably a good thing that games aren't built with the option to upload players' online chats into them, but this is a very cool little project indeed.
[source theverge.com, via bert.org]
Comments 13
@ryancraddock this is going to make our days even more productive
@antdickens I think it might be time for @Dazza to stop making custom face emoticons of everyone and get us into a SNES game!
but why?
@setezerocinco like most things, to see if something is actually possible. I think it's pretty cool.
That's quite cool, if extremely pointless.
Also @ryancraddock there's a spelling error in the tagline and an error at the end of the first paragraph.
Just so cool
@NinjaAceTrainer Fixed the tagline! 😊 Can't see any errors in the paragraph though?
@ryancraddock Oh, whoops, I read it wrong. I thought it meant to be 'every other day'. My mistake, haha.
Really?
Nintendo had people update a SNES game right up to sometime in the year 2000? Or maybe the updates had just been scheduled well in advance.
@Pod
Nintendo was releasing Super Famicom games as late as the back half of '99.
@BLD The final official Super Famicom game was released in December 2000.
The last two games Nintendo made for it were Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 (which released for download in 1999 and on retail cartridge in 2000. Oddly enough, the Limited Edition of the game seems to have come with a rewritable cartridge with the download copy of the game preloaded, so only the standard physical release came with the proper retail copy.) and Metal Slader Glory: Director's Cut, a remake of a Famicom text adventure by HAL.
I shared the Mashable article on this in the #random Slack channel where I do contract work! I figured some would get a kick out of it.
Looks cool
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