Game Factory
From Sega Retro
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| Game Factory | ||||||||||
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| Made for: Sega Mega Drive | ||||||||||
| Manufacturer: NewLeaf Entertainment | ||||||||||
| Licensor: Blockbuster | ||||||||||
| Type: Backup tool | ||||||||||
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Game Factory was a rewritable Sega Mega Drive cartridge service run by Blockbuster around late 1994, developed through a collaboration between Sega of America and NewLeaf Entertainment. A novel idea in the world of home rentals, the service was highly ambitious and critically well-received, but suffered from a number of problems and had its subsequent nationwide rollout eventually cancelled.
Contents
Service
Manufactured by NewLeaf Entertainment subsidiary Fairway Technologies[1] exclusively for Blockbuster, two types of cartridge were offered; a green-labelled version (NL103) which could store up to 16 megabits, and a blue-labelled version (NL102) which could hold 32 megabits, both using a standard NTSC Genesis cartridge shell. The cartridge also devotes an area for a printed label, so that Blockbuster staff could easily keep track of their stock. A third cartridge, labelled with NewLeaf's logo (NL101) also exists, but appears not to have been intended for general consumers. Altogether, the process of flashing a cartridge with a new title took roughly 45 seconds.
Games available for rent through Game Factory appear to contain different ROMs than their original releases, with titles like The Jungle Book displaying a unique B.B. FLASH ROM message at the title screen to indicate its purpose.[2]
List of flashable games
- Earthworm Jim[3]
- The Jungle Book[3]
- The Lion King[3]
- Mighty Morphin Power Rangers[3]
- Monopoly[3]
- Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure[3]
- Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage
History
Background
| “ | Game rental has become an increasingly important market segment, with estimates at about $1.5 billion a year industrywide. But with nearly 1,000 great Genesis and Game Gear software titles available, it’s tough keeping an inventory broad and deep enough to satisfy peak demand. This system ensures that every customer will be a satisfied customer. | „ |
In the early 1990s, the success of the Genesis and Super Nintendo in North America was had resulted in the creation of a profitable video game rental market for Blockbuster. However, as technology continued to improve, the company was worried that systems of digital distribution (which could deliver movies and games directly to customer's homes) could negate the need for Blockbuster entirely, and looked to invest in new technologies which could improve the customer rental experience.
The popularity of Blockbuster's game rental problem also created the problem of inventory shortage, especially with certain hot-selling titles, with a reported one-third of customers being unable to rent their desire game. To address this issue, Blockbuster turned to the technology firm Soundsational, a company which designed and produced networked music kiosks at which customers could purchase an album and have it burned to the format of their choice (such as CD or compact cassette) while they waited. While Blockbuster's traditional fare of movies and films presented considerable technical hurdles in instant rewritability, video games were more compact in terms of filesize and distribution, and the existence of previous cartridge rewriting technology made the future-proofing of Blockbuster's game rental market an appealing choice for the company. In 1990, Blockbuster acquired Soundsational, as well as teaming up with IBM to establish a sister company, Fairway Technologies. Soundsational was renamed NewLeaf Technology and assigned to both market the system and acquire licensing deals, while Fairway created the actual hardware, software, and networking technology for the system. Over the next three years, the two firms would develop a system of in-house flash cartridge writers for use in Blockbuster's rental stores.
The concept involved customers renting Sega Mega Drive video games stored on reprogrammable flash cartridges, and was thus chiefly pitched as an inventory management solution. Avoiding the need to stock potentially hundreds, if not thousands of official video game cartridges for rent, Blockbuster could instead use a Game Factory cartridge, flash the contents of a ROM image onto the memory inside, and distribute that instead. When the customer had finished borrowing the game, the cartridge could then be flashed with another ROM image and be recycled for further use.[1]
Blockbusters pitched the concept to both Nintendo of America and Sega of America. While the former replied with a hard no (as Nintendo was wary of game rentals, having famously taken Blockbuster to court over the matter), the latter was definitely interested, but wanted to see a proof of concept before licensing anything - resulting in Fairway Technologies having to virtually reverse-engineer the Mega Drive's cartridge technology to create a working demonstration unit. Thankfully, said demonstration was a success, and Sega granted NewLeaf a license to use several of its first-party games for rental through Game Factory.
Launch
The Mega Drive Game Factory was the first of its kind (though the concept of using reprogrammable cartridges is as old as the game cartridge itself, as it is a vital tool for cartridge game development), and was initially offered between the 10th and 15th of August 1994[1] to ten Blockbuster stores in Columbia, South Carolina (alongside at least one store in NewLeaf's hometown of Boca Raton, Florida). The real plan, however, was to gauge interest in whether the concept would be feasible with the upcoming generation of consoles, namely the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. A Sega Game Gear variant was planned[1], but does not appear to have made it to consumers.
Blockbuster had also tried (and failed) to secure deals for other forms of entertainment, such as VHS videos and music CDs, however despite developing the equipment, big publishers were uneasy with the practise and chose not to license their libraries. Some of these fears were mitigated, however, by Viacom's takeover of Blockbuster in 1993.
Decline
Though apparently a success, the Game Factory service was not rolled out nationwide, nor to other regions of the world where Blockbuster operated. Aside from the fact that Mega Drive sales were on the decline by the end of 1995, Blockbuster and NewLeaf had a hard time keeping up with the demands of new games, which often included extra features that the Game Factory cartridges couldn't accommodate.
For example, having successfully built and tested 16 megabit carts, the firm was hit with the news that Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, a game Blockbuster had signed up to promote, would be released on a 32 megabit cartridge. Other games like Sonic & Knuckles and Virtua Racing were likely skipped entirely, and it is not known if there was compatibility with games which required a battery for saving.
Blockbuster also had trouble signing deals with third-party publishers, and so could initially only offer the service for first-party Sega games[1] and those developed by Virgin Interactive (owned by Blockbuster). Eventually, Acclaim, Activision, and Parker Brothers licensed titles for the Game Factory service.
The move to optical media and the security features surrounding Saturn and PlayStation video games proved too much of a challenge for the firm, and the service was quietly discontinued at some point in 1995. It is not fully understood what happened to the Game Factory inventory - cartridges have been spotted on online auction sites, and development cartridges have also been seen. After Game Factory's closure, the cartridges were generally flashed with a single game and sold directly to consumers as a form of liquidation[5], frequently with the game's title having been crudely written on the label.[6]
Legacy
Game Factory cartridges appear to use CR2032 batteries to hold onto data. Should these batteries have died in the last twenty years or more, the cartridge's contents may have been wiped, rendering them unusable.
Magazine articles
- Main article: Game Factory/Magazine articles.
Physical scans
| Mega Drive, US (16Mb) |
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   Cart |
| Mega Drive, US (32Mb) |
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 Cart |
| Mega Drive, US (NewLeaf Entertainment) |
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 Cart |
External links
- Game Factory: Blockbuster & Sega's On-Demand Game Rentals video essay by Gaming Historian at YouTube
- Remember When Blockbuster Video Tried Burning Game Cartridges On Demand? article by Drew Littrell at Hackaday
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 EGM², "July 1994" (US; 1994-07-19), page 28
- ↑ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-FI5nZvEHe5jo6HAzIoJ6xz1oIPHLEr-/view
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pOsHrcfrjqzgSbIXidj0JfLqgWX-ftIczHX0VcPUcV0/edit?usp=sharing
- ↑ Sega Visions, "August/September 1994" (US; 1994-xx-xx), page 8
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUWIHasHPQ
- ↑ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KrzXK094OdgcxpcSw6oTspZ65TsaUgaf/view