25 years ago Sega finally figured out the internet with Phantasy Star Online
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25 years ago Sega finally figured out the internet with Phantasy Star Online
2000's online RPG followed a decade of Sega trying to make online gaming work on its consoles.
Marc Normandin -->
By Marc Normandin |<br>December 31, 2025 | 3:00pm
Image: Sega
Games<br>Features<br>Sega
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For almost the entire time that Sega was in the console business, they were trying to make the internet work for them. A search for some kind of advantage over the competition combined with a desire to leverage new, more powerful technologies—a trait the company had developed in the arcades, where they first found prominence—led them to the online world. Except said online world was still so nascent in the games scene, still so undeveloped, that it was a difficult thing to even advertise or promote or develop around.
In December of 2000, Sega would release Phantasy Star Online in Japan. It was, in many ways, the culmination of those decade-spanning efforts to utilize the internet for something that would stick, the final product from lessons learned over the course of multiple projects and multiple consoles. It’s an exceptionally important game that helped lay the foundation for online console gaming for years to come—and it’s also just a great time even all these years later, even if the world it takes place in seems so much smaller now. But the important thing is that it didn’t just happen. Phantasy Star Online didn’t come out of nowhere, but from dedication to the idea that something fruitful would come from Sega’s work with the internet and connectivity, eventually.
Sega Net Work System—otherwise known as Sega MegaNet, after the Genesis’s Japanese name Mega Drive—was Sega’s first foray into utilizing online capabilities in a console. It used dial-up internet and required that a modem be purchased—the Mega Modem, naturally—and did this all the way back in 1990. The modem connected with the expansion port in the back of the console, and then you could plug it into a phone jack in order to achieve those sweet, sweet 1,200bit/s speeds. Luckily, games were also a lot smaller back then, so while it wasn’t exactly a quick download, you weren’t trying to shove multiple gigs of game data onto the specialty cartridge you would buy for Sega MegaNet titles.
In what turned out to be fitting, one of the most prolific series available through the MegaNet was Phantasy Star. Phantasy Star II had a number of text-adventure spin-off titles featuring characters from the base game, which meant that, of the 42 games released for MegaNet, seven of them were in the Phantasy Star line.
While announced for North American release, it never did get there, and the redesigned Model 2 Mega Drive/Genesis removed the EXT 9-pin port that the modem connected to thanks to the failure of the system to catch on. Between the service only receiving so much support and the price of the hardware and subscription necessary to make it all work, it just didn’t stand much of a chance in 1990, even if it did give you a heads up about the news and the weather in addition to a downloadable library of games. It was like the Wii well before the Wii. MegaNet did receive a release in 1995 in Brazil, however, which Tectoy’s licensed version of the Mega Drive was able to utilize, so, like with so many other Sega products, it wasn’t actually dead even if it seemed that way because Brazil was around to keep it alive. (If you want to see how much Brazil loved Sega, check the Sega Master System Wikipedia page sometime, go to the “Lifespan” section, and note when production of the system stopped in the country.)
MegaNet would give way outside of Brazil to the Sega Channel, which used cable television connections, such as through Time Warner Cable, to deliver downloadable games to users, by way of a coaxial cable and adapter for the Genesis. Nintendo tried something similar in the same era, albeit by going the satellite route with the appropriately named Satellaview, but neither quite took off like either industry giant hoped. Sega Channel did pretty well, though, when you remove the lofty executive expectations from the mix, with a quarter-million subscribers ready to try out demos and download games from a rotating list of 50 titles in their living room. But the late-life release of the service combined with its cost—$15 in 1994 is more like $33 now, which wouldn’t seem like that much if Sega wasn’t in the middle of turning their attention to the Genesis’ successor system, the Saturn—caused this one to flame out, too. And that was the case even though it was at first the only way you could get your hands on the excellent Alien Soldier in North America. Ah, well, at least...