Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles | Vale.Rocks

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Video game consoles have a long history with web browsers. From the advent of the World Wide Web, consoles have been trying to get online. Browsers on video game consoles were initially very much an attempt to provide a cheap gateway to the web for a casual audience lacking technical expertise, though as time progressed they’ve become a greater and more integrated part of systems.

This article takes a look at browsers on video game consoles in detail, though only covers official web browsers. Many consoles have browsers installable via custom firmware and homebrew, but they’re beyond the scope of this post, as are non-web systems such as Satellaview and online services that didn’t provide a browser, such as XBAND, Sega Meganet, and Sega Channel.

Game console browsers were of interest to web developers for a period while personal computing devices and mobile browsers were still establishing themselves. Overall, the development of console browsers provides an insight into a juvenile web, slowly growing and establishing itself, as well as an insight into game console user interfaces.

CD-i

The Compact Disc-Interactive format and hardware created by Philips and Sony was an ill-fated attempt to bring interactive multimedia to the masses. Development on the project started in the mid ’80s, and home players arrived in 1991.

The CD-i’s inclusion as a ‘game console’ here is debatable as it was designed for and touted with much broader capabilities. However, towards the end of its life it was marketed much more as a game console, and it is as a game console that it is best known today – especially thanks to the infamous Mario and Zelda games.

With a modem and a CD-Online disc (known as Web-i in the United States) released in late 1995, users could access the web in a very rudimentary manner. The term ‘internet-lite’ is seen paired with the CD-i frequently, for not only was the internet and indeed the entire World Wide Web burgeoning, but the CD-i was a rather limited machine that wasn’t well equipped for supporting the full-scale web.

The main menu of CD-Online Disc 97-10.

The browser worked and had links to various web portals but was very limited, even given the primitive web of the time. The CD-i’s limited RAM meant that it could store very little, and that simply using the browser would overwrite other values in memory, such as preferences and game saves. The idea was that the CD-i would be a cheaper, TV-based computing device, available at a price point lower than typical home computers that could make it the gateway to the internet for the less technologically literate.

During 1996, the CD-i KeyControl keyboard was released, as were additional CD-Online discs. The idea being that new discs would be released periodically with additional games, software, and peripheral support. Records indicate six discs were released in total, with later versions including the ability to develop and deploy your own homepage. By late 1998, CD-Online was winding down on the CD-i, with a version of the service launching for PCs during the turn of the millennium. Throughout the early 2000s it fizzled out and domains went offline, with everything CD-Online coming to a complete close in the mid-2000s.

Sega Saturn

Sega’s 1994 console, the Saturn, gained internet access in late 1996 with the release of Sega Net Link – a tiny device with a custom chip and 28.8kbps modem that fit into the cartridge port.

For the Net Link, United States based company PlanetWeb provided their PlanetWeb Browser as the ‘NetLink Custom Web Browser’, an efficient and lightweight browser with a bespoke engine which was tailored and released for various devices in collaboration with manufacturers. Reading PlanetWeb’s frequently asked questions page from 1997, it is clear their browser was built carefully to target television-based devices and existing consoles, making it optimal for the Saturn.

Due to televisions having low-resolution screens compared to dedicated monitors, the PlanetWeb browser made use of ‘proprietary software technology for displaying clear, readable text and sharp images on an ordinary television.’. In other words, ‘the Browser features such advances as anti-aliased fonts’.

For its time, and given it is on an extremely limited console, it is remarkably fully featured. The browser has an inbuilt magnifier that can zoom to multiple levels, image support, history, bookmarks, an address book, the ability to download files temporarily, and full parental controls for filtering.1 That is in addition to all the configurable options and settings available in a menu accessed by pressing Start. There is a wide selection of themes with different cursors and sounds – any of which wouldn’t be out of place in Kid Pix, with blips and bloops and springy sounds of all varieties.

The main Net Link page in version 2 of the browser. Each district of the city is a navigable hyperlink.

Each...