Temporel, inc. and the Videoway system
As streaming services continue overtaking physical media, the idea that a video game may vanish entirely once it or its platform is no longer supported has become a very real fear among classic gaming enthusiasts. This is already true of countless games created for old, obsolete mobile phone platforms, pulled from marketplaces before anyone cared to archive them.
But this isn’t a new phenomenon. While most games released in the previous decades are still playable throughs ports or emulation, the ’80s and ’90s also saw gaming platforms that eschewed physical supports for games and the ownership they imply, leaving their libraries to disappear along with the services through which they were once available.
Such is the case of the Videoway (or Vidéoway), a subscription-based, interactive television service launched by the Quebec-based cable distributor Videotron in 1989. Billed as the first of its kind in North America, and also distributed in parts of the UK, the Videoway service and its dedicated terminal granted access to premium tv content, while also serving as a sort of primitive Internet and video game console, as the terminal contained a custom-built 8-bit computer. Users could consult weather forecasts, pay bills, access entertainment news, send messages to other users, or even participate in a dating service, with the information being transmitted through the TV cable rather than a phone line through a Canadian variant of the Videotex technology. Likewise, the games were downloaded to the terminal’s RAM every time you picked them from the menu, and deleted when you were done.
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