Hi Assembler Forums, Long time lurker, firt time poster here. So, I'm from Hungary, and there was a television show in the early nineties on our national television which had a big part in the popularity of the NES and the SNES in our country. Hungary is a post-communist country, so the NES was not available until 1990-1991 around here. There was this TV show which had started in 1990 and ended in 1993. You could win various things (the main prize was a trip to Miami) by playing Super Mario Bros. on the NES. BUT, you had to play from home via a phone connection. At the time average families had rotary phones, so a crew went to your home and provided a phone with digital buttons. On the dial pad the directional buttons were 4, 6, 2, 8 A and B were 1 and 3, as far as I know. Here is the only video available of the show: I can translate it if you want me to. The host (Tibor Dévényi) says this system works "over fax" and they connect a "little machine" in people's homes. He also mentions this system is being played only in three countries: Austria, Sweden and Hungary. In his autobiography book he wrote about negotiations in Japan with Nintendo, but they bought the license from Stadlbauer, the company distributing Nintendo games in Hungary. So anyone heard anything about this? At the moment I'm trying to gain acces to the national television archive to dig up some more episodes and contacting Stadlbauer.
Very cool! In fact I have faint memories from my childhood in The Netherlands where people would play something like gameboy tetris (I know, sounds weird to broadcast that on TV) via the phone, but the details are hazy.
How is it i have NEVER heard of this , how where they capable of doing this? It looks like there was indeed some lag from the input (looks like it to me in the video). Also that giraffe stuffed prize has got to be the greatest thing ever!
A few phone in shows had something similar here too. Basically they are just listening for the tones for the directions and then translating that to button presses
So, I've just finished the english subtitles for the video, so you could undestrand it. It's a bit late here, so it may be a little sloppy.
iirc there were also shows that did this with voice controls instead of a keypad (shouting forward, jump, down etc)
Thanks for the video. I was just reading about this a few weeks ago, and was wondering what it looked like. I do wish I could remember where I read about it. It was a post somewhere, from(I think) someone who worked on it. EDIT: Found the page, but I'm not sure if it's the same thing: http://blog.pricecharting.com/2012/11/snes-campus-challenge-92-for-sale.html
Some time ago I created obscure PSX games theme on HG101 forum, and one post is interesting. Slovakian TV show where you play Crash 2 and Crash 3 via phone? I didn't know that is possible play PSX games on this way.
Imagine playing multiplayer Halo..over the phone. I mean, with some kind of custom controller, yes, but it would be cool to see if modern games could be played this way?
The host looks like a cross between Bill Gates and a seventies employee in an accounting firm wearing a Mario cosplay. It's awesome On that note I think there was something similar in france too, but it wasn't with an actual console, I don't know how they did it but it was played in a similar fashion. I think the way it worked was more like a Dragons' Lair laserdisc type thing, where they had a fmv running and button presses on the phone acted like actions on the screen. You can see it for yourself here : Honestly it's pretty damn terrible, yet hilarious in hindsight.
The players were indeed all terrible, but I remember reading an interview of someone who mentioned at one point being a contestant on this, and he said that the lag was awful. There were rumors too that it was on purpose to keep people from reaching too far in the game which sounds a little paranoid honestly but I don't know. And there was not only a C64 game, I remember there were at least two PS1 games, and probably more. That always baffled me because I couldn't get past the fact that the character is anything but charismatic and likeable.
That puzzled me a bit too when I watched the above Mario video until I understood that they were timed. It's really just farming for points... But on the Hugo thing if I'm correct the objective was to get as far as possible in the game (which is what I was talking about).
