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In the videogame field, the 1990s was a time of technological innovation. The arrival of the cd-rom in the homes, allowing a gain of data on an optical medium, coupled with increasingly powerful and complex hardware, made it possible to overcome certain technical limitations faced by video game developers. Although still risky and in its infancy, these new wonders, which hinted at a possible good in the future, had difficulty carving out a place for itself in the homes of the general public. The reason for this was a relatively high price, which dampened the enthusiasm of the players of this period and especially their parents... Having just reached the 16-bit generation, the console market was not yet ready to publicly democratize access to the latest emerging technologies.

One can still remember the Sega CD / Mega CD sowing-failures, addons that are tempting on paper but disappointing in the end, especially because of the limitation linked to the transfer speed, depending on the Megadrive's memory bus. Ignoring these design errors, a great name in the arcade, better known as Taito, made the decision to launch into the home console market, with the intention of offering an avant-garde machine. His name: The Wowow.

## A revolutionary vision
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With its success and reputation in the industry, Taito has a solid experience in the field of hardware, since the studio designs each of its games around dedicated and built from scratch, more commonly known as PCB. At that time, the arcade was a technological showcase in the middle, far surpassing what could be found on domestic appliances. It was with this in mind that Taito began a partnership with ASCII (originating the MSX standard) as well as with JSB, a company specialising in satellite broadcasting. Yes, you read it right! The Taito Wowow's ambition was to offer a kind of early dematerialization of games, the prototype offering an RJ45 port allowing access to servers via satellite link. In addition to that, the console offered a system built around a Motorolla 68000 processor at 12Mhz and a CD player! Unveiled during the Tokyo Toy Fair in 1992, the announcement was sensational, before falling into oblivion some time later...

Because in front of the magnitude of the task and faced with excessive ambitions, Taito had to resign himself to abandon the project. Several technical problems, including the lack of ram to store a game in house, discouraged the designers. Faced with so many difficulties, the Wowov quickly fell into oblivion. According to an interview with Yukiharu Sambe, the main instigator of the project, he said :

> We had two reasons to suspend this project. One: Data transferring speed was not enough and many error correction packets eat up these precious data speed. User should wait more than several minutes to download one small game. And if we try to broadcast several games at the same time, the download time needs more time. Second: At the beginning, JSB intended to combine game hardware in the home satellite receiver. However, memory was expensive and all combined receiver made the cost estimation very high. 5 years later, Nintendo absorbed satellite music company ‘St.GIGA’ and started their satellite download business in 1995. The data stream was almost same structure that we designed. Nintendo use their game console with special satellite game equipment, however, Nintendo did not make good success on this business. They had similar difficulties that we encountered before.

Source : https://www.unseen64.net/2015/08/10/interview-taito-wowow-console/

## It's not lost for everyone
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Still it is that, as stated in this interview, Nintendo took advantage of the bargain to realize and design his famous Satellaview, a few years later, on the ashes of the Wowow. Far too far ahead of its time, this machine still arouses fantasies but also questions from the most experienced amateurs. What would have happened if the project had been completed ? Would we have experienced a video game evolution totally different from the one we have all experienced so far ?