Satellaview

Nintendo's satellite modem for the Super Famicom, live-broadcast Zelda and F-Zero from a Tokyo radio station, off air in 2000

Shut down
19902026

The Satellaview was a satellite modem add-on for the Super Famicom, released by Nintendo in Japan on 23 April 1995 for 18,000 yen. Through the BS-X application cartridge it received games, magazines and data broadcast by the satellite radio station St.GIGA, including BS Zelda, BS F-Zero Grand Prix and BS Super Mario USA, some of them SoundLink titles played in real time to a live voice track. Nintendo withdrew in 1999 and St.GIGA ended broadcasts on 30 June 2000.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1995
  2. 23 April 1995 Launch
    Satellaview launches in Japan

    18,000 yen by mail order; BS-X cartridge and 8-megabit memory pack.

  3. 6 August 1995 Feature
    BS Zelda no Densetsu

    Four weekly episodes with a live voice track.

  4. 1996
  5. 23 June 1996 other
    Nintendo 64 launches

    Nintendo's attention moves on.

  6. 1999
  7. 31 March 1999 Decline
    Nintendo withdraws from the service

    St.GIGA continues with reruns.

  8. 2000
  9. 30 June 2000 Shutdown
    St.GIGA ends Satellaview broadcasts

    The channel goes dark.

The site through time

Browse nintendo.co.jp as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Nintendo 1995–1999 Founded Hardware and games by Nintendo; broadcasts by St.GIGA
St.GIGA 1999–2000 other Continued reruns alone after Nintendo withdrew; a WOWOW subsidiary

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Downloads ▲ 100,000 1997 Estimated Approximate hardware sales; about 116,000 subscribers at peak

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: St.GIGA, the satellite radio station that carried the Satellaview broadcasts, ended them on 30 June 2000. Nintendo had stopped producing new content and pulled out of the partnership in 1999 as its attention went to the Nintendo 64 and St.GIGA's finances collapsed; the last year was reruns. Because most games were broadcast on a schedule and stored on a rewritable memory pack, many of them, and all of the live SoundLink audio, are now lost or survive only in fan dumps.

Our analysis: The Satellaview was a decade ahead of its market: downloadable games, timed live events with a voice track, magazines and news pushed to a console over satellite in 1995. It was also a Japan-only accessory for a console that Nintendo was about to replace, sold to about a hundred thousand people, dependent on a small radio broadcaster that could not carry it, and built around a schedule, so a game you missed was gone. Everything it tried came back later, on the internet, with servers that could be archived.

History [edit]

Games from the sky

Nintendo announced the Satellaview in 1994 as a partnership with St.GIGA, a Tokyo satellite radio subsidiary of WOWOW, and released it in Japan on 23 April 1995: a receiver unit that fitted under the Super Famicom, an 8-megabit rewritable memory pack and the BS-X cartridge, "The Story of the Town Whose Name Was Stolen", a small town you walked around to reach the download shop, the magazine stand and the broadcast schedule. Subscribers needed a BS satellite dish and tuner, and the hardware cost 18,000 yen by mail order.

What came down was remarkable for 1995: the Satellaview versions of Zelda (BS Zelda no Densetsu, a remixed original Zelda broadcast in four weekly episodes from 6 August 1995, with a live voice-acted soundtrack), BS Super Mario USA, BS F-Zero Grand Prix, Kirby, Wario, Fire Emblem chapters, Radical Dreamers, Dragon Quest scenarios, plus magazines, news, weather, horoscopes and free rebroadcasts of Famicom classics. SoundLink games ran to a live studio broadcast at a set time, so players across Japan played the same hour together and heard the same announcer. Roughly 100,000 units were sold and about 116,000 subscribers signed up.

Off air

The Nintendo 64 arrived in June 1996 and Nintendo's interest faded; new content slowed through 1997 and 1998, the last new SoundLink broadcasts came in 1999, and Nintendo formally withdrew from the service on 31 March 1999. St.GIGA, in financial trouble, kept the channel running with reruns and Nintendo-free content for another year and ended Satellaview broadcasts on 30 June 2000. Because the games lived on flash memory packs and the audio only in the broadcast, much of the catalogue survives only through the memory packs collectors have dumped since; the voice tracks are largely gone. Fan projects have translated and restored BS Zelda and a handful of others.

The domain today

nintendo.co.jp is Nintendo's Japanese site; the Satellaview appears in its hardware history pages.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Nintendo's expansion ports: Satellaview Nintendo World Report 27 October 2011 [archived]
  2. The incredible story of Satellaview, Nintendo's satellite modem SNES add-on Time Extension 23 April 2023 [archived]
  3. Nintendo Satellaview turns 30 on April 23 TechEBlog 20 April 2025 [archived]
  4. Fans translate rare Japanese Zelda game, now everyone can play it Kotaku 13 October 2016 [archived]
  5. Cooly Skunk: the cross-gen console game recovered from oblivion Eurogamer (Digital Foundry) 31 May 2020 [archived]
  6. What becomes of the unplayable games? Video Games Chronicle 19 April 2020 [archived]

Last verified: 16 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).