Satellaview

The Satellaview was an add-on piece of equipment for the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo gaming systems.

One could access the Satellaview service via the St. GIGA satellite station between 4:00-7:00 PM. The user was required to have a subscription to the St. GIGA station as well as a BS tuner in order to operate the Satellaview. During this time, a player could download and play games. The BS system broadcasted for 5 years, up until June 2000. A very large catalog of games previously released in cartridge format as well as a few new games was made available for download through the service. A deluxe package came with a rewritable 8-megabit memory card that plugged into a slot on the top of the boot cartridge. Without such a cartridge, the BS-X cartridge saves downloaded content to its 512 KB of built-in memory ".

A feature called SoundLink allowed the use of streaming music or voice clips (most famously used in BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets) while playing a game.

The Legend of Zelda games that were released were BS The Legend of Zelda, BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets, and a port of A Link to the Past.

Along with other and earlier game download services, the Satellaview service paved the way for modern downloadable content distribution, which allows the purchase and download of full retail games as well as original download-only titles, much as the Satellaview allowed.

Trivia

 * The first 6 dungeons in the first BS The Legend of Zelda quest are in the shape of a letter. When put together, they spell out S t. G I G A  (St. GIGA), the company that provided satellite service for the Satellaview. The other two Dungeons are in the shape of a Skull (Dungeon 7) and an Arrow pointing down (Dungeon 8)
 * Similarly, the Second Quest's dungeons spell "NiNtENDO".