Lost Sega Channel exclusive Genesis/Mega-Drive games “The Chessmaster” and “Klondike Solitaire” discovered and dumped online

We got more long lost Sega Channel material for ya. Thanks to the hacking community on our very own sister website Sonic Retro, a new data disc of Sega Channel material has been found and uploaded to the internet. This was an archive of the game selection made available on the service in September, 1996, which includes a variety of Genesis/Mega-Drive games many of us are already familiar with, but most importantly, it includes two exclusive games that were never released anywhere else: The Chessmaster and Klondike Solitaire. News of this discovery was brought to our attention by famed romhacker and Sega Channel enthusiast Billy Time Games, who had very recently preserved someone else’s video tapes of the Sega Channel experience.

This is a great time for lost Sega Channel media returning for the first time in decades, so if you’re as excited as we are, log in through the break and find out more about these discoveries.

Here’s a brief rundown on the games. First is The Chessmaster. This is a virtual game of Chess developed by Mindscape. They had developed several versions of The Chessmaster for a variety of platforms in the mid to late 90’s, including Windows, PlayStation, and Game Boy Color, but this Genesis version was only released via the Sega Channel. There are no physical versions of this game released to retail anywhere in the world, making it a real treat for Sega fans, or at least the ones who really love and understand Chess. Here’s a video of the game below courtesy of Billy Time Games.

Klondike Solitaire is a digital recreation of the card game, which has existed for almost 150 years, but was popularized in 1990 by Microsoft’s own digital Solitaire game introduced in Windows 3.0 and featured in every version of Windows ever since. Klondike Solitaire on Genesis is a simple 1-player game where, in this case, it’s you against the computer. There isn’t much else to note of this version of Klondike Solitaire besides the fact that it was programmed by legendary video game programmer and co-founder of Activision, David Crane, someone you might be very familiar with if you have played the recent hit retro game collection Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration.

And because you’ve joined us beyond the break, we have an extra treat for you. Among the preserved material here was also a ROM of the September 1996 Sega Channel menu, which was previously never preserved since its original appearance during that timeframe. Billy Time Games has a video of that here and has released the ROM for this menu online for all to try in an emulator or a flash cartridge on real Genesis hardware. You can download the ROM file for yourself from this link.

If you’d like to download the Sega Channel archive featuring The Chessmaster and Klondike Solitaire for your digital rom collection, you can find those here in this Sonic Retro forum thread for Sega Channel discoveries. (6.sa.bin is The Chessmaster. 30.sa.bin is Klondike.) And be sure to check out the another recent Sega Channel discovery, where Garfield: The Lost Levels was found and shown off in a playable state.

Are you excited by all these Sega Channel discoveries? Were you a Sega Channel subscriber, and if so, do you remember playing either of these two lost games? Is there any other lost Sega Channel material you’re hoping to see again someday soon? Give us a shout in the comments below.

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