I never had any of these back then, and I keep wondering what it would have been like to be all-in on these ecosystems. Especially Nintendo; gameboys with link cables, N64s with controller add-ons to insert your GB cartridges into, Super Nintendos with cartridges that add 3D hardware to your system, etc.
Closest thing is that a friend of mine had a NES and a cartridge with 365 games on it (in a menu with snails crawling towards each other), two controllers and the gun.
Modular stuff is fun, especially if it looks nice on a shelf, but it becomes a nuisance when your shelf runs out of room, or when you upgrade a system and you either have to re-buy some gear or find that's there's no real replacement.
For example, after buying an N64, would you keep your SNES around just for your Super Gameboy?
I was still playing my NES games when I had my SNES, and I guess I stopped playing once I got the N64, same for the SNES/N64.
Actually I disliked the first gen 3d consoles, the lack of details and colors in textures was a large turn off, I never really understood indianapolis 500 on DOS, couldn't stand superfx games and all these games had such graphics.
It was even crazier in Japan and to this day I don't quite understand how their 90s- era "videogame sent over television" and "videogame sent over ancient cell network" features and dongles worked. I'm trying to remember the names of these features exactly but can't, I just know that it was like, the NES or SNES you could "download" games onto somehow from a TV signal, and then the GB or perhaps GBA had something similar if you connected your console to your phone.
The first thing to consider is that the island nation of Japan is geographically small. Small enough that a single satellite could serve the whole island with broadcast signal for satellite television.
Then once you accept this, it becomes easier to consider a company buying bandwidth on that satellite for its own purposes.
That this purpose is a modem on a Super Famicom, that receives game data from the broadcast satellite, and that at certain specific moments you can play the game with a voice track being blasted in real time by the broadcast satellite becomes conceivable.
A lot of those early "videogames over broadcast medium" worked by having all the games being broadcasted all the time in a loop and the decoder (typically a fat "cartridge" with a modem embedded) waiting until the chosen game was broadcast and then caching that broadcast into some (battery-backed?) RAM or rewritable ROM.
It was purely one-way communication, so payment and access control (if any) was handled locally by the cartridge. As far as I know none of those supported per-game payment, so the payment was included in the purchase/rental price of the cartridge/modem.
Closest thing is that a friend of mine had a NES and a cartridge with 365 games on it (in a menu with snails crawling towards each other), two controllers and the gun.