Bring Back The Kiosk

If you were to walk into a GameStop today, you might find the platform choices deeply lacking. Certainly you could find games for the latest consoles from Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, but what about Windows? Mac? Linux? The previous generation of systems from the console companies too? How about the Nintendo 3DS, the Wii or even the Sega Genesis?

Over on GameStop’s website, you can buy games for nearly every console released in the US since the mid-’80s. But good luck picking up a copy of Wii U Fit or Link’s Awakening in an actual store.

Keeping physical products in stock is hard, and harder still when you have to support so many platforms. Yet, the majority of the consoles sold since the mid-’90s are disc-based, supporting CDs, DVDs, or Blu-ray discs. Even Nintendo’s flirtation with discs have some grounding in standards: The GameCube uses mini-DVDs while the Wii and Wii U use a format based on DVD and Blu-ray respectively.

Given that these formats are standards-based, why couldn’t GameStop just create discs on demand, with the help of a digital kiosk? Not only could GameStop support the various PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo disc formats, such an approach could support older games, too. Imagine: The store could just burn a 3DO, Jaguar CD, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, or Dreamcast game, whenever you wanted? (And the publishers get paid?!?) Take this a step further and license these kiosks to independent retailers too, and you’d have a hell of a system that would surely be attractive to many game publishers. Figuring out who owns the rights to many of the older games would surely be the harder part.

When I was growing up in the early 1990s in the UK, we had a similar problem. Consoles hadn’t really taken off yet, and home computers were the norm for gaming. The Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64 were all still commercially viable. MS-DOS was starting to see some releases, and even the MSX was a going concern too. As an Amstrad CPC owner in this era, it was often hard enough to find games on cassette. But if you wanted games on Amstrad’s not-quite-proprietary 3-inch disc format, you were out of luck. At the same, the image files for these games are relatively small, as anyone with access to an emulator can attest. The solution? Supply the image files on CD-ROMs to the stores, and duplicate games at the point of sale. Want a copy of Treasure Island Dizzy for your Amstrad CPC on 3-inch disc? No problem.

Enter Software on Demand Ltd, a company out of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire who created the EDOS system. The Electronic Distribution of Software platform leaned on a giant, hulking IBM PC clone with a case that included multiple floppy disk drives, a pair of caddy-loading CD-ROM drives and, in the middle, a high speed cassette recorder. It was capable of copying software from all of these platforms and others, including MacOS.

From their own sales catalog: “Electronic Distribution of Software is a new way to buy games software. EDOS stores are provided with this special equipment, which permits them to duplicate games for you on the spot.”

More than 20 companies distributed games through the EDOS system, based on a catalog from 1991. The brands were pretty well-known to UK gamers of the era, including Alternative Software, Codemasters, Titus, and Ocean Software, along with some up-and-coming software houses.

(The scheme might remind some gaming fans of Nintendo’s own attempts to build a kiosk-based platform in Japan with the Famicom Disk System, but one major difference was that the EDOS system was cross-platform. Nintendo Japan later brought the basic idea to the Super Famicom and Game Boy with its Nintendo Power cartridge-copying service. By the way, did you know that there’s a Game Boy cartridge with a Super NES game on it?)

At the center of the scheme, and driving its interest, was the British retailer John Menzies.

Formed in 1833 as a bookseller in Edinburgh, John Menzies had a significant retail presence throughout the UK and especially in Scotland. (Case in point: If you’ve seen the movie Trainspotting, the opening shot has the lead characters running from a Menzies store on Princes Street, having just robbed it.)

While the retail outlets would eventually merge with rival WHSmith in the late ’90s, the company was known for supplying independent newsagents with magazines and newspapers. Given all that, it’s not hard to see why they thought they could have some success with this endeavor too.

One clear benefit of the EDOS approach? It was designed to make things as easy for the stores as possible. It seems a lot of care was put into the duplication process by the company to reduce the number of returns too, with each duplication verified by the machine and self tests running on each of the duplication drives daily.

In the end, the story of EDOS is a pretty compelling what-if story of a company with a clever idea that perhaps was a few years too early. With the advent of games on CD-ROM just around the corner the system itself would need greater storage to store the images, but as gaming evolved, that seems increasingly possible. With dual-layer Blu-ray discs capable of storing around 50 gigabytes each, it’s possible this could have kept up with the increasing size of games as well.

Maybe Valve’s next piece of hardware can be a 3-inch disc drive for the Steam Machine?