On Sunday February 25th of 1996, McFoxx received the Sega Genesis XBAND Modem as a gift from his mother for his 12th birthday after he spotted it on sale for $12 inside a Kay•Bee Toys store at the local Stonewood Mall. The following year, being one of the only two "hardcore gamers" in a particular 7th grade Language Arts class, he and Madvin joined forces on a collaborative project to create a magazine.

Despite being neighbors their whole lives with similar hobbies, this was only the first time they interacted with one another, as being part of separate gaming "cliques" at school (Sega vs Nintendo) kept them apart. Once work began on the magazine project, the friendship solidified quickly and McFoxx introduced Madvin to the XBAND experience. Though relegated at first as a uniquely SEGA experience, as luck would have it, only a few months later Catapult Entertainment (the makers of XBAND) advertised a promotion in the GamePro magazine that McFoxx was subscribed to. The ad included a voucher for a free modem for the console of your choosing. Strictly a Nintendo Power subscriber at the time, Madvin was given the voucher to send out for a Super Nintendo XBAND Modem.

In 1996, owning a PC would not be a thing for McFoxx for about another two years, and XBAND was his introduction to e-mail, an online community of kindred folk, and news delivered digitally through the creative use of the four player profiles allotted to each modem. This ignited a passion of all things online for him, and he began frequently visiting a middle school friend that was subscribed to America Online. This was to get a taste for the world wide web, and for tinkering with creating websites through the use of WYSIWYG programs.

As far as gaming on the XBAND went, McFoxx and Madvin sampled as much as they could with a variety of games on the network. The competition was fierce, particularly on Killer Instinct. Each found the most success on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo with the original Mortal Kombat and DOOM, respectively. It was a time of showing off the service to friends, and hearing relatives through the TV speakers as they interrupted connections by picking up the phone mid-game.

With the announcement that the service would be ending in only a month's time, McFoxx was not focused so much on gaming. Rather, those last days were spent soaking in all the saved messages and news stories, along with exchanging phone numbers and taking down email addresses of friends made on XBAND. With the death of online gaming on the 16-Bit generation, it was time to move on to 32-Bits (and beyond).

It was during this time that the Sega Saturn shined for couch co-op and competitive gaming, due to the superior D-Pad it had versus the original Playstation (this was before analogue sticks were common), and the acquisition of the multi-tap adapter by McFoxx. Later titles in the Playstation library were able to scratch the multiplayer itch. With the "Ultra 64" looming on the horizon, magazines of the day began circulating rumors about the XBAND service making a comeback on Sega's 32-Bit system and Nintendo's upcoming 64-Bit machine.

The Nintendo 64 was a multiplayer gaming godsend for the small neighborhood of gamers all within walking distance of each other. With the 4 controller ports straight out of the box, very soon friends, neighbors, and siblings would begin taking part in the split screen mayhem Nintendo's system offered. Madvin became the host for many of these meetups. During this same time, the group ventured together on a "pocket monster" game before it was a household name, with link cable battles and trades being commonplace. It was at this point that a mutual high school friend of McFoxx and Madvin joined the fold. Skeptical at first to the point of mocking the new GameBoy property, it soon exploded as a phenomenon and Snoogans made a dramatic u-turn, going all-in on catching them all. There were also some infamous rounds of GoldenEye that were had between the triumvirate, but these are not spoken of.

In the end, the rumors of XBAND making a comeback were only half-realized. Though it did return in some limited capacity on the Sega Saturn via the NetLink modem, unfortunately the price point of $199 was much too steep for McFoxx to be able to use in it's heyday, and only acquired one as an adult long after it was defunct. The service never appeared on the N64 or PS1. Catapult (and by extension XBAND) were acquired by MPath Interactive, which provided a similar service on PC called MPlayer. For McFoxx, this seemed like the place to chase the XBAND experience.


Madvin was the first to introduce the group to the world of PC gaming, and before too long McFoxx was able to get his hands on a PC as well. Though they were able to experience MPlayer and other similar services, novel as they were, they just couldn't reproduce that XBAND-vibe. Even the better subscription-based iterations seemed lacking. Then, a hack-and-slash demon-slaying Action RPG by Blizzard came as a revelation: it's own self-contained community of in-game chat rooms filled with players, able to communicate and play with each other absolutely free of charge. It was not long before Blizzard struck lightning again with a sci-fi RTS game that again offered multiplayer gaming and chat rooms all absolutely free. This era came to a close with Bioware's release of an RPG based on the Dungeons & Dragons property that allowed people to play the single-player story with friends over the internet, which McFoxx and Madvin took advantage of. This was a sign of things to come for the next Age.