Connecting a Sega Mega Drive to the Internet Without Connecting It to the Internet

A few weeks ago I launched MegaWord, a Wordle-inspired puzzle game built specifically for the Sega Mega Drive and Genesis.

You can play it on original hardware or through an emulator, but one of my favourite parts of the project actually lives outside the game: the online leaderboards.

The obvious problem is that a Mega Drive from the early 90s cannot simply send a score to a website.

I wanted to keep the original hardware completely untouched too. No Wi-Fi adapters, accounts or additional equipment. Just the console, the game and a controller.

The solution was surprisingly simple.

When you complete a timed game, an algorithm running on the Mega Drive’s Motorola 68000 processor (which was first released in 1979) takes your result and encodes it into a short string of characters.

You then enter the code at megawordhq.com, where a matching algorithm runs the process in reverse. It decodes the result, checks that everything adds up and adds the score to the global leaderboard.

In other words, the player becomes the network connection.

The console never goes online. The website never communicates with the cartridge. The code is the handshake between the two.

It is a deliberately low-tech solution, but that is what I like about it. Rather than forcing modern technology into the Mega Drive, it works within the limitations of the original hardware and lets the modern web handle the rest.

Sometimes the most satisfying part of building something is not overcoming a constraint.

It is finding a way to make the constraint part of the experience.

You can download MegaWord for free and try it on original hardware or an emulator at itch.io and view the global leaderboards at megawordhq.com.