You could go up against a specific person on your Players List (there was room for 10 people), or you could be matched to a random opponent either locally or Nationwide if you paid for the premium service.
Skytel! haha Those hacked voice mail boxes were great! I got a ton of them from some dude out in San Fran named A Warriors Dream.
And it was fun recording the tone dialing, translating the tones to numbers, and using the nationwide service to call each other on Xbandâs dime. Weâd have around 9 to 12 people on the line thanks to most people having 3-way calling. Good times.
yea i remember winning a prize for beating him when they had some monthly champions thing and he lost like 13 times in 2 hours or something
everyone said he had 2 snes and would just swap wins. i remember one week he had like 900 wins in madden (before everyone knew about the hit reset as youâre connecting to get more wins trick) because if you committed 4 penalties in a row youâd get an auto loss so he must of sat there for a week doing that
i had some stupid 11 year old kid name like moon jump but then i changed it to grail nbk even though i wasnât in their xband gang
xband almost got me and my friend killed too when we went to baltimore on a bus to hang out with some people we met playing doom/mario kart and didnât realize baltimore was a ghetto and not a place for 13 year old kids
i had the keyboard and sold it to some guy for $200 cause they only made like 100 of them a month before they went out of business. good times
free long distance phone calls too recording the # and playing it back into a skytel pager. think thatâs one of the reasons they went out of business
Haha! Thatâs crazy! I knew some guys from Westminster, MD. Back then we were feuding (x-mail bombs, calling their house collect to cause lag or disconnections during their games, etc), but now we get along just fine. Xband beefs were hilarious.
Man, I still regret not playing on xband back then. I donât know why I never hooked that up :sad:
xband beef was hardcore. fools were out to kill eachother. before all this keyboard/internet commando shit tookover.
man i know i had my fair share.
gotta love the xband clans that were made. i was only in one clan tho, during my time on xband. didnt need another one, we were too strong in KI. (U*D) all day, until virus left and it went to crap. But thats when xband was coming to an end. while it seemed like other clans grew and fell weekly. NBK lasting the longest of all of them.
rsigley: i remember lord gamegod raping the shit out of magnus zhor during that âbeat a proâ contest or whatever it was that xband held. where you log on at a specific time and you randomly get paired up with him. beat the fuck down!
haha good times
It makes perfect sense! Magnus Zhor has a 10 minute video of his Xband rankings, but not one second shows any of his actual game play. LOL
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Hey, did any of you MK players play against some guys from NYC in a group called P.I.? Finster, Negative Creep, Sheer Terror, and Death News. Those guys were some of the biggest characters I knew up on Xband, but I have no idea if they were any good at gaming.
some of them used to play umk3 on xbox live when it first came out and werenât that good.
all i remember though was they were decent in mk2 but they used mileena so not really hard to be good there
they used to have a funny website on geocities but it disappeared.
i was lucky enough that nyc was local to me so had tons of mk/ki competition locally and on genesis tons of nhl/madden/sf
i remember one time too my friend beat some good guy on nationwide, forget who. does the infinite win trick like 90 times to get his ranking super high and they ended up charging him 450 nation wide minutes [what was it $3.95 for 60 minutes? i forget] for his 5 minute match haha
Oh man, I was just going to post in the regional thread if anyone from NYC or Long Island used XBand. I was wondering if I could track anyone down from when I played Mortal Kombat 2 back then. When I was 12. And thought the name âCoolKid11â or something was a good idea.
Goodness, was I an entertainingly scrubby scrub.
Anyways Xband411 (also thanks for keeping a lot of this information alive), I never heard of any of those names, but Iâm also not sure if NYC matches would have been considered local at the time.
This is really interesting to me. I had no idea such a service existed back then and if I knew Iâd probably be hopelessly addicted
funny side note about that magnus character - if you look at his youtube channel heâs a furry with fursuit and allâŚweird
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also i dunno if anyone still buys video games, but if you want to play super famicon games on snes xband acts as a converter for some reason.
since the xband was always plugged in ]just flick the switch up and play game normally] and game went on top we didnât even realize you couldnât play famicom games on snes until we took it to a friends house one day
He plays on XBL. Canât remember which games, but i ran into him a while back.
Itâs because Nintendo used only physical methods for region restrictions back then. When you try to put a jap SNES or N64 game into a US system it wonât fit due to the different grooves on the jap cart. Same deal for trying to play US SNES games on jap systems. Game Genie also could be used as a pass-through workaround if I remember right.
Man, you ainât kidding. Remember Mindboggle Arcade? (lol good times man) Anywho⌠I think I was in the 8th grade at this time. Some guy with long hair, all black clothes, rocker type⌠walks in with a baseball bat and confonts some other guy. Asking if heâs DeathRipper84 or something like that. Asks him why he sent him a message telling him to âfuck offâ. (and itâs clear from the âconversationâ that he has been sending other harassing messages) Waves the bat in his face. Guy was about to go to town on this poor kid. And I mean that. It really was just a kid. They person being confronted was about 12 years old. lol
I remember a cop showing up. Angry rocker was arrested. And then the kids dad yelling at him, telling him thatâs not why he bought him the âinâtendoâ. Also told the kid he was grounded, and that he was throwing his âinâtendoâ into the garbage as soon as they got home.
I wish I knew how angry rocker knew this kid was gonna be at the mall. I assume the kid told him, but just doesnât seem likely since he was going to be with his parents. Or maybe that was more the reason to do it? Figured the guy wouldnât do anything since his parents would be present? Who knows.
What I do know though, is that I learned âthe innernetz was serious bidness!!1!1!â before I even knew what the internet really was. lol When his dad said âinâtendoâ, I assumed he meant ânintendoâ. So from there I assumed Xband. It was confirmed when the cops were taking statements, and the kids dad tells the cop that his son apparently sent the guy messages that made him mad through Xband. Cop asks, âwhatâs Xband?â ⌠donât remember much after that, since I was pretty much leaving at that point. So many awesome memories in that place.
Jive Out!
ah that makes sense. i almost wish it didnât because the famicon game was some dbz fighting game my friend was obsessed with (he used to pay $30 to import 10th generation vhs tapes of 4 episodes of dbz in the mid 90s before it was popular) and every time we hung out he wanted to play the fighting game non stop and i hated it ha
I found a blog written by David Ashley, who was a game cracker for Xband/Catapult back in 1995. Heâs the guy who hacked SSF2 to make it playable via Xband. He wrote a post about his days at Xband if anyone cares to read it:
David Ashley: Some XBAND Recollections
The best part was when he mentions how there was a bug in SSF2 that was being exploited when it first became playable on Xband:
this thread is awesome
hey look, im on there a couple times for Ki. 
Now i know im old 
This entire thread was a good read, especially the âXband beefâ part. :lol:
I had no idea the 16 bit console era had an online service, Iâve heard of Gameboys being able to connect to a phone so you can play Pokemon against someone else but not this. And by watching the vids, it was amazing how it all played out, it certainly mustâve been considered advanced at its time.
Itâs also cool how some of the top players in the lists are here in SRK right now, you guys must be in your late 20s/early 30s?