Iantorno, M. (2025). Satellite archaeologies: restoring the Satellaview’s abandoned software ecosystem. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 1–24.  

Abstract

Developed by Nintendo and the satellite broadcasting company St.GIGA, the Satellaview once allowed Super Famicom users to access a rotating collection of games, digital magazines, and other content using a satellite dish. Due to its broadcast distribution model and rewritable memory packs, much of the Satellaview’s software library appears lost in the aether. In this article, Michael Iantorno discusses the methodological and epistemological challenges the Satellaview poses to platform studies and how “satellite archaeologists” have developed informal techniques to pry open the black box of the Satellaview and bring game preservation outside of formal institutions of memory.