Did you have the X-band online modem for either SNES or Genesis when you were younger? I never had that, but I remember seeing the commercial for it for SNES and Genesis (which I will post below).
During 1994 when it first came out, you could play certain SNES and Genesis games online using X-band (Madden being one of them). I WISH I had this when I was younger (would have been awesome to play games like Madden and Mortal Kombat on Genesis online), but my parents didn't get me an X-band..... most parents didn't buy this for their kids since this thing didn't sell well (a lot of people didn't understand the concept of online gaming at the time, despite this commercial explaining it very well):
I remember reading about this in magazines at the time during late 1994 or so. Yeah, I didn't understand what the internet or online gaming was at the time (despite the magazines attempting to explain it), so I ignored the X-band. If I knew what online gaming did at the time, I probably would have bugged my parents to buy me one of these. Also, I don't remember ever seeing that commercial for X-band on TV, but that is a cool commercial.
Sega supported the X-band A LOT more than Nintendo (which comes at no surprise since Sega had online multiplayer for a few of it's NetLink compatible games like Duke Nukem 3D for the Sega Saturn during the late 90's and Nintendo took FOREVER to accept online gaming). Sega also had the Sega channel, where you could download Sega Genesis games online and even Genesis game demos to try out the first levels of certain games:
