In the 1970s, when home computers started to gain traction, internal storage was very expensive, so these computers were capable of using external storage, such as floppy disks or the far cheaper audio cassette. This follows a trend of computers using storage initially created for music, video etc. as generic data storage.
Since audio cassettes were already a common way to store and distribute data, including games, it was fairly simple to turn that same data into a radio signal. Nederlandse Omroep Stichting is a company which pioneered this technology, starting a radio show "Hobbyscoop" for transmitting data in the 1980s
By the end of the 1980s, increasingly powerful computers led to increasingly large data, and radio transmission became infeasible for distribution. However, the 1990s saw the rise of the internet, and the transition into the current State of the Art of distribution.
In the 1970s, gaming consoles typically had a small number of games built into them. This changed with the second generation of consoles in the late 70s, where cartridges were used to allow one console to play many different games
In the late 1980s, video rental companies like Blockbuster started to appear, also offering rentals of games. However, game rental mostly died with video rental and the increasing popularity of digital download in the late 2000s.
Starting from the mid 1980s, there were many experiments with non-cartirdge games, with attachments for existing consoles such as the Famicom Disk System, and consoles such as the Phillips CD-i. However, cartridges remained the standard until the Sony Playstation.
Along with storage experiments, there were also experiments such as the SatellaView (pictured right), which used a satellite modem to recieve data in a similar manner to television broadcasts.