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Dismal Console Failures
Anonymous Howard writes "Shacknews' jason bergman has written an article that looks at some of the biggest failures in console gaming. It's a great read, and spotlights stuff like the Halcyon, a $2500 (!) laserdisc system with only two games and Nintendo's Virtual Boy, a stereoptic system that had red-on-black simulated 3D graphics."
DOnt know about anybody else, but after playing any game on the virtual boy, I developed a nasty headache. And it happened about 20 minutes in every time.
There was a Konami console I seem to remember that never made it past prototype. but was hyped beyond all belief with a power chair, foot controls etc.
The Commodore CDTV and Philips CDI were CD-ROM-based interactive players that popped up in the early 90s - both failed pretty badly, although the CDTV morphed into the CD32 which was mildly successful... before Commodore bit the dust.
I also seem to remember a C64-based console, and one by Amstrad called the GX4000, which was rubbish. Even the first wave of Neo-Geo boxes died a horrible death rather quickly, but I think that was down to price...
oods are that one of your eyes is stronger then the other and your weak eye objects to being forced to be used. This is common with all steroscopic display systems.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It was omitted from the list because it wasn't a DISMAL failure. It failed, sure, due to being tough to program for, because Jack Tramiel had no right running a company, and because all the Japanese console fanboys attacked it from the start (usually by straight out lying, such as claiming it wasn't really a 64-bit system, though the magazines were guilty of this too).
It didn't help that the inclusion of a 16-bit 68000 meant as a simple general purpose chip to do little things encouraged companies to port their 16-bit games to the system using mainly that chip without attempts to even improve the game. (Flashback, anyone?)
The existence of the 3DO at the same time, with it's $700 price-tag, compared to the $250 Jaguar, helped make the Jag look like the more viable of the two - which I believe it was.
I wonder what kind of games we might have seen if the system had survived long enough for programmers to push it to the limit - probably some impressive stuff. After all, T2K came out really darn quick, and it is still visually impressive in many ways. (Maybe that's just the extreme trippiness of the game...)
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
The most interesting thing about this article is what was left out and why. As someone who's been around consoles since the 1970's and owns more than 40(!) of them to this day (including the modern ones), I have to say I actually agree with his methodology. The Jaguar and Saturn both had a good chance at success, the TG-16 was actually a huge success in Japan, and in fact most of the systems considered "failures" here really weren't, in most ways other than the financial. The systems spotlighted in this article were just dismal and atrocious in pretty much every way - I don't even give the same props for the conception of some of these as the author does. How could a $700 console like the 3DO ever sound plausible to anyone? SNK tried the same thing with the Neo Geo AES, though at least they realized their system would never be mass-market despite having a built-in library of great arcade games - 3DO thought they could crack that $700 niche in a huge way from the ground up with all-new games. Stupid business decision, as all of these consoles were.
How bad does it have to be before it's dismal? The thing didn't have a chance coming out of the gate, 3DO or not.
it wouldn't be that hard to make a strap for it, i believe the tripod stand comes off easily.
check http://www.virtual-boy.org/images/headset.jpg, some guy did it already (no building instructions, just this photo).
Also, the SuperGrafx was never released domestically. It had six games (seven if you count the hybrid). The console sold for around $400 and the games were about 9800 yen ($110 at the time).
The PC-FX was essentially an NEC PC converted into a gaming console.
The Head Mounted Display Virtual Boy
That was really what it needed: to be head mounted. And it wasn't difficult to do. Seperating the system from the display was impossible due to what I assume was the timing (when I extended the wires the mirrors couldn't sync up). Fortunatly there was enough unneccessary crap that could be removed to lessen the weight enough to make it wearable.
I have many of the games and two systems (one is HMD now). I don't think console makers will take the plunge again though until little LCDs can display the quality of a full size LCD at a reasonable price.
With dirt cheap little LCD monitors comming out I don't think it's too far off. It's really the next logical step. I think Nintendo just took it too soon.
They should just have a dual video out for their next console and offer 3D glasses as an option. That would be nice. Trying to embed it all together is just a bad idea.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
One, was the Colecovision ADAM, the only system to commit data suicide every time it was turned on. Great concept, lousy implementation.
Two, the Vectrex game system. Brilliant platform, gave people that true arcade vector graphics feel, decent sound (considering this came out about the same time as the Colecovision), and an all in one package the size of a first gen Macintosh. Killed by low game variety and demand (it was a $150-200 game system, which, despite the fact the whole system came in one package, came in on the coattails of the 1970s recessions, when most parents were able to justify paying $20-$40 for a kids toy, but forget anything more).
Third: ISIX. The videogame platform that never came. This was an incredible console that required nothing more than a common VCR to deliver laserdisk'esque videogaming to the masses, using a frameshuffling method to allow multiple video game footage scenes to be displayed. I tried the system over a decade ago, from the wirewrapped prototypes. If Worlds of Wonder didn't tank, we would have seen this on the market, and it would have blown all other interactive media machines of the late 1980s out of the water.
Most of the games lived on, however, in rereleases such as Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and a few "Do your own music video" games that came later. Detach yourself from what you learned and paid for CD based games, and imagine how it would have been to get a game system that would rival them, just by hooking up the VCR you already had. That was it. Not that the games themselves were spectacular in CD media dependant world, but for the technology involved, it was leaps ahead.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Sometimes I wish you could edit your comments before they got moderated or replyed to, so you could fix this kinda thing. Oh well.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Wrong. I own two of these things and they are actually quite nice. There were a decent number of games. Here is a few of them:
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Aside from my nostalgia for this list (I had a 32X and Sega CD, and still have my Virtual Boy), I have to take sincere issue with the writer mentioning Captain Quazar as one of the decent games for the 3DO.
Captain Quazar? That game was crap! And I should know, I worked on it! The company that developed it, Cyclone Studios (bought by 3DO near the end of the game's production cycle) split their initial development efforts between that game and the best game made for the 3DO, Battlesport. Now THAT was a good game. Intuitive controls, fast action, quick rounds; everything I want in a round-robin multiplayer blast fest.
But no, Captain Quazar was just an ambitious mistake. I was a high-school student who played football with the company president, and they brought me in for some simple playtesting and initial level design. Captain Quazar's biggest problem was the fact that you could only get ammo by breaking open crates, but there wasn't enough RAM for them to include a melee weapon animation, so the only way to break crates was with the gun. If you ran out of your very limited ammo, you were screwed.
I heard it had a lot of bugs on release. I guess you can blame me for that, I was always playing Battlesport (or Tekken on the new import Playstation we had), and I never bothered to test Captain Quazar enough.
If what you say is true, only Ambidex'es could use this console without ills..
I am fully ambidextrous (dominant left-hand, but I can write perfectly legibly with my right as well -- it was great drawing graphs with both hands at the same time on the board at university, but that's OT ^_^) and I can state that, while nice to be, doesn't help one bit with Virtual Boy.
I do own a VB and about 6 games and it's really too bad that this project wasn't fully thought out. You had to take breaks every 20 minutes (forced by most games by a screen that comes out to tell you to go away for 10 minutes) and it seems that most people got serious headaches from any type of play, so they didn't even make it to the twenty minute mark.
I never experienced any ill effects (yet?) even though I played the truly brilliant and enjoyable Wario game for far too many hours on end; but then there were games like Red Alert (a plane shooter) where you could not tell if those lines approaching the screen were going to be a cave or a wall... parts like that were not so fun.
I packed it away a few years ago and, even though I would love to play Wario again, I don't have the courage to play it again lest I ruin my eyesight. I will hang onto my system though, perhaps it'll be an antique one day*
*please refrain from posting that it is an antique now. The type of antique I mean is one that is actually worth some decent cash = )
Uh, no. Not by a longshot. Nolan Bushnell is the shepherd behind Pong. Trip Hawkins is the founder of Electronic Arts.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Actually Colecovision was a huge hit when it came out, especially considering that the Atari 2600 and Intellivision were already well entrenched by the time of its arrival. There was a Colecovision 2, it was called Adam and it was Coleco's attempt at a home computer. It died a horrible death partly due to the great Video Game crash of '84 and partly because it sucked. Coleco invested very heavily in the Adam project, the Adam is probably the biggest reason that Coleco no longer exists.
Well, last I checked, Nintendo makes money on the GameCube.. And I'm sure volume and manufacturing advances have reduced the loss (if any) on the PS2.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Well, gee, what to say, except that hindsight is always 20/20. Armchair analysts of today haven't had the benefit of experiencing Trip's Reality Distortion Field(tm), where the idea of a $700.00 console actually seems fairly reasonable.
I have my own ideas as to why the 3DO platform failed. One is that the development system was hosted on NuBus-based Macintosh systems (this was in the 68K era, before Apple jumped entirely over to PowerPC). Despite screams of developers everywhere, no effort was made to port to the PC until very late. Further, once Apple announced they were abandoning NuBus in favor of PCI, no effort was made to convert the development hardware, forcing developers to find increasingly scarce (and slow) older Macs. And, despite the protestations of enthusiasts everywhere, the Mac was just agonizingly slow. (3DO developers should count themselves fortunate, however. Had the original system developers had their way, development would have been hosted on the Amiga. Commodore declared bankruptcy about six months before the 3DO was launched.)
The other big problem was that the development software and tools were, for the most part, utter $(EXPLETIVE) $(EXPLETIVE) $(EXPLETIVE) garbage. 3DODebug was little better than a program loader and dumb command terminal. Being in the system software group, I was fortunate in that I got to use a Philips logic analyzer to debug the thornier problems, rather than suffer with the never-did-work-right symbolic debugger. 3DOAnimator was a very crufty hack on top of EA's Studio32, and it would regularly crash, destroying all work. There were a couple of Photoshop plugins, but their use and enhancement was discouraged, as they were considered "stopgap" measures until 3DOAnimator came up to snuff (it never did). And the Norcroft C compiler sucked rocks. It generated bad code and kicked out stupid and incorrect warnings that couldn't be turned off. That so many titles were developed in this apalling environment is a tribute to the dedication and talent of all the developers we had.
At the end of it all, though, I don't really know why 3DO failed. We had more than enough money, and a charismatic leader who could convince people of the most astonishing things -- a formula for sure-fire success in anybody's book. Except ours.
Get me drunk sometime and I'll tell you all about Jurassic Park Interactive...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If you read the instruction manual that came with the unit, on seven out of the ten pages it warns you that it will make you nauseous. On two out of the remaining three it mentions that it may permanently damage the vision of small children. I think the last page was blank.
I played the Virtual boy for long enough that it no longer effects me, but it took a *long* time for that to happen. My roommate played the thing for an hour and was unable to do anything requiring depth perception for the rest of the day.
Part of the problem was that the system wasn't designed to display 3D polygons at its core... It's a slightly beefier Sprite-based Game Boy at heart. Warioland was one of the best games available, yet in many places that which was deeper in the background wouldn't parallax at all (despite the left-eye, right-eye separation), or the deeper image would parallax horizontally but not vertically. The botched effects could be quite, quite nauseating.
On the bright side, they had (and still have) an excellent 4D tetris, and perhaps the best boxing videogames to date (Teleroboxer). But with the assorted physical ills associated with playing, and the fact that depth never really effected gameplay, the system probably shouldn't have made it out of the prototype phase. Gumpei Yokoi, I salute your creativity and your energy, but the time is not right just yet.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a championship Teleroboxer to defend.
-C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
It may not have made the article because: A.) It was primarily sold in Japan, and B.) It was more of a premature "digital convergance" box than a pure game machine per se. A co-production with Bandai, the Pippin used a PowerPC 603 processor and a slimmed-down version of Apple OS.
a pple_bandai_pippin.html.
Information on this system is surprisingly hard to come by for a machine released in the mid-1990s, but here's an ancient page listing the specshttp://karx.narod.ru/tmegames/pippin.html.
And another link from a retrogaming site: http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Apple_Bandai_pippin/
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I think they just didn't consider it as fitting the catagory of console.
The Adam was an *extension* of the Colecovision that turned it into a peronal computer. I've known a number of Adam owners and not one ever considered it a games machine at all.
Now as a *personal computer*, boy was it a huge failure. Ate up all the Cabbage Patch Doll profits, and then some. They made them right down the road from me a piece and when the company went under they were giving them away like promotional pens.
Even for free they weren't really worth it, as far as I'm concerned, but believe it or not there are *still* people using these things. I know one of them. But they all seem to use it as dedicated WP machine more than anything else. The built in daisy wheel printer seems to be the main attraction.
Ironically it was the low quality of this printer that was one of the key factors in the Adam's failure.
Oh yeah, that and the built in *300* baud modem when 2400 was the norm.
The Adam was built to a price point using whatever *discontinued* stuff they could scrounge up from other manufacturers (the daisy wheel was a Smith-Corona) to slap it together. The public realized that and stayed away from it in the proverbial droves.
KFG
The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in Japan in 1983 as the Famicom.