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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."
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...
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.