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."

Comments

Jaguar!

[corebreech]

Not Apple Jaguar, but Atari Jaguar.

That was a bitching console, but too difficult to code for.

That said, it had Tempest 2000, for which the Jaguar version was simply breathtaking in places.

Aliens vs. Predator was excellent too.

Virtual Boy

[proj_2501]

I think the Virtual Boy's biggest flaw was that you had to mess up your neck to play it. A strap to attach it to your head would probably have worked better, and you could have played it in bed.

Some decent software and polygons instead of wireframes would have been nice too.

Lest weforget...

[bjohn]

The Article appears to pick on only a few of the more notable failures, but what about all the hyped, yet still-born console failures?

They neglected to mention Apple/Bandai's much lauded Pippin, the Atari Jaguar, and the mighty Indrema...

Perhaps they can return to this topic in six months and include the mysterious "Phantom."

Re:Sorry to troll, but..

[mrseigen]

Some of the import stuff wasn't bad, but I think the major reason why it died was because it was hard to code for, AFAIK.

Re:Sorry to troll, but..

[ille_pugil]

something along the lines of 7 different processors, and smp support made its programming a nightmare. (At least that's what I've read when rummaging around for programming docs).

These kinds of posts crack me up.

[DwarfGoanna]

This is just like any other platform bashing. Console, PC manufacturer, text editor =), whatever.

I plunked down for the Saturn shortly after launch, and was very happy with it. NiGHTS, Panzer Dragoon, Virtua Fighter 2, Sega Rally, perfect translations of the Street Fighter games, I could go on and on. What's that? You didnt like/play those games? Maybe thats why you liked the PS better. Consoles then, and now, are about the games....duh.

Re:3do

[10Ghz]

The 3DO was INNOVATIVE, not one of the biggest failures. Geeeze.

Maybe that's why it is one of the biggest failures? I mean, it had huge industry backing, the specs were impressive, the games looked GOOD, the media was all over it. It seemed that 3DO was about to take over entire console-business. And then... nothing happened. It just went away. It never got popular. With all those games, with all that money, with all that media-attention... Nothing.

To me, that makes 3DO one huge failure.

Re:$2500?

[pla]

But *somebody* must be buying those $400 video cards for PCs.

The "hardest-core" gamers, yes. But even reading the first-run numbers expected for the GeForce FX, *only* the most serious of gamers will spring for that. And for most people, even that will serve as an upgrade, rather than the entire $2500 system all at once.

I think the problem doesn't involve *no one* wanting to buy it, but *not enough* people. Perhaps the situation differed a bit 20 years ago, but today, any console with "only" a million units in the field after a year will fail miserably. Why? Not because the company can't pull *some* profit from the hard-core gamers who will pay almost anything for the best gear available. Rather, because very few 3rd party developers will sign on with them (for example, the Sega 32X the article mentioned - a decent product, with a reasonably large number of units sold, but Sega ended up having almost every title that ran on it as one of their own efforts).

Notes In Video Game History

[MBCook]

So many consoles, so many comments. Oh well, here is what I think of some things.

• Virtual Boy - I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I LOVED this system. The tennis game was great, and Mario Clash was great too. The pinball game really showed off the 3D. The red thing never realy bothered me, and I actually own two of these things (bought them both for $20 from a Blockbuster after the system failed). The biggest mistake they made was naming this thing "VirtualBoy." This made it sound like a GameBoy, and many people I know thought that it was meant to be a replacement to the GameBoy. The problem with this fact was... say it with me now... IT'S NOT PORTABLE. It's about as portable as a PSOne with a little LCD screen on it. This isn't something you can just slip in your pocket like a GameBoy. The other big mistake was that the head unit contained all the guts and so it was heavy and cumbersome. They should have put all the electronics in a little box that went in between the controller (which was quite nice, actualy) and the "display". Personally, I'd really love to see them re-release this. They could probably do color for a reasonable price (GameBoy Color type color, not GBA type) and make a great system because they could make it much smaller. I liked this system.
• Atari Jaguar - Why wasn't this on the list? I rented this thing too, and it sucked. First of all, if you think that the X-Box's origional controller was big (which it wasn't that bad) try this thing. It's like they took a "normal" controller, and stuck a calculator in the middle of it. Plus, the games... well... sucked. The only one I remember wasn't THAT bad. I think it was the pack in. The game was you in a spaceship, or something, that transformed, or something. The fact that they actually made addons (like the CD drive, and wasn't there a modem?) amazes me.
• 32X - Owned one of these too (bought from Toys 'r' Us for $50 after it bombed, great way to get stuff ;). The games varried. The only one I really liked I still own. It had you flying around in a spaceship in a little 3D polygonal universe (sorta like StarFox but not on rails and no planets). You could play with two players at once (one controlled the ship, the other the gun). It was actually a pretty good game. I also tried some of the 32XCD games, but I don't remember them. One of the big flaws with this thing was that the saturn was already announced (or at least rumored as the Dural or BlackBelt or whatever. Things always have cooler codenames than final names. Project Dolphin.) and many people wouldn't buy it because it wouldn't play Saturn games. If it had done that, it probably would have done quite well.
• 3DO - I always thought that it looked neat, and I heard it had a few great games. But the fact is when your 10 years old, you don't have $500 to drop on a video game machine. It did hang around for a LONG time though.
• CDI - To tell you the truth, I remember hearing of this, and seeing games in magazines. But I never saw a single one for sale, that I can remember. That's a great recipe for success. I also remember hearing it was expensive.
• Saturn - Two games I wanted to play. I wanted to play Nights (still waiting for a rerelease of that) and Panzer Dragoon (that game looked so amazing at the time.) Plus, the Saturn had all those cool "Theater of the Eye" commercials. Very cool. But of course, it was expensive as hell, the analog controller (when it finally came out for Nights) was weird (and fixed (somewhat) in the Dreamcast). Part of it's problem what that it was supposed to be terrible to develop for because of it's dual CPU nature. There were some good games, but let's face it, Sega has always had a hard time with consoles after the Genesis. The Saturn and Dreamcast didn't do too well (Dreamcast was good). I would have bought one of these if that 3D Sonic game that they previewed ever came out. The only Sonic game was that terrible racing game.
• Lynx - I never played one (it was supposed to be quite good) but I had a friend who thought it was amazing. I don't remember anything about it. I don't know why it failed.

There you have it.

Yeah but

[hikousen]

For all the point and sneer "ahh haaa! what a waste!" types out there:

Without these "dismal failures" there wouldn't be a Playstation 2 or Gamecube.

It's called trial and error, folks, and yes, it's important. Fact: The foundation for every success is a string of failures.

Hard to code for?

[microTodd]

How come so many people cite the reason the Saturn and Jaguar failed commercially was because "It was hard to code for"?

Meanwhile, many people talk about how the PlayStation2 is hard to code for, yet it continues to be a commercial success.

What's the difference here?

Personally, I think any developer who complains "Its hard to code for" is not a real programmer. Since when have you heard about someone giving up breaking an encryption or copy protection system because "Its too hard".

Re:Hard to code for?

[Chris Canfield]

Talk to developers. There are a lot of companies who gave up programming projects for the PS2 because the investment in programmers in both time to market and cash expenditure was significant. The PS2 has a tremendous installed userbase, which is why it is financially beneficial for many companies to program for it, but that benefit is offset by the resources necessary. If the PS2 didn't have a lot of hype behind it, and a userbase transfer from the PS1, it would be dead in the water. Why is the X-Box getting lots of exclusive titles from edgy developers? Because the PS2 was too hard to code for.

"Its hard to code for" is a perfectly valid reason to not do a project, both from a programmer perspective and from a business perspective. Any developer worth his salt knows when to walk away. Your programming talent shouldn't be wasted trying to figure out the obscurities of timing processor instructions to use the DSP as a co-processor in a non-threaded environment. For more information on wasted genius, look up the Game Developer's in-depth technical issue on fitting Resident Evil onto a N64 cartridge.

Re:Virtual Boy

[Anonvmous Coward]

"I do own a VB and about 6 games and it's really too bad that this project wasn't fully thought out."

It probably would have been a good idea for them to use yellow instead of red for the color. Even green might have been a better choice. Red was just hard for people to focus on. I'm not sure why their research landed them there.

There's a reason that monochrome monitors were never red.

Re: shareholders!

[Antity]

Shareholders are what brought at least one company I used to work for to bankruptcy. Once there were shares, they started to smell "big money", which started with telling all the employees on the very next full-company meeting that they can always be replaced, that the shareholders are now the uppermost important persons to please, customers came next, and then us.

Well, replacing year-long employees that know how the company was actually making money by Wallstreet junkies never seemed to be a good idea to me.

About one year later, there was nothing anymore to worry about.

You see, we're talking about a company that made real money before this IPO and shareholder shit. Sorry for being a bit angry, but shareholders are in no way more important than the people that work for a company, brought it up and have no choice but to see upper management start playing Bullshit Bingo.

I personally don't have any understanding about people buying shares of some company and not knowing (or not wanting to know but prefer to listen to quackers) about the risks. Shares are a game. Games are not where you should put your money if you REALLY need it. This only attracks all the sharks and destroys even more people's lifes that you never even heard about.

Re:Stupid business model

[Chris Canfield]

The really big problem in this space is the stupid business model of razor and blades. People won't pay an economic price for the console so they are sold below cost but tricked out so the vendor can recoup their costs selling overpriced games.

So anyone trying to sell a really innovative platform is going to end up charging way more than the market will bear.

I don't follow you here. Gillette gives away razor handles which cost them very little and yolk consumers to the tune of nearly $1 per blade (for dual-bladed designs), a full 100% markup above blades without handles.

Sony, Nintendo, et.al make hardware that they sell for little or no profit, but that they make back $5 licencing fee per game released. That brings a $45 dollar game to $50 dollars, or a markup of %10. Successful consoles are also self-subsidizing, as over their lifespan they transition from being loss-leaders to profitable items in and of themselves.

I don't see why you would say that anyone selling an innovative platform will do so at above what the market can bear, with the implication that they wouldn't be tricking the consumer into buying overpriced games? The PC market continues to exist, and despite a glut of options PC market prices aren't significantly lower than Console prices. They actually have a significantly higher TCO, if you factor the difference in price between the two platforms across the number of games for the platform you have purchased (On average, 10 for a console). 2,000 is too much for a console box. After the cost of the television, audio system, et.al, it isn't bad, but even computers are multi-purpose items. If you buy 20 games for a $2,000 system at $50 each, you have still spent $150 dollars per game. Those are NeoGeo prices, the amazing system that didn't have a shot in heck because they had solid-state cartridges comparable in size to CD's... in 92. You cannot sell a $2,000 gaming console, period. It wouldn't matter anyway, as the technology of that console would be within $400 reach in just 2 years after it was released. $2,000 is just too far up the curve to be worth it.

Consoles do not have a stupid business model. They have a very intelligent and market-driven model. Pippin, 3D0, Indrema, Computers, and Cell-Phone makers have all tried different models, with varying degrees of success, but none as successful as this, the "razor blade" model.

And so that you know, the glut of games for the 2600 which caused the horrible average quality and the great gaming crash of 83 was caused becase anyone who wanted to exploit gaming an the innocence of consumers could make a game for that system. From then on, Systems carried authentication chips which publishers had to not just buy access to, but had to submit their code for an extensive approval process. While there may be some pretty bad games released today, without this approval process it would be a wasteland of bad games.

-C

Re:3do

[Rayonic]

The Heroes of Might and Magic Series (3DO) is a damn good PC game now.. They are a great software house as well.

3DO is a *HORRIBLE* software house. These are the people responsible for the Army Men franchise, remember. Also all those lousy Might and Magic spinoffs (Warriors, Legends). Plus they drove the main Might and Magic series into mediocrity after reviving it with 6/7.

How they manage to maintain the excellent Heroes of Might and Magic series is beyond me, though I do notice that they shove out a lot of expansions for it.

Actually, the "Army Men: Air Attack" sub-series isn't bad either. 3DO still isn't a good developer, though.

The reason "Console X" wasn't included

[Schnapple]

People keep saying "how come 'Console X' wasn't included?" The answer is twofold - first, these are dismal console failures. Second, most consoles fail, so the failures of these particular consoles are more interesting.

The two laserdisc consoles were simply retarded. The Virtual Boy is famous since it was percieved Nintendo could do no wrong post-NES/SNES, so it stands as a fascinating example (I still have one to this day). The 32X stands out since it was dumb to come out with a 32-bit add-on, then ditch it promptly when your "real" 32-bit console came out. The 3D0 stands out since they went for the different business model and happened to be around when FMV games were the talk of the town.

But the Dreamcast didn't make it to this list, neither did the Saturn, since they weren't dismal failures. The Nintendo 64 didn't make it since it wasn't a failure at all - it just never did as good as the PSX and it's not as popular with adults (who *ahem* should be the readers of this site). The Jaguar was done in by management bungling, not because it was a "bad" console.

The main reason "Console X" didn't make it is because the story behind it wasn't interesting. A console that flopped because it just wasn't the best is boring. A console that flopped because of bad management is boring. A console that flopped because no one wanted to pay $2K for one game or because the designer hadn't been wrong yet, or because they tried to replicate VHS, that's interesting.