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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."
you mean no one would pay for a 3d gaming system in which your back was broken hunched over to play?
seriously tho, i played the 3d tennis, it was pretty fun... with todays technology they could probly make some real full color 3d.
cept nintendo believes in 2 "color" non backlit crap, so fook em.
Perhaps I'm just showing my age, but perhaps a paragraph or two on the the Magnavox Odyssey and it's betaMax-like demise may be just the history we need so later failures learn the lesson before trying and dying on the lonely shelves of stores and warehouses.
--- have you healed your church website?
Impressive NEC managed avoided a mention here (except indirectly, within the Pioneer LaserActive. I guess the PC-FX was excluded because it never made it to our shores, but what about the SuperGrafx? There was also that PC Engine laptop which I believe weighed 20 pounds and sold for $15,000.
--
est modus in rebus
So anyone trying to sell a really innovative platform is going to end up charging way more than the market will bear.
BTW $2K is not too much in principle for a games system. I know plenty of people with MUCH more expensive systems. Mine cost $5K, only they are called PCs, not consoles. Mind you these days it would take a lot of dedication to go above $2K for a desktop machine. It took some doing to spend $5K two years ago. I paid $400 for the upgrade to my Son's machine a few months ago and he basically got a new machine with almost the same spec as mine.
When is Lara Croft comming out, thats what I want to know.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I'm sorry, but the 3DO was an AWESOME gaming system. It was the first system I ever played that had a pretty decent fighting game backed by WHITE ZOMBIE.. No, not synth music - THE REAL STUFF. This amazed me.
Return Fire was an awesome - awesome - awesome game as well. One of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game to date, and the strategy between 2 players in this game was amazing.
There was also that game-show-ish "Twisted", I believe it was. The presentation in that was excellent.
The 3DO was INNOVATIVE, not one of the biggest failures. Geeeze..
The Heroes of Might and Magic Series (3DO) is a damn good PC game now.. They are a great software house as well.
Long live Trip!
first of all 'cause it sucked major ass, and secondly because Atari **COULD** have had sales rights to the Nintendo Entertainment System instead.
Probably one of the biggest f-ups in the history of the electronic entertainment industry.
\/\/oobie
There is a great article in this month's edge magazine (in the UK) that goes through the history of the Saturn. You are indeed right, it was modified at the last minute to try and handle 3D as well, as with all these things tho ultimately you can put it down to bad management.
Bear in mind that the Saturn was incredibly popular in Japan where 2D games (mainly fighting games like Street fighter 2) continued to be extremely popular long after the 3D revolution took over the west. The edge article also talks about it's apeal to the retrogaming community now.
All in all, I dont think it was THAT bad. I kinda liked the little bugger. Sure the red on black was odd, but the effect was neat and it worked. The sound was pretty good too, since your ears were right by the speakers and it used true stereo sound with a fairly high sampling rate for the time.
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Maybe this is off topic, but who here remembers the Sega Channel?
I ditched more classes in high school then you could imagine, just so I could go to my buddy's place and game all day. Essentially, you downloaded ROMS off your cable TV feed. Sega was _really_ ahead of its time on this idea, to bad it didn't stick.
Paranoid tinfoil hat crowd say Y here, everyone else say N.
There is no way the Master System was a failure. When they came out everyone had one and there were more than 200 games for it. The Megadrive was no failure either and Sega still make good games for the arcade and other consoles.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
The pippen! Ruggedized ADB ports, 6 megs of ram! a slimmed down macos that only had one game that I've ever heard of (Marathon!! I loved that game).
... oooh! a shiny penny!
The specs for the pippen are available at this site
ah yes those heady days where apple was so distracted by any little
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
You'd be right, except for the fact that there were actually quite a few REALLY GOOD GAMES that came out for the Mega CD / Sega CD system. These include Lunar, Lunar 2, Shining Force CD, Sonic CD, and a few others.
It could have been a force to reckon with in the US if Sega had stayed away from the crappy FMV games, and Sony hadn't sabotoged it with the crappy "Make My Video" (or something like that) series. Sony used the Sega CD as an "experimental" platform. Sony was developing the Playstation at the same time they were releasing HORRIBLE titles for the Sega CD. They learned that "FMV games" were not the way to go as far as software was concerned, and did so at Sega's expense.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I also seem to remember a C64-based console
Indeed you do, and it was called the C64GS. You can read about it (and a whole host of other old consoles and computers) here.
There was essentially no point in buying a C64GS since it did nothing that an ordinary C64 couldn't do, and the GS didn't have a datasette port either, which cut out the vast amount of cassette-based games already available.
Who could forget the Neo Geo? The I don't know what turned people off more. The 500 dollar price tag on the system or the 200 dollar price tag on the games. Also I think the worst peripheral of all time need mentioning: The Nintendo Power Glove. The Wizard lied to me.
They turned out to be very sensitive to being fried by ESD (static electricity). He went on to buy several more units at surplus sales over the years to protect our investment in game cartridges.
One cool thing you could get for it was a BASIC cartridge. You used the cheap bouncy 15-button calculator keypad on the base unit to peck out programs for the 1K or so RAM. The cartridge itself had a 1/8-inch phono jack embedded in it so you could save programs on casette. It was a heavy cartridge; I'm guessing it had more logic in it than the base unit. I wrote my first lines of code on that thing.
Interesting fact is, the Jaguar was bound for higher success if the Tramiel family hadn't scared away every publisher that had been already been planning on porting some of their games over. I do recall that one of these was to be Mortal Kombat III, as I've seen screens and it was actually shaping up to be a killer game for the system. Also in the pipeline were a WebTV adapter (of which exactly 2 prototypes exist), the VR system (of which there are I think 3 prototypes, 1 fully functional with Missile Command 3D [to be the pack-in game]), and the 19.2k modem (of which there are I think 18 in circulation, all prototypes that work with the game Ultra Vortek via an in-game special code to access the dialer). Games like Tempest 2000 and Alien vs. Predator were fairly groundbreaking for the system, and the DOOM port was something of "the best port ever" according to Carmack at the time. You really have to pass by the chaff to see the "wheat" in the system. Battlesphere, which was released WAY after the Jaguar's demise, is one hell of a game, offering 16-Jaguar network capability, although it's incredibly expensive to obtain (check eBay). The GOLD version even adds a full development system to the mix. DOOM also enjoyed this networking capability, although buggy. Pretty far ahead in terms of networking consoles. Between this and the modem, it was the precursor to things like "XBox Live" you see today. Which brings me to another point - continued development. The Jaguar enjoys probably one of the best game release rates for a "dead" system in video game history, other than perhaps the Atari 2600. Telegames released I believe 4-5 games that had been finished but not released before the system was canned. 4Play (Battlesphere) released Battlesphere. Songbird Productions released another 5 games (and continue to obtain rights and release them after tweaking code/completing them). B&C Computervisions released several prototypes (both finished and unfinished) in the past year. There's further development going on, given the advent of CD-encryption bypasses included on some newer releases and a reliable way to encrypt the cartridges. Quite an amazing feat, really. ANd the fans are rabid as HELL.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
I was one of the developers of the Bally Arcade in 1977 - it had a Z-80, 4K of RAM, 4 built-in games, a 160x100 4 color frame buffer. It was way ahead of everything else. Eventually it included a BASIC programming cartridge with a audio tape interface.
It also cost about $300 back then - and the Midway Manufacturing Division of Bally had a 60% mortality rate in manufacturing. It did not help that several of the executives wanted the project to die.
Anyway - it lingered for a while and attracted a cult following. Eventually it was sold to a startup called Astrocade which failed a year or so later.
The lesson is that you can not make an open console that costs lots more than someone else doing the "loss leader - razor" model.
What I really regret was that I spent a evening chatting away with another designer at a GameTronics conference and basically invented many of the IP protection techniques that Nintendo and Sony later used to achieve market dominance and corporate control of game content. I wish I had patented them and not let anybody use them!
The Arcade firmware and architecture is open source now - we released all the specs to the world about 5 years ago. I wish someone would copy the "Gun Handle" joystick controller - it is about the only thing that does not cripple people who use them.
Colecovision is an interesting story.
The game was definitely the "hit" of the time, as far from a failure as the 2600 or Nintendo ever were.
The Coleco Adam, however, was a different story.
It included a Colecovision for games, and it also had a tape drive (!!!) with SuperColeco games on it! These were games played thru the Colecovision but were better because tapes could have more than a cartridge could. (I remember a Dragon's Lair variation.)
Anyway, that may have set the record for vaporware. There was a published pamphlet that listed dozens of games (Tunnels and Trolls, and Power Man or something similar, come to mind.) Almost none of them ever saw the tape drive of reality.
I actually bought a floppy drive for that system later on. You haven't lived until you've copied cartridges onto floppy!
Anyway, the Coleco Adam lost so much money for the Connecticut Leather Company that it absorbed the entire profits of Cabbage Patch Kids AND the company still went bankrupt!
Their business model was "we make all the games", still the prevailing philosophy at the time. Atari 2600 3rd party games were still viewed by companies as something that should be prevented because hey! Those games were supposed to be your company's profits! Thus a lack of titles began to rear its ugly head in the death knell of a product.
Yep, I bought one with every game published in the U.S., all new in box for $50 or something.
I think it is pretty fun for a 10 minute game fix. I've never gotten a headache and the 3D is very good - and well used in some games.
My favorites are Mario Clash, Galactic Pinball.
It looks nice sitting next to my Vectrex too.
Aliens Vs. Preditor was not amazing graphically by any means, but is one of the most memorable games I've ever played thanks to the heart-pounding ending. It also was just a really good game in general to play.
I think the only endings I've liked as much are Half-Life, and Out Of This World. There's probably at least a few more I liked as much that I've forgotten... but I Iguess if I've forgotten they were not quite as good!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Well I have both sitting right in front of me and the Xbox's is bigger and significantly heavier. If anything that tells you how big the Xbox's original controller is - the fact that a controller with a keypad on it could actually be smaller than the XB controller is pretty amazing (though pretty much all the keypad controllers I can think of - Intellivision, Colecovision, 5200, Jaguar to name a few - are smaller than the XB controller). It also tells you how we don't always remember things as they really were. Hindsight is not always 20/20 (though it's usually closer to that than foresight is).
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.
The CD-i was not specifically intended as a game system. I don't actually recall if the CD-i came before or after the 3DO, but it's possible Philips was trying to learn the lessons of 3DO. CD-i was marketed as a full entertainment set-top box capable of playing CD's, movies and of course games. The gaming capability of the system was not very good, though - not up to the standards of the systems it was "competing" with (though again, they were trying to go for the more casual gaming/home entertainment market). The CD-i is probably the main reason why gamers these days cringe whenever anyone uses the word "set-top box" or starts talking about doing things like adding movie playing or other functionality to game consoles.
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.
Yes, the Saturn has a complicated architecture, but then so does the PS2 and it doesn't seem to have mattered in its case. Developers will develop for a system no matter how hard it is if they believe it's viable. In fact, the Saturn was viable for a while, and was actually quite successful in Japan (like the TG-16) - which is why it doesn't belong on this list. Sega and other developers continued supporting the Saturn in Japan until after the Dreamcast's release.
There are so many misconceptions about the Saturn it's hard to even count. One of the biggest is that it was designed as a 2D system, with 3D added at the last minute in response to Sony's PSX announcement. This is refuted in section 15.2 of the Saturn hardware FAQ (which you can find at GameFAQs - sorry, they don't allow direct linking). The Saturn was always a 3D system, designed as a sort of home version of the Model 2 arcade board, but had its texture capabilities enhanced in response to Sony's PSX.
The Saturn does remain one of the best 2D systems ever, though (perhaps only the Neo Geo - with its processing power and unlimited, cartridge-based RAM beats it) and in fact had more VRAM and greater raw 3D polygon-pushing power than the PSX (>500,000 vs. ~360,000, by the published specs in the respective manuals). But as MS is trying to do this generation to Sony, Sony basically bought the market out from under Sega last generation. Only Sega ended up thinking it really worthwhile to learn how to program their own system, and games like Virtua Fighter 2 still look better than most anything ever released on the PSX. The Saturn really did have some great games - though most of them were first-party Sega titles.
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.
Several reasons - though it was a great system for its time. Big, backlit screen, excellent sound, great graphics for the day. But it was too big, ate batteries like nobody's business (the original version would get you 2 hours on 4 AA's if you were lucky), and was poorly marketed by Atari - who couldn't really do anything right by that point. It also didn't have a killer app like the competing GameBoy did (Tetris). In fact, there aren't that many good games for the Lynx in general, though the few that there are really make you wish the system would have stuck around for a while. Plus, for adult hands, the Lynx II (the version most people have) is really comfortable - even if it is still pretty big.
Also, my roommate's talking about Neo Geo, which I recall in name only. Any thoughts on that? I'm FASCINATED.
I would guess you're talking about the Neo Geo AES, the home version of their arcade hardware. These things still fetch a pretty penny on eBay, and with good reason. First of all, they sold for $700 initially just like the 3DO. Secondly, despite what a lot of people think the system is still being supported by developers and in fact has had one of the longest lifespans of any console (the last game I know of - Rage of the Dragons - was released in Sept. 2002. The system these days generally gets about 2-4 new games per year). SNK never intended this system to be mass-market - it was always a niche console. It was priced to be profitable right from the start, as were the games, which sold for $300 and up initially and still do. The idea was to generate buzz for the company's arcade business by getting systems into the hands of high-class buyers who would then spread word of mouth about the games and drive people to the arcades where average people could afford to play them - the exact opposite of what most other arcade publishers do today.
The reason for the high game prices? The games were literally the exact same games as you'd find in the arcade. Only the pin-outs of the carts were different (in fact, you can buy adapters now so that you can use the cheaper arcade carts in your home AES system). Lots and lots of RAM, and this back in the day when RAM was not cheap. As RAM came down in price, the games didn't because SNK just kept adding more memory to the games.
A CD-based system was released several years after the AES in order to try to make it more mass-market. But it still wasn't really supposed to compete with the likes of the PlayStation or Saturn - more to just satisfy less cash-rich Neo Geo fans and open up new lines of revenue. The system was still expensive, though the games dropped to around $50. Load times were a major problem, though, and real Neo Geo afficionados avoided the system because of the lack of arcade perfection. Some games were actually enhanced with new redbook audio, but again, it was arcade-perfection that Neo Geo fans wanted. The system was a failure even by SNK's modest standards. (A second version of the system was released to try to fix some of its problems, but it didn't really help.)
There is still a large and thriving Neo Geo community - as you'd expect from a fully alive and thriving console. Neo Geo systems are no longer produced and SNK themselves went bankrupt about a year ago - but not because of the AES system (their arcade business - the core part of the company - fell apart). The system itself, though, is still supported with new titles periodically and is considered by many probably the best 2D system ever. That is, of course, if you're a fan of Neo Geo games - there's always a debate among the "classic gaming" community as to whether SNK ever actually put out any good games or not (most of them were fighting games that didn't differ all that much, though I personally find more variety in the company's titles than most, and enjoy a lot of the smaller, lesser-known games that the company released).
As a Neo Geo owner I have to say that it's still one serious system. Everything about it just feels quality - at least if you have one of the original packages with the old-style large controllers. It's a large system but doesn't look it - with its clean, elegant, bat-wedge design. The cartridges are absolutely monstrous and most of them come in high-quality clamshell cases. Holding one in your hand is like holding a brick. Truly a unique system and one that I definitely recommend owning - no way it belongs on this list of failures.
Apple's console - code-named Pippin, developed under the Amelio era... I think it sold briefly in Japan through toymaker Bandai called the "@world" or "@mark" or something like that.
It had a PowerPC 603 processor, I do believe, and ran a scaled down Mac OS. I never actually saw one.
Colecovision was awesome and it was a runaway success, thanks to the superior graphics and (in large part) to Donkey Kong, the pack-in game. And how can you call the ONLY home system in the U.S. to EVER actually have company-sanctioned expansion modules available for its expansion module slot a failure? :-)
My friends all had 2600s, but somehow they always showed up at MY house after school, once Christmas of 1982 passed.
Coleco killed themselves with the ADAM. I have one (bought in the mid 90's on eBay just as a curiosity), and I think its main flaw was that it tried so hard to be a Serious Computer and a video game system at once, that it was impossible to do either thing really well. Coleco should have stuck with the Expansion Module 3 that was originally planned, which stored games on some sort of then-new 'wafer' that had enough space to allow games to have intermission scenes, and the ability to write to the media for the purpose of storing high scores.
Looking back, it's hard to blame Coleco for switching their focus-- computers like the C64 were just coming into vogue at the time, and I suppose everyone thought that the one-trick-pony consoles would lose out to the more versatile computers.
~Philly
Sadly, what is an upgrade for a box? You need a new processor, so you need a new motherboard. The new motherboard takes a new power supply and a faster type of RAM. Your removable media drive has been surpassed by far larger / faster / more funtional types, and so that should be replaced. And with the larger media drive you need a new Hard disk of sufficient size. All you've kept is the networking card, and the little aluminum box which is recyclable anyway.
Upgradable computing solutions all wind up in the trash, just one piece at a time rather than all at once. Personally, I'd rather see them put to some use rather than thrown out, but console boards are optimized to play videogames: NESs would make crappy routers.
And they are not the worst example of planned obsolescence. That distinction goes to alternatively the Car or the Toaster. The technology exists right now to create a $20 toaster that will outlive the owner, simply by using a thick enough band on the heating elements. Many toasters from the 70's are still around for this very reason. Modern toasters are intentionally down-tuned to last for 2 years, to keep the production cycle up. Cars are designed to last 5 years, despite the fact that 5 year old cars do exactly the same thing that modern cars do. You throw out your 4,000 pound car every 5 years, much like you throw out your 3 lb console, yet you are replacing the car with a functionally identical product. Consoles are obsolete because they have been replaced by functionally significantly improved versions, and console owners are hesitant to replace an existing system without that significant bonus.
The two things are very different. The obsolescence of consoles isn't intentional.
Just my $1/50.
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