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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.
As an owner of an Atari Jaguar CD system, I must say that I am disgusted that this fine unit was omitted from the list. I mean, when installed, the thing looks like toilet...
The Atari Jaguar, that brings back memories. Such a good console system... 2 processors one for graphics AFAIK and the other for everything else. Just a pity that there weren't any major game releases/support for it.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
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.
Lotsa money got wasted for research, and for buying the technology.
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.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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?
I actualy know somebody that has the sega 32x. I've played with it before, and I think it's quite good, I really don't see why it failed.
YarrRrr
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.
I could never get the infinite lives cheat on Sonic 3 to work on the Sega MegaDrive.
My childhood... RUINED!
-Mark
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...
I still can't speak the word "Saturn" (hahahahahahahahaha) and keep a straight face.
I had a friend who plunked down 400 college-dollars (those of you who have been poor college students and then gotten good-paying jobs understand the difference here) for one of these things and ended up buying only a few games, and even those were pretty much junk. The PlayStation was such a better system.
Okay.. now someone reply to this and give me some sob story about how the Saturn was supposed to be a 2D system that was hacked at the last second to try and do some 3D..
Meanwhile, I'll be laughing..
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
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."
Commodore Amiga CD-32, anyone?
Loved that thing. Brutal Football was the best game made for it.
* chirp * chirp *
Don't forget that useless expensive upgrade. Most of the games were really grainy FMV where you occasionally got to do something in the game.
(and how could they have left out the multiplayer mode in Golden Axe?)
Hail to the king, baby!
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?"
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/
Yeah, it was pretty tough.
:)
I remember distinctly trying to get that depth down right. I think I was playing some sort of tennis game or something. I never owned one myself and the one guy I knew who did had just got it and never let anyone else goof around with it too much before he'd get all excited again and take it back.
We were pretty young.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
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!
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.
If what you say is true, only Ambidex'es could use this console without ills..
The sad thing is the games were fun. I just couldnt play them.
There is one event which is guaranteed to signify the destruction of a console as a viable platform -- Jeff Minter writes a game for it. Happened to the Jaguar, happened to the Nuon (an interesting recent stillborn console). And now he's in the process of writing a game for the Gamecube. Oh well. :)
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
I LOVED the Virtual Boy! (Please don't take that the wrong way)
I played it first a few years ago at tennis camp in PA...I was hooked! I never understood why it did so horribly...Maybe the seizures and headaches casued by it was a factor...
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.
-
I bought a VirtualBoy along with several games a few years ago just to keep around. I'm a sort of fan of early 3D efforts and still have lots of old 3D comics and magazines with the red/blue glasses, and some of the early hologram efforts, ViewMasters, etc.)
I have to say, that these days, my 8-year-old and his friends can't get enough of Mario Tennis, Virtual Baseball and other 3D games on the VirtualBoy, even though they all have the latest GameBoy Advance, GameCube, Playstation 2, X-Box, etc.
There's still enjoyment to be had in the VirtualBoy. Plenty of units and games are up for grabs on eBay, too.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Those who forget the past are doomed
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
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).
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.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Okay, $2500 sounds like a lot for a game console. But *somebody* must be buying those $400 video cards for PCs. I'll bet alot of those go into $2500+ "gaming rigs." (Sure, those PCs can do other stuff too, but mostly no better than whatever computer they're replacing).
hmmm what does that Halcyon really look like?
Heres a good list of them outdated systems.. http://gamerland.com/games/systems.shtml and heres a better picture of a Halycon in case that Shacknews picture wasn't good enough for you.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All these consoles everybody's mentioning here are the consoles that I walked by thinking they're trash.
This the the sequence of consoles that I thought were quality...
Nintendo (tons and tons of games, many greats)
Super Nintendo (Still tons of games, some of the best are in here)
(skip N64 to...)
Playstation (The start of true 3d games. Many sucked, but it was new stuff)
PS2/Gameqube/eXbox (Who knows. I do computer games and such these days)
I don't see Colecovision on this list and was wondering how successful it was? I had one and it had some good games but I didn't know anyone else with one. For some reason the only games I can remember are Ladybug and Popeye and those were fun.
This system couldn't have been that successful since it pretty much came and went and there wasn't a Colecovision 2. I think it also had those lame ass controllers that were part joystick part keyboard like the Atari 8500 or whatever the hell it was called.
I can't believe I actually played pong at one time.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
The failed systems featured all seem to have common feature: extra large price tags. People were just not willing to spend that amount of money for the "features" these machines gave.
And its still true today. You can get the hotest hardware, the niftiest features, and the coolest designers all to collaborate on something but if it is priced out the interest of the common consumer its going to be a boat anchor or a bookend.
Hopefully this will be a lesson for future console makers.
I know a few people in the console industry and, believe me, failures are widespread. I know of three companies in the local area that are out of business. A couple of others have been bought out by bigger companies and they are not much more successful now. Companies do not like to admit how many games are started and then cancelled due to budget constraints, poor game design, or too high of expectations.
A friend of mine has a 3DO console, and it is awesome. If a system that much better than the competition were released now, I daresay it might have a fighting chance, but back then there was no market for "high-end" gaming systems of any sort.
I'm surprised he didn't mention Jaguar. I remember that crap.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
The Infinium game console is doomed before it gets started. Given the current game console market, you have to make the hardware cheaper than what it cost to manufacture it. The only way to make money is to pump enough cash into manufacturing the systems and marketing them up front and make the money back later on licensing.
They are going to be VERY hard pressed to make a console in the $200-300 price range that has a decent amount of power. Furthermore, even if they manage to pull off that magical feat, people have to actually buy them which comes down to marketing. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo already have a natural momentum in marketing because of both their history and their war chests.
I'd love to see a console come onto the market that uses some of the ideas these guys are throwing out, but unless a big corporation backs it, it isn't going to happen.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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
I rented one from a blockbuster for a weekend when it came out. Even now, thinking of it after all these years, I can still remmeber the searing head pain...
Anything with a label on it telling you it will give you a headache in 20 minutes has to be a failure. Plus the 3 games developed for it sucked ass.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
The Gamecube controller and the Virtual Boy controller look extremely similar... I wonder how they jumped to the bizarre claw-like design of the N64 controller...
sig.
There you have it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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!
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.
LadyStar - Your Magical and Mysterious Adventure Awaits
I own 2 Virtual Boys, and the best ways to play it that I found were to lie on the floor on your stomach and look into it (screwed up your neck after a while) and to lay on your back and rest the unit on your head (worked good if you put a little foam tape or something inbetween the eye pieces, otherwise it cut into your nose).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
I still remember all those Bonk's Adventure commercials. Don't think I ever played it though... maybe at K-Mart or something...
Carl
Vote Libertarian
I think the Atari Jaguar should get honorable mention here. I bought one off Ebay, along with several games, and it was just junk. Brand new games wouldn't work right, it would crash. It reminded me of some of the really poorly programmed DOS games that came out back in the days when Windows was really picking up speed.
And what about the NEO-GEO? A system with $200 games? Yeah, right. At least you can go find the ROMs for free if you dig hard enough.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
The NGPC. To date, the finest handheld console to have existed. Died in the wreckage of SNK. I still take mine out when I want to feel the goodness of real SNK fighting action on a handheld.
***minute of silence***
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Am I the only one who finds that fact that the system that kick-started this article is called the Phantom?
No, not a bra-size.
Anyone remember this? It was supposed to be an add-on to the Nintendo 64. I seem to remember hearing once that Sony and Panosonic were competing over the licence to produce it and when Nintendo dropped the project they both went on to develop their own seperate systems.
Of course, this just might be my overactive imagination telling me things again.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
I'm too young to remember those days, but I picked up an Intellivision in a yard sale once. It came with about 25 games, most of which were lousy duplicates of classic games like Space Invaders, Pacman, and Donkey Kong. There were a few decent sports games, but the controllers were so hard (and painful) to use that even the better games weren't any fun. I'm guessing the system never caught on, since I've never seen or heard of another one.
Yeah, kinda amusing though that the background image on that page gives you a headache as you try to read the directions.
This is an industry where momentum and future are king. You'll never buy a box with only 5 games unless it comes from Sony or Nintendo and has promise for more.
When I worked at TV settop box company, you'd be surprised at how they casually thought that they could just step in to the game business. Seriously, they thought they'd just put doom on it and the next thing you know the world would come running. Meanwhile the hardware has about a 10th the performance of a PS2 and offers just as much in the way of platform support. Never mind that doom was years old at the time. The idea got wacked, but not before some poor bastard spent 5 months working on getting doom running on it.
Most of those things have that same vibe. Some company with some money thought that they could just step in and own. Doesn't work that way.
I rather enjoyed the virtual boy. Granted, I paid $30 for the system and all 12 games (new, I might add) but there were still a few good games.. Teleroboxer and Red Alarm come to mind.. Mario Tennis was also kinda fun. But, in the end, it wasn't worth $130 or whatever Nintendo charged for it. I would never have touch the thing if it hadn't been on super-clearance.
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.
Or it's due to poor motion tracking of your head. If your field of view doesn't move at the same pace as your inner ear, I imagine you'd fall down vomiting in a few minutes.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
The article wasn't about "bad" consoles, just the ones that failed. Lots of good products fail. All you need is a bad price point, or a lack of cevelopers and even the best product can fail.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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 = )
Star Control 2 which is being ported to Linux (in fact, quite playable already) is based on the source of the 3DO version, not the x86 one. In fact I only heard of 3DO because of this...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Heh, back in the day, my mom saw Virtual Boys on clearance at Toys R Us and decided that my little brother needed not one, but two of them for his rapidly expanding console collection (they were literally like $20 each). She also proceeded to buy out all of their games for a mere $5 a piece (so what did that run her, another $20 or so?). At first we were excited; I mean, how many kids' moms randomly buy them game consoles for the hell of it, let alone a backup? Then the play commenced. They probably wouldn't have been *that* bad if they didn't have brain searing red-on-black graphics, but the unfortunate truth is that they did, and all four of us kids were extremely nauseous after about an hour with our new toys. Talk about a let down :)
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
Anyone remember the Lynx? 16-bit handheld, IIRC, competed around the time of the Game Gear? I saw one in a catalog a LOOOONG time ago. Was it any good? Was it doomed to fail?
:)
Also, my roommate's talking about Neo Geo, which I recall in name only. Any thoughts on that? I'm FASCINATED.
Oh, and, okay, so. I remember seeing CD-based "interactive TV"? units, in the earlyish nineties. I remember playing them at the electronics stores. You could like paint with them using the remote control. Weird as hell. Supposed to be the next big thing, even bigger than that "Internet" thing that was coming along.
Anyway, just nostalgic ranting. Please feel free to reply with any hints.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
If you're interested in what the Slashdot effect looks like for a relatively small story, look here: http://www.shacknews.com/docs/amd.x BTW, that spike at 4am is the nightly backup. The webserver load jumped, but the database server was fine since it is run through FastCGI
everyone cares about the poor buyers of these failed consoles but nobody cares about the poor shareholders who went bankrupt. oh well, this is /. where u expect more poor grad students than shareholders. atleast the console buyers can impress girls with their collectibles.
I liked the Virtual Boy - was I the only one? I never got a headache from it, and I liked the tennis game for it - it used the sense of depth very well. My sister and I used to play it for hours. Really - did no one else like this system?
I'm the stranger...posting to
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
Super Streetfighter dragged me, or rather my father, into purchasing this system, It was wonderful . . . for this game. So must potential, so little games.
But I did like fighting with people on how to pronounce 3 deee oh, 3 do oh.
...are at the bottom of a landfill right now. The successful ones *and* the failures. They are throw-away commodities, the worst examples of planned obsolescence in fact.
Closed box, proprietary, non-upgradable computing devices should be anathema, especially on Slashdot of all places...
just my $.02
I have a Virtual Boy, and enjoy playing games like 'Red Alarm' for hours on end. I've never had any sort of problems with headaches.
:)
The only side effect is after an hour or two of playing the real world looks pretty funny
http://www.xpurple.com
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".
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Good way around the headaches is to stop play (pause the game) about every 5-10 minutes for a minute or two. Too much game play can give you a vertigo feeling (plus the headache) after a while. A friend of mine picked one up at Toys R Us about 3 years ago for $25 - games were all clearanced at $1-5 each. So he bought the system and a copy of each game they had left! Had some fun for a few months and then he gave it to his little brother for Christmas. He got the unit and nearly all the games produced for about the same price as a good new release PS2 game!
Rob "Welcome to Lifestyles of the Dull and Nearsighted."
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.
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.
There was never a home Street Fighter II port like the on the 3DO. My friend bought one for that sole game and was never dissappointed...
Both the music and graphics were head and shoulders above the playstation/saturn/dreamcast ports that I have seen.
"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.
I owned one, still have it in a box too. I always thought it was a pretty cool little system. I never developed a headache from it, but I always got cramps because of the odd position you had to be sitting in to use it. I'm tall, so sitting it on a table didn't work too well. I would usually end up on the floor on my stomach trying to play, but that just made my arms fall asleep. Ahhh, the good old days :)
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/
Where's the Pippin? The name is enough to make it qualify...
fsck -u
Philips CD-i
Flop
Your thinking of the neogeo, basicly arcade hardware in the form of a console, the mem cards were swapable with the arcade, but with the huge price for the games 200$ most people never got one, not to mention if you paid 200$ for a game why the hell would you play it at the arcade, unless your just tring the mem cards out
Yeah, lying on your back with it resting on your face was the best way to play it without straining your neck. Eye strain was another story. The worst thing about playing it for long periods of time wasn't so much from the graphics as it was suddenly going from a black background to normal light. It was like looking into the sun, which of course would be a stupid thing to do, so it helped to play it in dark rooms.
The games themselves were pretty fun though. I just wish I hadn't paid all that money to own five of them.
I used to have this console trying to be a computer of a game.
I can't beleive this game wasn't included in this list!!!
Just look at the games you have to choose from:
- K.C. Munchkin (*cough* Pac-Man Rip off *cough*)
- Computer Intro
- Speedway!/Spin-Out!/Crypto-Logic!
- Las Vegas Black Jack!!!
- Bowling!/Basketball!
...and last but not least...
- Alien Invaders - Plus! (Just in case plain Alien Invaders wasn't enough for you kids!)
How this console is no longer popular, I haven't a clue!
(/sarcasm)
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
The replies of people that actually owned some of these bad (both mentioned or left unmentioned by the article) systems shows that there are a lot of us that end up buying bad systems. I wonder what drove us to buy these systems? Is it ignorance? Because we had disposable incomes (to try and one up our neighbors)? We certainly didn't have the web and its plethora of tools (slashdot, google, etc) to make us better consumers. (Hey, I had a Lynx. My excuse is that I was an Atari fanboy, with the 2600, the 800, and the 1040ST...)
;) Or are we all still drones that are easily swayed by hype and commericals?
I'd say that it's hard to make an uninformed purchase nowadays, unless you're a lazy ass who doesn't bother researching the web before buying wonderful techie toys
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
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.
I own 2 Virtual Boys, and the best ways to play it that I found were to lie on the floor on your stomach and look into it (screwed up your neck after a while) and to lay on your back and rest the unit on your head (worked good if you put a little foam tape or something inbetween the eye pieces, otherwise it cut into your nose).
I hear the next version of the Virtual Boy required you to hold your breath while fully submerged in hot pudding. Doesn't sound too much more painful of a gaming experience than what you are describing.
:P
Is there an emulator for it now?
To tell you the truth, it looked like an awesome idea. I would probably have bought one if the name didn't immediately turn me off.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Motion tracking? You're giving the Virtual Boy far, far too much credit. It was a pair of red GameBoys strapped to your face.
Motion tracking... Next thing you are going to tell me they did something productive with that 175 dollars!
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Ok since I started this thread I need the two who gained points on my back to now donate them to me:) Just kidding. I forgot about the Adam.
/
A year or two ago someone came up with a life size version of Quake 2. You were surroung by the game almost like an IMAX version of it. Some of the bosses stood 10 ft tall. It was very spendy back then but I think they should let me demo it now. Check it out and how fucking cool is this... http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/caveQuake
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
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
Scared me there for a second. Slashdot put this topic, "Dismal Console Failures", right next to More Ways to Blow Things Up.
Table-ized A.I.
If anyone knows where I can buy this old (but great) game --- please let me know !
You're right too.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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
There was no research that landed them at the color Red, just economics. As everyone knows, red lasers are the cheapest visible lasers money can buy. Making the color yellow or even green would have raised the price considerably.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
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.
Schnapple
Though I don't know if the server managed to go down, it's fun to look at the Server Load Page to see just how much extra load a link at Slashdot can cause to a page that already gets a lot of traffic.
Well, it wasn't exactly two gameboys strapped to your face, but yeah.
The Virtual Boy was originally intended be a helmet and have motion tracking AND have more than one color. But then it turned out to be obscenely expensive and cause severe motion sickness, so they trimmed it down.
I remember playing Virtual Wario at Blockbuster. Good game, although it didn't exactly take advantage of the 3D as much as it should have. I thought it was cool though. (Far cooler than I though the Playstation to be, which, because it was CD based and used shapes instead of letters to identify the letters, I associated with the CD-i, and thusly didn't give much respect to at first.) Maybe a Virtual Boy type product may be reborn in time.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
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.
They used lasers for the display? No wonder I wear glasses now. heh... : )
seriouslyexcited.net
You just have to lie on your back and (precariously?) balance the think on your head while looking up. All of the other gameplay pieces (except the nausea) fall right into place. : p
seriouslyexcited.net
Being one of the only purchasers of the TG-16 on the North American contintent, I have to agree about the TurboExpress, a handheld gaming console WAY ahead of its time.
Admittedly, the TG-16 never had many games that were heavily advertised in North America. Still, to this day I'll insist that classics like Bonk's Adventure, Blazing Lazers or Military Madness are the equal of anything produced for the NES -- the system that, after all, it was designed to compete with.
it *was* a Z80 machine, so at heart it was a perfectly good machine to get your feet wet in programing, at least if that's all you could get your hands on.
For that matter, they're still making Z80s and I've been toying with the idea of hacking up a "modern/old" computer just for kicks.
KFG
The displays used in the Virtual Boy were OEM versions of Reflection Technology's Private Eye.
These were LED-based and used a vibrating mirror to create the image. I assume that as red LED's were much, much cheaper than other colours at the time the virtual boy was made, that was why they used them.
Here is a link to detailed info on the head-up displays used in the Virtual Boy.
They used a row of red led's to generate horizontal pixels, and an oscillating/vibrating/or spinning mirror to create the vertical pixels.
They did do some research to land at red, but I question the quality of their research.
I've actually got one of these - it's a DVD player with a really inexpensive games engine built in.
I still need to find a controller for it, but I managed to pick up Tempest 3000 at the same time. Definitely one of the most interesting 3D engines I've seen - it's kind of like what vector displays might have evolved into if they were still used for gaming.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The left eye right eye dominance issue has nothing to do with your hands. My wife's right handed, left eye dominant, I'm right handed, right eye.
I really don't know what causes dominance, but it has nothing to do with your hands.
Or maybe the nuns had it right.
Dan
I am a huge fan of the Nintendo Virtual Boy. In fact, I just got done doing some homebrewn work for the system. There should be a port of good 'ol GCC for it soon.
:-(
The system really had immense power, the CPU is faster and more powerful than that on a GBA. (The VB actually has a divide instruction and floating point opcodes!)
I think this author is exaggerating the effects of Virtual Boy and just running on speculations. I NEVER have known anyone in real life to get sick or loose their vision from playing one of these things. I always have friends give my system a try, it is actually quite fun to play, especially Wario Land and the Japanese niche game Space Squash.
The biggest shame is that the finest games - Bound High, Dragon Hopper, Zero Racers (F-Zero), et. al were never released.
Remember, blue LEDs haddn't even been invented when the virtual boy was released. The best you could get was green and those were expensive. Red was really all they could have used without the unit being insanely expensive. It's to bad, if they'd waited a year or two they could have used a much nicer color. If it had been made today they could have used pure white, or even done color using mixed red, green, and blue LEDs.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No mention of the Turbo Grafix 16 system either.
I thought it was an awesome concept: instead of cartdiges, it used cards... about the same size as a credit card, but about 3 times thicker. 16 bit system. decent sound. And (the best part) the cards you used for the main system, you could also use for the portable (handheld) system.
I'm assuming the game console tanked because they didn't really have that many games for it, but I ended up dishing out about $150 for the portable system anyways... and got 5 free games with it. (yeah, the store was practically giving it away. It was initially marked up at about $400 I believe.) Even got a TV tuner to attach to the handheld console for an extra $30!
Great idea in my opinion. Too bad they couldn't get any decent games for it.
Karma: NaN
ACTION MAX
That whole story smells like a load of BS.
While te Vitual Boy was never sold officialy here in The Netherlands I once had the change to play on it in a small store that had imported some of them.
They had set it up with the tripos slightly bent so you could play it while standing in front of it.
The 3d effect really worked on 3d tennis but you have to keep you head against the device to see anything on the screen, so you couldn't see the controller and didn't know which buttons you were pushing.
The idea was great, it wasn't all that heavy so Nintendo would have done better if they had placed the device in a helmet of some sort.
Until this day I regret not having bought one. The device itself including one game cost around 40/50$ and they also had about 5 oher titles at 7$ a piece or so.
That wasn't really expensive and now I would have had a museum piece... DAMN!!
Excuse me if I'm unfamiliar with four dimmensional tetris. Is this a game god plays a lot?
suddenly I feel very tired
All the info you ever need!
As I recall it was called FM Towns "Marty".
I remember an advertisement for it, once. That's all I really know about it actually.
Oh, and I think it's mascot was a green lizard or something. I guess he was Marty.
<skeptic's query>
</skeptic's query>
blog
I actually got quite a few "failure" systems used for a good price and had a lot of fun with them.
My USA failure systems:
Sega Master System (with 3d glasses!)
Atari 7800 (my favorite game: Ninja Golf!)
32X (it does suck)
SegaCD (my favorite system to this day)
GameGear (it's pretty cool, I liked it a lot more than my GameBoy at the time!)
So check it out. I don't buy used systems (or even new systems) anymore... good thing too since it was getting to be an addiction.
I've very surprised noone's mentioned this; i guess it's the US-centric crowd? The GX4000 was a MEGA failure. By the time Amstrad released their new CPC+ plus range (including GX4000) the world was well-and-truly done with 8-bit CPUs. The 286 was popular, i believe the 386 was emerging. Amiga was even reaching the end of its days, and Atari was more or less already dead. The SNES was 16-bit. Why oh why release a new range of computers and a console that still ran on Z80s, even with a hacked up color chip that could handle 4096 colors (aha! but only background shading, not sprites - wtf!) I don't know what crack Alan Sugar must've been smoking. Of course, then they released the PenPad, which was far more useful, and the REAL first PDA (not the Apple Newton like Slashdot likes to think). Now they're making all kinds of bizarre telephone/computer mixtures, which is pretty interesting. But i digress.
The GX4000 had Switchblade, which was a fantastic game, even now. It had Burning Rubber, which wasn't too bad. I'm not sure what else... I don't think they were terrible games, just not technically up-to-date.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
best buy also used to sell the sega nomad..which played genesis games on a hand-held machine I think.
Gumpei Yokoi, I salute your creativity and your energy, but the time is not right just yet.
It's worth letting you know if you don't.
Unfortunately Gumpei was killed in a car accident in (iirc)1999.
Maybe I'm the only one who remembers it...
Why didn't this make it in the list. It was a dismal failure... so much that it never even existed.
At least there is an emulator for it though. People can see what they're missing.
Actually, a 4D-tetris does exist, and was supposedly created by a man by the name of Greg Kaiser. However, besides several references, I have been completely unable to locate any code. If anyone has any information on how to make a make Google search at right angles to reality, I would greatly appreciate a line. 3D tetris just isn't challenging anymore. :)
-C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Breakfast served all day!
The Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast both have two processors as well.
Saturn, yes. Dreamcast -- I believe not. The dreamcast used a Hitachi SH4 as it's main processor and had an additional (PowerVR) graphics processor -- which really shouldn't count, because most modern systems do.
The Saturn had a second processor thrown in at the last minute to up its power to compete with the Playstation's 3D capability. If it wasn't for the second processor and the Saturn's quad-polygon engine instead of tri-polygon like everybody else was using, I think the Saturn may have been more successful and the Dreamcast could have been easily designed for backwards compatability with the Saturn. If not for those two things, I speculate that the Dreamcast would probably have come out later and be more powerful and a smashing success even today.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
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