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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."
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...
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.
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 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...
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."
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.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
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.
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.
-
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).
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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
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
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.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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
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
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).
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.
Wrong. I own two of these things and they are actually quite nice. There were a decent number of games. Here is a few of them:
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Aside from my nostalgia for this list (I had a 32X and Sega CD, and still have my Virtual Boy), I have to take sincere issue with the writer mentioning Captain Quazar as one of the decent games for the 3DO.
Captain Quazar? That game was crap! And I should know, I worked on it! The company that developed it, Cyclone Studios (bought by 3DO near the end of the game's production cycle) split their initial development efforts between that game and the best game made for the 3DO, Battlesport. Now THAT was a good game. Intuitive controls, fast action, quick rounds; everything I want in a round-robin multiplayer blast fest.
But no, Captain Quazar was just an ambitious mistake. I was a high-school student who played football with the company president, and they brought me in for some simple playtesting and initial level design. Captain Quazar's biggest problem was the fact that you could only get ammo by breaking open crates, but there wasn't enough RAM for them to include a melee weapon animation, so the only way to break crates was with the gun. If you ran out of your very limited ammo, you were screwed.
I heard it had a lot of bugs on release. I guess you can blame me for that, I was always playing Battlesport (or Tekken on the new import Playstation we had), and I never bothered to test Captain Quazar enough.
If what you say is true, only Ambidex'es could use this console without ills..
I am fully ambidextrous (dominant left-hand, but I can write perfectly legibly with my right as well -- it was great drawing graphs with both hands at the same time on the board at university, but that's OT ^_^) and I can state that, while nice to be, doesn't help one bit with Virtual Boy.
I do own a VB and about 6 games and it's really too bad that this project wasn't fully thought out. You had to take breaks every 20 minutes (forced by most games by a screen that comes out to tell you to go away for 10 minutes) and it seems that most people got serious headaches from any type of play, so they didn't even make it to the twenty minute mark.
I never experienced any ill effects (yet?) even though I played the truly brilliant and enjoyable Wario game for far too many hours on end; but then there were games like Red Alert (a plane shooter) where you could not tell if those lines approaching the screen were going to be a cave or a wall... parts like that were not so fun.
I packed it away a few years ago and, even though I would love to play Wario again, I don't have the courage to play it again lest I ruin my eyesight. I will hang onto my system though, perhaps it'll be an antique one day*
*please refrain from posting that it is an antique now. The type of antique I mean is one that is actually worth some decent cash = )
Uh, no. Not by a longshot. Nolan Bushnell is the shepherd behind Pong. Trip Hawkins is the founder of Electronic Arts.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Actually Colecovision was a huge hit when it came out, especially considering that the Atari 2600 and Intellivision were already well entrenched by the time of its arrival. There was a Colecovision 2, it was called Adam and it was Coleco's attempt at a home computer. It died a horrible death partly due to the great Video Game crash of '84 and partly because it sucked. Coleco invested very heavily in the Adam project, the Adam is probably the biggest reason that Coleco no longer exists.
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
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
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
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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.
"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.
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.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
It may not have made the article because: A.) It was primarily sold in Japan, and B.) It was more of a premature "digital convergance" box than a pure game machine per se. A co-production with Bandai, the Pippin used a PowerPC 603 processor and a slimmed-down version of Apple OS.
a pple_bandai_pippin.html.
Information on this system is surprisingly hard to come by for a machine released in the mid-1990s, but here's an ancient page listing the specshttp://karx.narod.ru/tmegames/pippin.html.
And another link from a retrogaming site: http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Apple_Bandai_pippin/
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I 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
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!
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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
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
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.
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.
[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
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
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.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
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.
That whole story smells like a load of BS.