Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
"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.
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!
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
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
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.