Dismal Console Failures

Anonymous Howard writes "Shacknews' jason bergman has written an article that looks at some of the biggest failures in console gaming. It's a great read, and spotlights stuff like the Halcyon, a $2500 (!) laserdisc system with only two games and Nintendo's Virtual Boy, a stereoptic system that had red-on-black simulated 3D graphics."

Comments

Well

[Slashdot Insider]

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...

Re:Well

[Saige]

It was omitted from the list because it wasn't a DISMAL failure. It failed, sure, due to being tough to program for, because Jack Tramiel had no right running a company, and because all the Japanese console fanboys attacked it from the start (usually by straight out lying, such as claiming it wasn't really a 64-bit system, though the magazines were guilty of this too).

It didn't help that the inclusion of a 16-bit 68000 meant as a simple general purpose chip to do little things encouraged companies to port their 16-bit games to the system using mainly that chip without attempts to even improve the game. (Flashback, anyone?)

The existence of the 3DO at the same time, with it's $700 price-tag, compared to the $250 Jaguar, helped make the Jag look like the more viable of the two - which I believe it was.

I wonder what kind of games we might have seen if the system had survived long enough for programmers to push it to the limit - probably some impressive stuff. After all, T2K came out really darn quick, and it is still visually impressive in many ways. (Maybe that's just the extreme trippiness of the game...)

Re:Well

[Twirlip of the Mists]

How bad does it have to be before it's dismal?

Uh... I would say "dismal." Before being called dismal, it has to be dismal. Do you need a dictionary?

What ? No Odessy ?!

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

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.

Virtual Boy

[proj_2501]

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

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

A couple of omissions...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:A couple of omissions...

[Anonymous Coward]

I also seem to remember a C64-based console

Indeed you do, and it was called the C64GS. You can read about it (and a whole host of other old consoles and computers) here.

There was essentially no point in buying a C64GS since it did nothing that an ordinary C64 couldn't do, and the GS didn't have a datasette port either, which cut out the vast amount of cassette-based games already available.

Lest weforget...

[bjohn]

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

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

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

Stupid business model

[Zeinfeld]

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

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

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.

Re:Stupid business model

[Chris Canfield]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-C

Re:Sorry to troll, but..

[mrseigen]

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

The most interesting thing...

[badasscat]

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.

These kinds of posts crack me up.

[DwarfGoanna]

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

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

Re:3do

[10Ghz]

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

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

To me, that makes 3DO one huge failure.

Re:SEGA MEGA-CD

[Maul]

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.

Notes In Video Game History

[MBCook]

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

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

There you have it.

They forgot three.

[NeuroManson]

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.

3DO

[gornar]

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.

Confessions of a 3DO Veteran

[ewhac]

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

Re:Virtual Boy

[Anonvmous Coward]

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

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

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

Re:Virtual Boy

[dubiousmike]

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

The reason "Console X" wasn't included

[Schnapple]

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

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

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

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