Every day, console wars rage all over the internet’s battlefields. Be it Twitter, Facebook, or the many forums out there, soldiers fight tirelessly to show their favorite console is the best. Their goals are innumerable, ranging from a strong enough passion for their chosen machine that they feel the need to relentlessly bash the other, all the way up to a bad experience setting them against that particular manufacturer’s consoles forever. No-one is safe as Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony see their supporters rip opponents limb from limb online.
Even those of the oft-despised “PC Master Race” get involved in these tirades of hatred. Perhaps this isn’t the case but from how some act, there appears to be a genuine desire to see opposing consoles die a bloody death at their hands.
One thing that most of us can pretty much agree on though is that whichever console you love or hate, they all work for the most part these days. A homogenized format and layout of sorts has found its way into the games industry which stops utterly confusing inventions coming into the world. For every console brand or machine which is successful now though, there have been numerous cadavers left in the wake of progress. These fetid corpses are all that remains of the greatest mistakes our much-loved industry has ever seen.
So that’s what we’re going to take a look at today. These are not simply consoles that failed due to commercial or critical problems. They all had some key reason for why they failed utterly and terribly. A couple may have had an idea or two before their time, but that simply doesn’t make up for the terrible mistakes that were made at the launch of them. Anyway that’s enough waffling on about nothing for now.
Bring out the failures!
Virtual Boy
This is a little foreboding if you’re looking at virtual reality headsets and thinking “Yeah I bet those are cool”. Luckily for the upcoming Oculus, Morpheus, even the oddly titled Vive, the Virtual boy had to deal with some pretty painful technological limitations way back in 1994. At the time, both Sega and Nintendo were stuck behind a 16-bit wall they simply could get past. The market was stalling and both companies were looking to whatever could plug the earnings gap until the 32 bit era arrived, itself signing the assassination note for Sega.
Nintendo’s attempt to bolster their lack of growth came from the Virtual boy. This was a piece of technology was incredibly ahead of its time when you look at things like VR headsets and Smartwatches that fill our world today. Back then though, it was nothing more than a disaster. The uncomfortable grey plastic mounting forced you to stick your face into the designated groove while you gripped a controller in your hand to play the game, all the while having the wire holding both pieces together try to strangle you.
Using a red-tinted display which showed two-dimensional images in a way to create the illusion of 3D using a parallax with mostly wire-frame graphical elements, the Virtual Boy finds its way into this list of consoles we’re glad died because the technology was too young then to achieve anything. If the Virtual Boy had been a success, we’d have seen high-resolution textures on TV screens replaced with wire-frame images for many years to come. Not to mention that if anyone actually wanted to create a full-color display it would have cost more than a small car to buy one.
The Virtual Boy’s death was a quick and almost painless one. Nintendo lost money hand over fist with the console, releasing the device in Summer 1995 only to discontinue the Virtual Boy on the 2nd of March 1996.
Gizmondo
Ads in free-to-play mobile games are just something we’ve come to expect these days. Unless the title is created with in-app purchases in mind, this is the only way developers often find a way to make a living. There’s nothing wrong with that because usually these advertisements are not so irritating that you want to break your phone into six tiny pieces and claim you dropped it when the insurance company calls. So how about one of the worst handheld consoles ever made, which had the added benefit of covering your screen with ads whether you liked it or not.
The Gizmondo, a terrible name for a terrible creation if ever there was one, was a small handheld games console released in 2005 with a hefty price tag of $400/£229. You could buy a cheaper one at $229/£129 if you were willing to buy the version with “Smart Adds” (their typo, not ours). This system was a terrible example of product differentiation that luckily failed so the tradition didn’t continue. These cheaper versions would be exactly the same machine with one special difference. “Smart Adds” technology would display advertisements on the Gizmondo’s screen at random intervals three times a day, every day.
These advertisements were downloaded onto the Gizmondo via a GPRS system and were intended to mean that people paid a lower price for a slightly more irritating item. Luckily this system was never actually turned on for two simple reasons: no-one cared and the Gizmondo was such a flop that no-one even bought an SKU. Fewer than 25,000 units sold over the console’s 11 month life span even though it was being sold at places like a dedicated store on London’s Regent Street, a rare thing for consoles even to this day.
We are all used to advertisements these days in any media we consume. Hell pretty much every website you read including this very one is supported by advertising. Paying the same price as a Nintendo handheld console today which forced you to look at commercials every day though? That’s just too far.
It’s premier game was also called Sticky Balls. All hail the morally justified fail.
There were also links with criminal organizations in the executive branches of the business so yeah, there’s that.
N-Gage
Okay we’re going to give the Nokia N-Gage a little credit here. The idea of a mobile phone that was focused on playing games back in 2003 was pretty damn revolutionary. It’s just a shame that the technology and execution used by Nokia in creating the N-Gage was about as useful as a English to Russian phrasebook in downtown Quebec. The N-Gage was trying so very hard to display beautiful, even 3 dimensional, graphics on a small screen so it certainly set the bar high for itself. Then Nokia forgot that to do this, you have to actually make it work.
The stab at graphical fidelity which Nokia took may as well have come from a week old hot-dog because it broke so easily. Games were not the smooth experiences that purchasers hoped. They devolved into nothing more than somewhat shiny slideshows where gameplay comes second to crying at the controls for not responding. Nokia did manage to snap up Tomb Raider titles in order to pull the gaming populace towards their console but they didn’t spend any time or money wrangling any other big names. Consoles can live or die on their launch titles after all.
So it barely had a launch lineup and lacked the computing power to even run what it had. That isn’t enough for a console to have to fail though is it. So how about the fact it was nearly impossible to replace a game. The features of a console have a tendency to stick around if it’s successful. If the N-Gage had been a success, we would have likely been inundated with copycat consoles where you had to remove the battery to change a game. That and we as a unit of gaming lovers would have been stuck with consoles that barely ran their games.
You may have been ahead of your time N-Gage and you may have made your mistakes, but we’ll always know you for side talking.
Philips CD-i
Philips tried to find favor with so many technological products but will still be best known for a cross-headed screwdriver. Rather fitting that their name is synonymous with a tool because whichever bright spark over there decided that the CD-i would have made a good addition to the console market should’ve been locked in a tool-shed. One of the first home gaming systems to incorporate a CD-ROM into its design, the Philips CD-i made so many mistakes that it’s a surprise this console wasn’t burned from human memory to stop us devolving into riots.
Right out of the door, it was priced at between $700 and $1,200 depending on the source you believe which even then was a little high for a piece of technology. This price might not have been so bad if the Philips CD-i brought incredibly advanced games for the time into the world. Of course, it didn’t.
It’s hardware was almost exclusively used to bring gamers FMV games and games from other genres that varied between half-decent to downright awful. Perhaps the most infamous of these were the Zelda games which appeared on the CD-i due to a deal made with Philips after Nintendo attempted CD-ROM technology and FMV ’em up Dragon’s Lair which is currently available on a bunch of platforms you should not purchase it on. These FMV games didn’t even look good. The image above should say plenty but if it doesn’t then think of watching a VHS tape you’ve left next to a magnet for a few years and you’ll be close.
Why should we be glad this is one of the happily failed consoles? Well because if it had seen more success, it would have lead to more FMV games than you could shake a flimsy-ass controller at.
Atari Jaguar
The Atari Jaguar was the attempt of the technology company to try and get a stronger foothold in the console market. Their name is synonymous with the games industry for many, but their success defies this assumption. Especially when you look at their more recent forays into the world of home consoles. The Atari Jaguar was one such attempt and showed the console market one thing; gamers as a collective were not going to lie down and take shit.
Atari tried to make the Jaguar’s selling point one which many will have seen happening again recently. Their marketing strategy revolved around jamming the face the Jaguar was a 64-bit system into the faces of games, claiming it was much more powerful other consoles which were only 16 bit systems . Now that should’ve worked, and yet it didn’t. Did we get a lucky break on that one. You see, the Atari Jaguar wasn’t actually the 64-bit system its manufacturer’s advertised. When the Sega Saturn and PlayStation rumbled onto the scene only a couple of years later, their 32-bit consoles blew the Jaguar out of the water.
There’s also something else we can all be grateful for in the failure that was the Atari Jaguar. It’s control pad was nothing short of a mess wrapped up in grey plastic. A D-pad, two shoulder buttons, and six standard buttons were nice to see. The utterly confusing telephone-style thing in the middle most certainly wasn’t. It did allow for developers to create their own unique add-ons for the controller, but that increased their own production costs thus making the Jaguar nothing short of a significant error in gaming.
Atari’s console failing was a blessing in disguise that helped shape how console manufacturers treated their customers. Not only did they (for the most part) stop lying about the specifications of their hardware, they stopped making such strange controllers.
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