Home consoles came into our lives in the second half of the 70s of the last century, and it is very possible that the number of models that have reached the market is incomprehensible. In the early days of the Pong alone, the absence of a patent on the invention encouraged hundreds of companies to market their own designs , with adaptations so rare that it is impossible to list them all. And the mythical Atari 2600, or the CBS Colecovision, or the Intellivision, the Vectrex and Philips Videopac had not yet arrived.
What do we consider a rarity?
In general terms, talking about strange consoles is quite abstract, open to personal considerations because if we look closely at some designs of machines that were hugely successful, some of them could be considered as rare . This is the case of the first PS3, the fat , or the Mega Drive 32X, or the very PS2, which inaugurated that desire to stand up consoles with an appearance reminiscent of a wall radiator. were they pretty? Well for taste…
So we have decided to further refine the concept of strange console and what we have done is clearly mark the territory. We are not going to include only rare designs (objectively repudiable) but also the bet itself. That is, what company it comes from, its tradition in the world of video games and how bad the conception and implementation processes were until reaching the final mess. That is to say, what we could quite rationally consider an absolute disaster no matter where you look at it.
So, we are going to start that journey through the gallery of horrors of video game history . Ready?
What do these companies paint here?
In this category we are going to explain the most bizarre projects that have seen the light throughout the history of video games. Almost all of these fails are created by companies that nobody could guess what they were trying to achieve in this sector and that, with all the reason in the world, ended up abandoning them after a resounding failure. Although in some cases they saw the danger coming and chose to back down as if nothing had happened, hoping that history would forgive them. And they are the following:
Apple Pippin
In the turbulent years of Apple‘s Newton, those from Cupertino came to think that they could launch a console in the midst of a multimedia boom in the mid-1990s. Specifically, in 1996, when the Americans decided to develop a console from which they could see some units at the E3 of the time. The poor thing was going to have a Power PC processor, which is almost certainly one of the worst Apple has ever used. Luckily, someone must have realized the failure that was waiting for them around the corner and they canceled it. Today Pippin is practically a myth… luckily.
Nokia N Cage
At the height of the success of Nokia phones with the Symbian operating system, the Finns tried to try their luck by developing a mobile phone model that they called a portable console. It kept the screen in vertical aspect ratio, some ability to play 3D games ( Tomb Raider wasn’t bad), and an SD card system for distributing its games. The nearly 300 euros that it cost (in 2003) made it a rare bird, although with the second generation they came to lower its cost significantly to make it more popular. Obviously it failed, and a lot, and nobody remembers it right now. It was one of the failures prior to the beginning of Nokia’s decline against smartphones that began to be sold in 2007, with the first iPhone in the lead. A disaster of an idea or one ahead of its time?
game.com
Tiger Electronic, a company that in the 90s developed a large number of LCD machines such as the classic Game & Watch, came a time when it thought it could overshadow Nintendo and put its own Game Boy on the market. As expected, the project lasted just long until the partners who believed in it saw the few sales achieved and, most importantly, the poor projection of what would come in the following years. In the end, he placed just over 300,000 units with games like Resident Evil 2 , Duke Nukem 3D , etc. It cost just under $70 at the time.
LaserActive
In 1993, in the midst of a multimedia boom, and with 3DO looming on the horizon with optical formats, the sound giant decided to make the leap to the console market in the hope of carving out a niche. In this case, the chosen format was the mythical LaserDisc from the old arcades like Dragon’s Lair and Space Ac , although the way of bringing the project to the stores was somewhat… absurd. Pioneer priced its machine at almost a thousand dollars, something crazy in 1993. And that’s despite the fact that it received accessories that allowed it to play games from the Mega Drive, Mega CD or the original TurboGrafx 16. Not even that managed to lift a device that had neither head nor tail.
Why did you do that?
Now it’s the turn of the consoles launched by some renowned video game companies that, on paper, knew exactly what they were doing because, somehow, they already had experience in the field and knew where they were stepping. But in view of the results, it is clear that they did not and that those responsible for those messes must have all ended up making bow ties in some office of their central offices. Here are the highlights:
VirtualBoy
It is one of the great fiascoes of the Japanese. An attempt to create a 3D console (no, not virtual reality) before the sensational 3DS and that had some unspeakable misconceptions. The first, that we could only use it on a table, well supported, because if we tried it between our legs, the whole would end up in pieces on the floor. In addition, the rolo color chosen to dye the screens of their games was hellish and a break every 15 or 20 minutes was both necessary and recommended for the health of our corneas. As if that were not enough, its distribution was quite limited despite having a price of just under 200 dollars, since it went on sale in Japan and the US, leaving Europe out. Looking at the Virtual Boy from the perspective of time, it seems incredible that Nintendo would risk so much. But he did and he paid for it.
Sega Mega Jet
This contraption was actually a portable Mega Drive, with a built-in six-button controller, missing only the screen. It could read cartridges, it had a video output, a power connector and another extra for a second controller in case you wanted to play anything with a friend. It was not a good idea and its appearance did not help either because the users who saw it did not understand the concept very well. Also, it belongs to that dark age of SEGA when it went crazy releasing Mega CDs and Mega Drive 32X like it didn’t cost anything. If you see one, hug her tightly to give her all the love she deserves in the face of so much misfortune that she lived almost 30 years ago. Strange no, the following.
nomadic
Proof that SEGA didn’t get it right the first time was that they tried it a second time, so they took the concept of the Mega Jet and put a screen on it to, yes, turn the Mega Drive into a real handheld. It kept the second port for an extra gamepad, a video connector to project the image on television, a power connector and an extra compartment to put the batteries that, by the way, he drank them (literally). It never arrived in Spain and many users missed it because the idea was not bad. A revision capable of consuming less batteries would have been extraordinary, but that never happened because SEGA in 1995 was already involved in the battle against Sony for PSX. And we also know how Saturn ended.
Philips CDi
Although Philips was present at the origin of the home console market in the late 1970s with its Magnavox Odyssey (in the US) and Philips Videopac, it took almost a decade for it to return to the fray at the height of the CD format . The Dutch came to think that with a multimedia console, capable of playing movies and launching applications, they were going to turn our television into an intelligent device, and they did not succeed. In the video game part, we witness glorious messes such as Squire’s Zelda (three to which worse) or that Mario with the appearance of a little boy’s doodle. Various models were launched, in different price ranges with one common denominator: they looked like vintage 80’s VCRs and were still at the beginning of a market that has only truly materialized in the last ten years.
Atari Lynx
Many experts put the Atari Lynx as one of the strangest consoles ever launched on the market and it may be so, but only because of the design, which was too cumbersome for what the competition styled. Game Boy especially, and Game Gear, were more compact, more plastic unlike a Lynx with a very good finish. It wasn’t too popular but at the gaming level, it has a good collection of small gems thanks to its enormous graphic power, which left the portable bets of SEGA and Nintendo in diapers. Even so, they gave him the title of video game rarity and, with great respect, we have no choice but to slightly disagree.