Forum - View topicThe List - 8 Defunct Game Systems
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Two words: Bernie Stolar. The man ran the SEGA name into the ground, at least in the west, and made off like a thief doing so. |
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ninjamitsuki
 Posts: 602 Location: Anywhere (Thanks, technology) |
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The Casio Loopy was an interesting one, being a console intended solely for girls. Most of the "games" were really just Mario Paint-esque applications (you could even print our your pictures as stickers) but there was one game called Loopy Town no Oheya ga Hoshii that was sort of a precursor to Animal Crossing with some Princess Maker style gameplay elements. Obviously it was never released outside of Japan.
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3018 |
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A lot of people remember the Dreamcast so fondly because - thanks to the similarities between the Dreamcast and the Sega NAOMI - it represented the first time you could buy a home console version of an arcade game and be 100% sure that you were getting a cutting-edge arcade-style experience. You could pop in Marvel vs Capcom 2, Zombie Revenge, Crazy Taxi, or even Charge N Blast (if you were some kinda masochist), and feel like you were playing the game as it was meant to be played. Sure, the controller wasn't great, but this was the age of a billion third-party controllers - some of which were actually functional - and there was a cheap Saturn-to-Dreamcast converter that let you use your Saturn controllers, Virtua Sticks, and Virtual On twinsticks with your Dreamcast VMUs. If you had a GameShark, you could even play import games, and this was right around the time it started to become easier and easier to get them in the US. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Wandering off onto that tangent-- I remember when the Sega vs. Nintendo ad rivalry was at its most obnoxious and ugly and Sega, with a full-color handheld, was making jokes comparing Gameboy's green-o-vision to "creamed spinach", yuk yuk. Which seemed like a waste of humor, when if you looked at Gameboy's ads at the time, the emphasis had suddenly later turned to selling the monochrome Gameboy to adults, for the inner-child thrill of playing Tetris on the morning bus commute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIUV2MTeWg0 Oh, yeah--Nothing says "Cutting-edge handheld system" like trying to sell it to your dad. 
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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Same here, though my oldest is my Atari 2600 (which I haven't even hooked up in 30 years). My SNES broke down several years ago, but the rest of them were all still working last time I turned them on. I never owned any of the systems in this list, but I at least remember seeing advertisements for all of them except the Magnavox, and there were a couple like the Dreamcast and Virtual Boy that I tried out in stores (my local Toys R Us had a Virtual Boy set up in the video game aisle, as well as a console Neo Geo). Funny thing with the N-Gage is that I never realized from the ads that it was actually supposed to be a serious game system - I thought it was primarily a cell phone that also happened to play games, not the other way around. |
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belvadeer
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Exactly. He was so anti-RPG, it was beyond sickening. How do you support an idiot who says RPGs have no business being in the U.S.? The man was a disease to gaming, and good riddance to him. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 2959 Location: Email for assistance only |
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In case it was pointed out here, I've updated the article to correct the Gizmondo blurb. Tiger Electronics and Tiger Telematics (the latter made Gizmondo) are different companies. Sorry about that!
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zrdb
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I had a Virtual Boy I got from Blockbuster when they were dumping their rental machines and game cartridges-had about 15 games for it. The damn thing gave me a headache if I used it for more than 15 or 20 minutes. I sold it to a video game collector a few years ago for way more than I paid for it.
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2234 |
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Dreamcast: Y'know, it's fascinating examining this and the Saturn, because both of them, despite their failures, had really strong libraries full of unexpected and really fascinating titles. Another thing that contributed to the DC's failure was EA starving Sega out by refusing to release its sports titles on the system, owing the SEGA making its own titles. Not the last time EA would use dubious tactics hoping for profits.
N-Gage: Oh, this one. This thing was a laughing stock within a year. Magnavox: Now that's one even I didn't hear of Jaguar: If the console itself wasn't bad enough, the Jaguar CD was even worse. James Rolfe did a video on it and the hardware was so badly designed that even when he had a friend directly wire it to the console it wouldn't work. Now that is an accomplishment Gizmondo: The story behind this was even more hilarious than the product. Steambox: I remember when everyone was going on and on about this like it was going to be the second coming. A lot of it you can contribute to weird, indecisive marketing. Valve went on and on about how they were going to make it a Steam console, but also how they would have different manufacturers have the brand so there was variety, it was really confusing. It's no wonder it never took off because Valve clearly didn't know what the hell they were doing. 3DO: This is what happens when you try to jury rig power for a selling point, it becomes impossible for people to program for it. Virtual Boy: The alpha version of the 3DS. Also featured the first appearance of Atlus' mascots the Jack Bros in the West |
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Waffitti
 Posts: 55 |
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While the idea of the 3DO console came from EA, the company that handled it (The 3DO Company) went from EA subsidiary to joint venture between EA & 6 other companies before the console's launch. While EA was heavily involved with it, 3DO was an entity independent from them, and worked on hardware for 2 more years after Hawkins left EA's board of directors, then spent 7 years as a software-only developer before filing for bankruptcy.
Sorry to "well, actually" you octopodpie, but while your blurb on the 3DO hit the points accurately, it took me a couple reads to get. Informing that it was licensed to Panasonic in the beginning and that it was manufactured by different companies was weird, since that was the "innovative" part of the 3DO: follow the VHS model and license the technology to multiple electronics manufacturers, have a bunch of developers make games enticed by the low royalties, create a competitive ecosystem for console makers so that 3DO consoles get sold at low prices/get bundled in TVs, collect royalties from a bunch of different sources. Since the manufacturers (just Panasonic in the case of the console's launch) set the retail price, and they weren't getting any royalties from it, they priced it at a profit, in a market where the razor-and-blades model is the norm to this day; that took some steam out of the 3DO for sure. While that model proved to be a curse for both 3DO & whoever manufactured it, it was a blessing for small developers. Kenji Eno, a big name in the pool of artsy '90s video game directors, made 6 games exclusively for 3DO (2 of them getting ports after the console was abandoned) in part because he did not have the finances to pay the fees other companies demanded. It attracted as many no-name companies as it did big ones pushing shovelware in Japan. |
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Brainchild129
Posts: 307 |
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To say nothing of his NO 2D GAMES, 3D GAMES ARE ~THE FUTURE~ stance, which cut off a sizable chunk of the Saturn's Japanese library from the west, everything from rhythm games to RPGs to those early Tokimeki-era VNs. Or his harebrained scheme to push it out 6 months before its original release date to get ahead of the PS1, which succeeded only in pissing off many of Sega's 3rd party developers and weakening its debut line-up of games since so many were just not ready by that point. As sad as the Dreamcast's history is, the Saturn's is a goddamn Greek tragedy. All of its mistakes were born out of hubris, and all of them sealed not only its own fate, but that of Sega itself. |
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Coup d'État
 Posts: 179 |
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It's sad that the Steam Machine flopped so badly. The biggest reason against a console for me personally is that I have a huge Steam library, but 0 console games and no real interest to ever getting into collecting them. So expansive ...
I own a Steam Link and their controller though, and I love it. The controller especially is really nice. Like, I can play Morrowind with that thing :
I never had a console as a kid (grew up with a gaming PC at home), and playing games on my TV is very special for me now. |
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Stampeed Valkyrie
 Posts: 835 Location: PA |
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The Dreamcast was many things.. easily hackable, and performed functions that could rival your modern Consoles with 3rd party firmware. I still have one with some 3rd party OS loaded on it, mostly to play imports.. like Macross M3, but it does things that it took consoles another 10 years to catch up to..
I could say the same about the Ngage.. At 1 point we had several NIB and being bored started tinkering.. there was a group that was modding these as well but I lost interest. Lastly the 3DO... this was an expensive but great system.. many, many games got ported from this to the PS1.. and many games were neutered because the PS1 didn't have the hardware resources for a full port... Great example Road and Tracks Need for Speed.. when you got busted by the PO usually you'd get a humorous cutscene.. but for the PS1 this was done away with.. along with some other items like a race course.. but just googling it shows it was an easter egg on the PS1. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Nintendo is the exception to that: With the exception of the Wii U, Nintendo systems have always been sold at a profit even during their launch. That being said, the reason Nintendo could do that is because the designers at Nintendo rarely go for the latest and greatest in technology. There is an incredibly large premium on electronics and electronic parts that are the newest in the market. Nintendo does the equivalent of the consumer who buys the second or third newest computer or smartphone to save money. By contrast, the 3DO's designers insisted on whatever was the most powerful hardware at the time, which makes it a luxury item. I mean, all game consoles technically are, but this one made no compromises between price and performance. The 3DO was essentially the Mercedes or Rolls-Royce of the industry during a time when there was little consumer interest in that. |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4474 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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Many people complain about the Dreamcast controller but I really like it, the trigger buttons are in the ideal position for representing the brake and gas pedals in racing games, a category of game where the Dreamcast excelled, with my top 3 Dreamcast racing games being (Ferrari) F355 Challenge, Metropolis Street Racer (the precursor to Project Gotham Racing on the XBox), and Test Drive: Le Mans, plus the more arcadey racers Hydro Thunder and Crazy Taxi (1 & 2).
Aside from Metropolis Street Racer, which was effectively a Dreamcast exclusive even if the first Project Gotham Racing game was kinda sorta like an expansion pack, and Crazy Taxi 2, I also own Playstation 2 ports of all the above games (Test Drive: Le Mans became 24 Hours of Le Mans on PS2) and some of them have slight refinements on PS2, like the "Good Driving" mode in F355 Challenge, but I find they still play slightly better on Dreamcast just because the trigger buttons are a lot more comfortable for racing games as the brake and accelerator pedals compared to the PS2's shoulder buttons (for those PS2 racing games that even give you the option of remapping the brake and gas to the shoulder buttons, some earlier PS2 racers only used, shudder, the face buttons). ADDENDUM: For the people who might tell me to "just get a steering wheel and pedals" especially for the PS2 games, I did but it was kind of a waste of money because my gaming area was too cramped for me to ever set it up properly. |
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