Hardware with a strong innovative charge that, for one reason or another, did not make it.
The history of video games is studded with great market successes and as many sensational ones flop. Quite often the sales of some consul they have gone below expectations and have not been able to spread widely among enthusiasts and simple users, becoming examples of winning concepts and innovations but without becoming mass products. Often the gaming market has been dominated by devices that have contributed little to innovation of this kind and which, looking at the cold technical side, proved to be decidedly inferior to the competition. We are talking about products that convey stories, characters, emotions even before bits, speed or processor power. It is equally curious, however, to go over a short part of this story to understand how and when some historic producers, despite the effort infused in the development of their creatures, made a sensational hole in the water.
Nintendo 64
We start in the story from a historical console. Probably and according to many, one of the best ever for various reasons. Nintendo 64 it introduced a series of crazy innovations on the market that made it by far the most powerful and versatile machine. The marketing of the time revolved around the concept of power: its 64bit could all be seen and were useful in introducing scenarios and worlds never seen up to that moment into the world of video games. We are obviously talking about Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time but also about dozens of other incredibly detailed games that made the competition simply backward. The same joypad, designed in collaboration with Shigeru Miyamoto and nicknamed by many “tricorns”, it was a concetranto of frightening novelties and innovations.
Rumble Pack, expansion port, central analog key and easy to handle for 3D games, the Z key inherited from the Virtual Boy. Inside the chassis was the famous Silicon Graphics RPC Reality processor and 4Mb of RAM. Despite the overwhelming technological supremacy and the numerous innovations brought to the market, the Nintendo console at the end of its life cycle managed to place less than half of the units compared to the direct competitor on the market, the first Sony PlayStation.
Atari Jaguar
Atari was one of the biggest names in the video game scene. An icon of the 80s and historical producer of unforgettable icons. But it has also often been associated with the concept of market flops due to hardware out of their time and bad choices. One of these was certainly that of the wonderful console Atari Jaguar, competing on the same market as Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Even three years before Nintendo boasted (erroneously, actually) that it was the first console with 64-bit architecture. Indeed, the power, for the time, was all but the problem was that of having a very low softeca and a series of hardware bug not insignificant.
The pair of 32bit processors that worked inside Atari Jaguar made the console a hybrid for the development of 2D games and the first real 3D titles, but the biggest mistake was probably the one that pushed the then CEO Sam Tramiel to define the its console as more powerful than Sega Saturn and slightly lower than the next launch PlayStation. And that according to them the Sony console would have cost no less than 500 dollars. History teaches us what actually happened: Atari sold around 250,000 pieces of his poor Jaguar.
Panasonic 3DO
To give a hard time to the aforementioned Atari Jaguar, initially it was neither Sony nor Sega but a timeless console that marked the history of this entertainment. Let’s talk about the 3DO produced by Panasonic and released at the end of 1993. The machine was born from an idea of Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts and one of the protagonists of the Apple boom until the early 80s. 3DO was produced by a consortium of great “powers” of the time: just think that inside there were, together, the South Korean LG, Sanyo, Panasonic and Creative. The conditions for success were therefore not lacking.
Given the fact that 3DO it was one of the most powerful and versatile consoles of the time (it was also used in the PC and professional field, and even many used it to replace the expensive hardware of the cabinets to have low-cost machines in the game room), the latter never succeeded to impose itself on the market despite the fact that at the end of its life cycle it had reached the remarkable figure of 5 million pieces sold (twenty times more than Atari Jaguar).
Sega Dreamcast
How not to mention the mythical, mythological and obviously unforgettable Sega Dreamcast when it comes to market flops? The prerequisites for “looking beyond” were already inherent in his name: “dream”. SAW at the time it really made us dream with hardware out of the ordinary that surely would have deserved better fate. Fans of the time know very well that this machine cost its historic manufacturer the exit from the world of consoles, thanks to some games that did not achieve the desired results.
SEGA had got it right, however: creating a system that was easy to program, unlike the previous Saturn which, despite being more powerful than PlayStation on paper, was much more difficult than expected to handle. However, this was not enough for SEGA to impose its new creature on the market. He had also pushed a lot on online gaming, its dedicated servers, a centralized service where you can connect to the internet, browser and voice chat. Futuristic concepts back in 1998 when even broadband was not widespread outside the Japan. Dreamcast incorporated a lot of news and “dream” hardware, but all this was not enough to decree its commercial failure.
PC Engine
During the life cycle of SEGA’s fabulous Master System and before the launch of the new Megadrive machine, a small big jewel came out that many still remember fondly: the legendary PC Engine by NEC. Although it was an 8-bit system, it enjoyed a 16-bit graphics co-processor which made it a console far ahead of its time. The intention of the manufacturer to create a “scalar” machine capable of updating itself and implementing new features: a quite unprecedented feature and ahead for the time. Despite himself, this heterogeneity of models and hardware (not counting his revisions) was one of his biggest limitations and a fair obstacle to the single platform that software developers would hope to have to optimize their products.
PC Engine already used a CD Rom player at the time, allowing products such as the famous DUO to take advantage of cutting-edge solutions even for the competition of 16 bits (Super Nintendo and Megadrive): extraordinary audio and cartoon animations for those years they were something unprecedented for the world of home consoles. As history has taught, however, the avant-garde and technological supremacy were not enough for NEC to establish itself on the market and consecrate its PC Engine on the podium of the most popular consoles of the time.
