Failed Consoles of the '90s

I always think the 90s are a really interesting time in console gaming, because it was absolutely dominated by Japanese publishers but it was the beginning of the end. The best consoles were Japanese, the vast majority of the best games came from Japan (and so came out in Japan first), and attempts by western companies to compete in the hardware market failed badly.

But then with the 3DO and the Jaguar, while the consoles were pretty terrible you can start to see the shift in appetites - AVP was surely the first good FPS game to ever appear on a console, and Madden & FIFA on 3DO showed the future of the franchises somewhat.

So I think that while there were plenty of failed 90s consoles, in many ways they paved the way for what was to come - the Xbox - and started the shift from Japanese console gaming dominance to Western dominance which we see today.

Hardwarewise the 3DO was a pretty big step up at its time of release, several years before Saturn/PS1, it was vastly overpriced on launch though and obviously superceded by the previously mentioned consoles.

As for Ngage, I remember all the memes and pisstaking about the 'sidetalking' but that is how a lot of youngsters seem to use their smartphones now and it always makes me think of the Ngage...

The concept of the 3do was an interesting one, in that the console technology was to be licenced out to anyone who wanted to produce it. To my knowledge there were Panasonic, goldstar and Sanyo variations, a bit like having a PS5 made by Samsung!
The idea was to upgrade the system over time, the proposed M2 add on looked amazing back then. Although short lived, I did enjoy the 3do so in that sense I Don't see it as a failure, I would nt put it in the bracket of the jaguar, which was poor hardware that failed commercially.

That’s what fucked it, the mugs who licenced the specs couldn’t sell the machines at a loss because there were no royalties to claw back from

Yup. On the face of it its just the same as the VCR model. Prices would have come down if it became remotely successful. I can see how somebody gave it a go

Victor too, I think. Also the Panasonic Gamecube.

Have we done this yet?

I think the idea behind the franchise model was to standardise the tech, sort of like what happened with the CD & DVD formats. The problem being of course, with microchip tech was Moore's law. The tech evolved too quickly for anything to be standardised.

We might not be too far off TBH. With AI upscaling and a few more generations of Raytracing tech, we might be getting to point of diminishing returns on hardware. I look forward to being wrong of course.

Hey, it happened in some of the Smash Bros...

Did they?! I remember the Amiga one, but not a C64 one.

There were only about 4 C64 cartridge games.

FUN FACT:

The N-Gage was not only a completely unlocked system with no piracy protection whatsoever, but its OS (S60) was shared with Nokia's other current smartphones, meaning you could run most if not all N-Gage games on basically any premium Nokia phone released in that time by simply copying the exe to your SD card. IOW you could play native N-Gage games without paying for either the console or the game. And you could pick the form factor you wanted.

I did this and to be honest, in some ways the system gets a bad rap. It was like somewhere between a GBA and a PSP in terms of performance in an era when phone games were those dreadful Java apps. I genuinely fired up Sonic N (Sonic Advance) all the time. Although again, I was using a normal looking phone instead of carrying that dumb taco thing around.

S60 also had a decent emulation scene and many consoles were well supported. It was pretty good stuff for the time and I blew a few people's minds showing them actual Mega Drive games running on a phone.

On the other hand it's hard to believe it came out only four years before the iPhone.