Gaming consoles are amongst the most popular electronic gadgets around, but that does not mean that these can’t bomb in the market. In fact, quite a few gaming consoles have failed to live up to the expectations of the manufacturers, as far as sales figures are concerned. Here are the top 7 among those:
- Atari Jaguar – Seriously, what were they thinking when they built it? Having awful games on sale is one thing, but having a huge controller that looks like an ancient phone is another. Besides, Atari’s claim of the console being 64-bit has often been questioned by gamers and technology experts alike. This console was fundamental in Atari’s ousting from the market of home arcade systems.
- Virtual Boy – This one could have been a great console; too bad the technology available at the time was not advanced enough to support it. Virtual Boy could display 3-D images using a set of oscillating mirrors mounted inside a headset. The only problem was that the display was still in black & white, except for the red LED-s that were located inside the headset! Virtual Boy was only sold for a year, after which it quickly disappeared from the scene. Apart from a few gamers, who suffered from headaches, bleary eyes and occasional dizziness, nobody seemed to miss it much.
- Game Gear – This console really had potential, and many gamers hoped to get from it what they could not get from Nintendo at that time. They were proved wrong not much later. Apart from poor craftsmanship and resource hogging (it used 6 AA batteries to run for just 3 hours!), the poor lineup of games sank this console into a quagmire soon enough.
- TurboGrafx-16 – This 16-bit, arcade style gaming system was capable of delivering far better graphics than Sega’s consoles and NES, which, at that time, would be considered a huge achievement on its own. The only problem with this set was the poor, rip-off games that ran on it. To add to owes of the gamers, only a handful of games were available in US, something that ultimately led to a speedy demise of this otherwise solidly built console.
- N-Gage – Ah, the famous cell phone-console combo. From state-of-the-art games and high resolution display to the media backing it, N-Gage had it all. The only problem that gamers faced was the controller setup, which caused severe strain on their poor ligaments if they attempted to play on the console for long. Apparently nobody at Nokia seemed to anticipate that gamers could play games for hours at a stretch.
- Sega CD – Sega had promised life-like graphics for this new baby. What players got were oversized polygon-meshes, blurry colors and plenty of games that never actually worked the way those should have. Add to that the infamous “Night Trap” controversy, and you have all the elements needed to get a console to the “extinct” section in the lineup of game consoles.
- Neo Geo – “Wow, it looks awesome! I want it, I want it. Umm, did you say it costs $600?” – This was the reaction of many a gamer to the Neo Geo console. The console from SNK was built in a robust manner, the controls were intelligently placed and the lineup of games was “heavenly” to the gamers, so to speak. The only fact that could have upset such a grand setup was the price, and not surprisingly, it did! After shelling out $600 just to get their hands on the console, gamers were expected to fork out more than $100 for each game title. That put this console pretty quickly on the high speed loco to oblivion.
These 7 consoles were the greatest failures in the world of gaming consoles. This goes on to show that manufacturing commercially successful gaming consoles is certainly not a child’s play.
