Worst console flop ever?

[joshposh]

I reckon that the biggest flop was arguably the Virtual Boy from Nintendo. They released it in 1995 and It was marketed as the first "portable" video game console capable of displaying "true 3D graphics" out of the box. Well that didn't really work out to well. They attemped to save costs in a bunch of hilarious ways, such as using only red LEDs for the display as they were the cheapest and a colour display would cost too much.

It ended up looking like this:

Wheres the number for my optometrist?

This is how the headset looked:

I'm pretty sure this would give most people headaches too, but that's just speculation on my part.

And last but not least, here is a picture of the controller (which you couldn't actually see while playing mind you).

All in all this ended up costing around US$180, which was a pretty hefty price back in 1995. It was slightly less expensive than a home console, but cost considerably more than the handheld Game Boy.

I watched a youtube doc on the virtual boy. Coming from a big name like Nintendo you would never expect a piece of crap like this. To ahead of its time, and they tried to make it cheap for the public by making it viewable in red? WTF?!

I have to say it did look promising when it was first talked about back then. but it never delivered like the developers had hoped or forseen.

 

[globulon]

I reckon that the biggest flop was arguably the Virtual Boy from Nintendo. They released it in 1995 and It was marketed as the first "portable" video game console capable of displaying "true 3D graphics" out of the box. Well that didn't really work out to well. They attemped to save costs in a bunch of hilarious ways, such as using only red LEDs for the display as they were the cheapest and a colour display would cost too much.

It ended up looking like this:

Wheres the number for my optometrist?

This is how the headset looked:

I'm pretty sure this would give most people headaches too, but that's just speculation on my part.

And last but not least, here is a picture of the controller (which you couldn't actually see while playing mind you).

All in all this ended up costing around US$180, which was a pretty hefty price back in 1995. It was slightly less expensive than a home console, but cost considerably more than the handheld Game Boy.

Oh man, that certainly brings back memories! I remember unboxing my brand new VirtualBoy and going nuts with happiness! Despite the negative reviews, I still had tons of fun with it. It definitely contributed to some neck problems in my older age though. There was just no comfortable way to play with that thing!

 

[cyberpinoy]

I would have to say of all the consoles Sega Genesis was the one I did not like. I dont know why But I just never liked the sega console. when it came out and I bought it and played I hoped Nintendo would come out with something better fast.

 

[jteezymob]

I would say the Sega Saturn. My personal memories of the Saturn involve my longtime friend, Eric, who wanted a Saturn over the Playstation for Christmas 1995. I had got a Playstation in November of that year, and for weeks I tried to convince Eric to go with the Playstation instead. He was convinced however, that a Sega system would deliver far better sports titles, which he preferred. Unfortunately his assumption proved incorrect. The early Sega Saturn sports games were fairly awful, and Electronic Arts delayed its Saturn sports titles for months at a time. I still remember Eric calling EA out of desperation to obtain the latest release dates for upcoming games. Years later, Eric relented and bought himself a Playstation. lol

 

[Patrick]

As much as I enjoyed some of the games released on the platform, I'd have to say the biggest flop was [Trigger Warning] the Dreamcast. Technically speaking, it was an amazing system for it's time. A generation ahead of it's competition, however it just could not take off. Perhaps due to the release of the PS2, or maybe because people just were not ready for what it had to offer. I especially hated the controller with an intense passion. It just didn't seem practical in any sense. It just felt like holding this huge chunk of plastic with mini-gameboys sticking out the back (btw, no one ever used the memory units the way they were intended. seriously. no one.). It wasn't comfortable to hold either, it almost felt like holding a textbook with buttons on it.

Ranting aside though, I believe it was just too advanced for its time.

 

[RivaCom]

I watched a youtube doc on the virtual boy. Coming from a big name like Nintendo you would never expect a piece of crap like this. To ahead of its time, and they tried to make it cheap for the public by making it viewable in red? WTF?!

I have to say it did look promising when it was first talked about back then. but it never delivered like the developers had hoped or forseen.

It was just a technology they thought would work. It resulted in cheaper hardware, and would be easier to mass develop for the consumer.

As for biggest flop, How about Neo Geo? Not super popular outside JP. Dreamcast flopped but I don't think the console itself was a flop, it was more of a financial flop.

 

[GlacialDoom]

What about that Nokia handheld system? Did that even last 3 months?

Still, that system had a lot of good exclusive games, or at least exclusive games based on good franchises, such as The Elder Scrolls.

As for the thread, I think that the Hyperscan was the biggest flop ever. Being a card-based system with PS1 loading times in the PS3 era was pretty much unacceptable. Also, let's not forget that it had like 6 games available before it went the way of the Dodo.

For those curious, here's a (subjective and dramatized) review from one of my favorite YouTubers, the Angry Video Game Nerd:

 

[ScorpionWaterfall]

I don't know. Sega stopped making consoles after the Dreamcast (except the Advanced Pico Beena, but that was only released in one country. When a system is bad enough to make a company stop producing consoles, I would say that's a flop.

 

[Kaitara]

If we're looking at this objectively, the Phillips CD-i was pretty horrid. That's the system famous for the terribly drawn Legend of Zelda "games". Then you had the SatellaView (not actually a game system, but a peripheral) that was released only in Japan and did moderately well for what it was, but didn't have much software.

Hardware-wise, the Dreamcast was designed very poorly as the ventilation was underneath the system, causing it to easily overheat and many complaints to be filed... so many Dreamcasts died premature deaths
Nowadays, we have the Wii-U to look to as an example of failure. It didn't fail hugely, but it didn't do as well as it needed to.

However, these are only some of the better-known ones. There are scores of game systems that never got off the ground or had critical issues.
Here's a great exhaustive list of gaming industry failures.

 

[beastmaster184]

Dreamcast comes to mind as the controller was slitghy like the xbox and the console was wrost than the gamecube which i particularly hate both systems.

 

[Mattmattics]

I reckon that the biggest flop was arguably the Virtual Boy from Nintendo. They released it in 1995 and It was marketed as the first "portable" video game console capable of displaying "true 3D graphics" out of the box. Well that didn't really work out to well. They attemped to save costs in a bunch of hilarious ways, such as using only red LEDs for the display as they were the cheapest and a colour display would cost too much.

It ended up looking like this:

Wheres the number for my optometrist?

This is how the headset looked:

I'm pretty sure this would give most people headaches too, but that's just speculation on my part.

And last but not least, here is a picture of the controller (which you couldn't actually see while playing mind you).

All in all this ended up costing around US$180, which was a pretty hefty price back in 1995. It was slightly less expensive than a home console, but cost considerably more than the handheld Game Boy.

I don't think I ever wanted a bad piece of tech more. The concept was so ahead of it's time we just got to gaming headsets with the Oculus. You couldn't tell it was bad, I didn't care the gameplay was so different. My parents got the final say and I never owned one. lol

 

[overcast]

I think the first ever released XBOX seemed to have some issues. The box was going out of warranty pretty easily. And many people reported how bad the production was. So it can be said that it was one of the worst console. Then Sony's PS 1 was also worst model. It has its share of issues even to new version of the device. But yeah old models had lot of problems.

 

[Deen]

One I can remember is the sega cd. Sega beat out everyone when it came to using CDs to hold their games, releasing the Sega CD in America back in 1992. The trouble was that though the Sega CD was just an add-on for your Genesis system, it cost as much as the Genesis itself. Plus, the Sega CD had a dearth of compelling games, with most of them tending to use compact disc's superior storage space for nothing more than movies.

 

[MLF]

The TurboGrafx-16 and Neo Geo units come to mind from my childhood.

I wonder what may have happened had they hadn't sat on the TG-16 release for over two years later than Japan and actually packaged a game with the system that the American market would have known about. As for the Neo Geo, a $600+ price tag in 1990 was insane although I would have loved to play a bunch of their games at home -- Baseball Stars, Double Dragon, etc.

 

[Koyomi Araragi]

Mattel's HyperScan didn't even know what its audience was. It was apparently aimed at little kids who weren't ready for "high-end" video games, even though the game that was bundled with the console was rated T. The only games that were ever released for it were TV show/movie tie-in games and it died a year after being released.

 

[Gladdy]

You'd be surprised at some of the bad game consoles that came out. Anyone remember the Virtual Boy? Not really? Good, because you'd be walking around the room with a brick on your face, if you ever used this console. (I'm not making this up. It was the size of a brick that you put on your face. That was early virtual reality, as you could get!)

Haha, sadly, I remember this piece of brick. I don't know what Nintendo was thinking releasing this but this has to be the worst ''console'' ever.

I am happy that I never bought it but my friend didn't have my luck. He bought it in America and showed it off once in school. Literally, everybody was making fun out of the Virtual Boy. It is probably one of the most stupid ideas I've seen. It is like one of those 3D glasses in the prehistorical area, mated with a brick. They wanted to make it into VR yet almost all of the games were 2D? Logic??

 

[Denis_P]

I don't think it was the worst flop by any means, but the most disappointing one for me was the death of the Dreamcast. I absolutely loved that console and had such high hopes for it after fantastic releases such as Power Stone 1 and 2, Jet Set Radio, Shenmue and Soulcalibur. I thought it was going to be the biggest thing, but then the PlayStation 2 arrived. Sadly, I much like the rest of the world began diverting attention from my Dreamcast and onto the PlayStation 2 after it just began dominating it with title after title. And so marked the end of a potential classic.

 

[thart]

I actually owned a 3DO but traded it for a saturn. The graphics were bad at the time compared to snes and genesi. Road Rash for the 3DO freakin owned. Sock wave, Need fo Speed, and Crush and burn were some other cool games for it.
Worst system ever has to be 32X. And the games didn't look much different from genesis games.

 

[Dhanidhamy]

My first game console was the first model of Ps2, problem I had with the console was its constant over heating and tripping off, later upgraded to the slim model and problem of over heating was fixed on the new model.

 

[PenguinManiac]

Well, there are plenty of unsuccessful consoles. The Sega Saturn, the Dreamcast, the first Xbox (to a certain extent) all performed pretty bad, sales-wise. However, these alleged "flops" pale in front of devices like the Virtual Boy or the Philips CD-i. The Virtual Boy is probably the most known, especially now that the VR scene is growing bigger and bigger. It's kind of sad to think that such a revolutionary technology could be deployed so disastrously by a company as big as Nintendo. I don't know much about the Philips CD-i itself, instead, but knowing that Zelda CD was on that console is enough to me.