Top Five WORST Consoles in Video Game History

[Christophero Sly]

To be clear, I'm not necessarily suggesting that any of the consoles I listed are "bad". I'm only saying that I would place those consoles on a "worst ever" list before I considered the 5200 for a spot.

 

Again, I'm not necessarily knocking any of the consoles I listed. I wouldn't put the Channel F or Astrocade on a top-5 worst list either. I'm just saying that they would make my list before the 5200 would. The Jaguar, however...

Yes, but as I already explained in the post you just quoted, the 5200 could fit better into the bad/worst category int he sense that it was both a symptom of the problems Atari Inc was experiencing and detrimental to the company. (in the way that it was marketed/managed in general and the form the hardware took to some extent -given the alternate options of adapting that same chipset)

 

Also, as I said already, one could argue the Jaguar belongs there less than the 5200, in the sense that it was successful in one critical area and had a net positive impact on Atari Corp. (it provided a source of revenue when the company was floundering and in debt, stabilized it enough to facilitate winning several quite profitable lawsuits, and put the Tramiels in the position to liquidate the company on such favorable terms as they did with JTS -they wouldn't have managed that if they tried to get out back in 1993)

I take your point, but I'm viewing the list more from a consumer or gamer's perspective, rather than a corporate one. From your corporate viewpoint, sure, Atari's console strategy could certainly have been managed better, but problems in the industry as a whole at that time had as much to do with the 5200's ultimate demise as anything else. That industry-wide downturn also evicted the 5200's primary competitors from the market, so in relative terms, it's hard to see the 5200 as being especially detrimental to Atari.

 

The Jaguar's failure in the marketplace, on the other hand, can't really be attributed, even partially, to adverse conditions affecting the industry as a whole. The Jaguar may have stabilized Atari long enough for them to exit the market on favorable terms, but to my mind, placing last and ultimately exiting a strong and healthy market can never be considered a corporate success.

 

Expanding a bit, it seems to me that Sega's continuing stumbles after the 32X, with the Saturn and Dreamcast, are a better fit for the model in which marketing/management deficiencies bear significant responsibility for a console's "failure".

[kool kitty89]

while I see the point in choosing systems that never made it to market, I can't say I agree with it.

those systems were indeed failures but they never 'damaged' the human race, how could they have? They never wasted my money, or wasted time while I played their rotten games. I'm also of the opinion that none of the oddball, non-mainstream systems belong on a list of the worst, simply because they didn't get into enough hands to ruin them.

 

'To be the worst,' there is an automatic requirement to 'be.'

Totally agree, same thing with others like the Konix Multisystem, though that one had a really neat chipset, management was all wrong and the over peripheral based concept was really impractical IMO. (that and using floppies: adding considerably to the cost of the base unit and using a standard, easily pirated medium) Given Konix never got exclusive rights to Flair's chipset, I wonder if they ever proposed using it to Atari as an alternative to the Panther. (before the Jaguar, of course)

 

 

I take your point, but I'm viewing the list more from a consumer or gamer's perspective, rather than a corporate one. From your corporate viewpoint, sure, Atari's console strategy could certainly have been managed better, but problems in the industry as a whole at that time had as much to do with the 5200's ultimate demise as anything else. That industry-wide downturn also evicted the 5200's primary competitors from the market, so in relative terms, it's hard to see the 5200 as being especially detrimental to Atari.

 

The Jaguar's failure in the marketplace, on the other hand, can't really be attributed, even partially, to adverse conditions affecting the industry as a whole. The Jaguar may have stabilized Atari long enough for them to exit the market on favorable terms, but to my mind, placing last and ultimately exiting a strong and healthy market can never be considered a corporate success.

Well sales figures and market share have little to do with success, hence why the Xbox (or 360 at very least) has yet to be a successful product.

It's a success for 3rd party software and for users who didn't get screwed by failing hardware, but not for th emarket as a whole.

 

And a healthy market is one thing, but a healthy market unfairly and illegally attacked by an extremely aggressive competitor is another. Nintendo did it and most got away with it (most suits got settled out of court, but Tengen won their antitrust suit eventually). But if going up against a company like Nintendo was tough, going up against a corporate giant like Sony would have been near impossible. (Bleem tried it and won, but collapsed due to legal fees; It's called railroading)

 

 

Whether the 5200 was a success or not is debatable, as is how harmful it was to the industry, but from the customer's perspective purely speaking: on the Jag you had a lot of original and unique games as well as a number of good multiplatform titles, it was on the market longer, it was affordable (and an excellent value for the hardware at the very least), but due to limited market share it tended to be hard to find places that carried the games and limited developer interest (so dry spells during late winter to early summer), but from the hypothetical perspective of a customer who bought a console a bit after it launched in early 1994 (1993 was a test market to drum up investors done out of desperation) you had a fair bit of software to work with, and the average family/user onyl bought a few games a year anyway, in fact it wasn't really any worse than the N64 early on and it increased a good bit through the end of '94 and especially picked up in mid '95. (a lot of CD support too)

On the 5200 you got some common ports which were generally reasonable but often not much better than the VCS version and sometimes weaker (like Space Invaders) and a few unique ports and exclusives, but generally fewer than the Jaguar, especially if you compare to computers. (Jaguar gets a bit weaker if you include games that were ported after discontinuation though)

The Jag did have a slightly longer life though.

 

None of that really applies to success though, but it's a better gauge of good to bad than public perception IMO, as that's often heavily skewed by ignorance, hype, and deliberate misinformation.

 

At best Atari might have managed a bit better before getting rolled over by Sony, or maybe even pulling though if the Tramiels were willing to bet the farm (or at least invest a decent chunk of private funds), but that would have a huge risk of blowing up in their faces. A company in their situation needed skill and a lot of luck (including luck to find good skill with the limited funding they had ), but I'm kind of repeating myself here.

 

With the 5200, the best case would have been Atari actually recognizing the cliff they were headed for and shifted things a year earlier than they did, even if that meant scrapping the 5200 or delaying it for a more optimized design. Even if they'd kept it as-is, they could have used it as a tool to help pull back from the saturated VCD market and start moving in the right direction: historically it was the opposite, pushed as the deluxe system with the 2600 as the mainstay platform simply bloating the industry more.

Actually, had the scrapped it alltogether, it could have meant competition gaining Market share, and had that happened fast enough, it could have possibly softened and/or delayed the crash a bit (with Commodore's mode, it would have been tough to prevent entirely, and in leu of that, investing n computers would have been wise -too bad Mattell and Coleco botched that pretty badly, and Atari had some bug hiccups with the 8-bits in the critical years of '82 and '83).

 

Expanding a bit, it seems to me that Sega's continuing stumbles after the 32X, with the Saturn and Dreamcast, are a better fit for the model in which marketing/management deficiencies bear significant responsibility for a console's "failure".

Sega's fumbles were primarily between 1993 and 1997, and didn't much apply to Japan. (the exception being the initial support for the 32x starved the Saturn for several games that could have been developed for it instead)

The main issue was the 32x's conflict with the Saturn. The Sega CD hadn't been a massive success and Sega of America didn't promote as much of the diverse software as they should have, but all in all it wasn't crippling (probably close to a wash, maybe a moderate loss), but the 32x was an odd duck with the Saturn totally conflicting with its release and I'm not sure where they were going with that as it clearly meant dividing crutial resources.

SoA had been putting a ton of budget into advertising, to the extent of deficit spending to combat Nintendo (not as extreme as Sony though), and with the Genesis and even Sega CD it was working, but then they poured a ton into the 32x and invested a lot in software to boot (including several games developed by SoJ teams) to the extent of starving the Saturn.

 

The Saturn came out and ended up getting pushed in early 95, which meant the 32x conflicted even worse than had been planned and Sega was starved for marketing resources as well as development being pushed on the 32x starving the Saturn of a potentially strong launch lineup. (Virtua Racing was great and could have been even better on the Saturn if done by AM2, Virtua Fighter was generally better in spite of the weaker hardware, Star Wars Arcade wasn't ever on the Saturn, neither was Shadow Squadron, Chaotix, etc, etc)

And on top of all that you had Nintendo still chugging away with the SNES and hyping the N64 (which had been delayed) and Sony, a newcomer to the console business but rapidly gaining pace and who was throwing tons and tons of cache at advertising, the like of which made the peak of early 80s TV ads pale in comparison, let alone the more focused early 90s ads, and on top of that you had price dumped hardware and dev kit produced by a recently bought-out prominent former 3rd party developer plus a console that took the hint from the 3DO on how important a clean high-level optimized console could be, tying into the comprehensive SDK being comprehensive programming libraries facilitating "canned" software development so to speak. (a drastic departure from previous gen hardware level assembly programming)

 

Sega was wiped after that, they'd lost their edge and faced an uphill battle, and they may have done well in Japan, but not well enough to compel companies like Square to go to them, and lost to Sony even more so. (FFVII was a huge boon to Sony in Japan, and and to a lesser extent in the west, Nintendo went to the highest market share in Japan in 1996 -mainly SNES and GB- to 3rd place by the end of '97)

 

The internal conflicts were settling at Sega after Stolar came on board, at least to some extent.

 

Things like Seganet were money pits, but that wouldn't have been obvious. The gold star policy and mishap with working designs are blown out of perportion, but I get the feeling that Stolar was a bit rough around the edges (more so that Katz), but that statement mane at E3 1997 "Saturn is not our future" really makes no sense from a buisness perspective, even if it's the truth, that's not the kind of thing you tell the public, you bend the truth to the positive (ie focusing on positive hype of the DC and not saying anythign negative on the Saturn), even then it was a bit early to even be hyping the DC that hard and the main prority would have been minimizing losses on the Saturn.

 

They got it right with the DC but had to fight an uphill battle and couldn't afford any slip ups... unfortunately there were some slip ups, namely with the GD-ROM ripping and CD-R playing vulnerability as a perceived massive vulnerability (regardless of real life significance as the PSX was more piracy prone by far, and it was still mainly bootleggers and hackers, not casual peer to peer sharing type stuff as happened years later or earlier with cassettes and floppies)

 

And that's about it.

You could argue whether Sega would have lost less following through with the DC longer before jumping to 3rd party only (as they took a pretty heavy hit doing what they did and sold a lot better on native hardware -and had PC as a decent sideline), but that's all that's left. (some blame Peter Moore for selling out to MS)

 

 

 

Nintendo made almost as big a mistake with the N64 (far worse from a Japanese perspective) and they'd had the Virtual Boy flop beforehand, but they had to critical things Sega didn't: a huge reputation worldwide and previous strong markets (declining in Japan only after FFVII) and had a de facto monopoly on the handheld market (at least after Sega left ~1996) while Sega had the Arcade business, but that was pretty weak outside Japan. (Nintendo also hadn't blown money with deficit spending beforehand)

Edited June 29, 2010 by kool kitty89

[jetset]

Dude do you really think anyone reads your novel-long posts? Yikes.

[Christophero Sly]

Well sales figures and market share have little to do with success, hence why the Xbox (or 360 at very least) has yet to be a successful product.

It's a success for 3rd party software and for users who didn't get screwed by failing hardware, but not for th e market as a whole.

I take your points here and throughout your reply, but, again, if I were the one making a list of the worst consoles ever, my perspective would be that of a gamer, not a market analyst. Sure, market penetration, number of units sold, profit, etc. are important factors to consider, but I wouldn't overly concern myself with strict market or corporate definitions of success. I think success measured in that way is still a function of consumer reception, anyway. I also question the validity of judging a console based on the corporate strategy behind it, especially as this sort of second guessing (or excusing) is done with the benefit of hindsight.

[Shawn]

 

5. Atari Jaguar

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(1993-1996), 250,000 sold, 67 (+14 CD) games, $250 (+$150 for CD) lanuch price

 

 

4. Sega 32X

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(1994-1996), 665,000 sold, 32 games (plus 5 CD-32X games), $160 lanuch price

 

 

3. Atari 5200

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(1982-1984), 1 million sold, 69 games, $200? lanuch price

 

 

2. Virtual Boy

==========

(1995-1996), 770,000 sold, 14 games, $180 launch price

 

 

1. Nokia N-Gage

============

(2003-2006), 3 million sold, number of games unknown, $300 launch price

 

 

 

 

You shot yourself in the foot right off the hop by including those sales numbers. ALL 5 of the platforms on your list where a success.

[kool kitty89]

Note that the Jaguar didn't sell 250k during it's active sales time, but only ~135,000 by the time Atari dropped out with ~100,000 mode then being dumped on the market as liquidated assets iirc. (so it might not even be 250,000, but sales figures are relative and there's many perspectives to take as already seen, the 5200 is one of the more complex issues IMO -the Jag is too, in other ways, but not in the same respect as the 5200)

 

And I don't think the 32x was a success, it ended up costing Sega money and severely conflicted with the Saturn. (had more good games than people give it credit for, especially for such a short life -granted it had a ton of 2st party support) And again, I think most of the units sold were dumped at a heavy loss after 1995, there were actually shortages early on though, and I think it probably sold a lot more during its active life (through 1995) than the Jaguar, for what that's worth. (Sega CD is more arguable, I don't think it hurt them overall, or not significantly, but if it wasn't a wash it was close one way or another -doesn't seem to have had the impace in Japan against NEC as intended though)

 

Virtual boy... negative impact on the market (overall), probably lost Nintendo a fair bit of money with R&D and dumped hardware/software after cancellation, advertising, etc. (hell, I'd say that for the average user, a 32x like add-on for the SNES would have been better, especially with the N64 taking so long; that or actually releasing the CD unit they'd been taunting prospective users with for ages only to cancel it and announce that they weren't using the medium in the N64 either)

 

 

 

Not sure about the N-Gage (or QD), cool idea that smart phones sort of capitalized on later, but was it a success is another matter. (did Nokia profit from it?)

 

 

 

@Christophero Sly

I get what you're saying on the 5200 too, and in spite of the issues and possible conflict with the 7800 (on the verge of full release in summer of '84), things very well may have turned out differently as time went on, at least had Warner not decided to leave:

James Morgan was doing exactly what he was brought in to do and things were rather promising from all accounts, rebuilding Atari Inc into a lean, well-oiled machine had he only been given the time to complete his work instead of Warner abruptly selling off assets. (the abruptness totally screwed up any kind of orderly transition to Atari Games and TTL/Atari Corp. too and led to some law suits)

 

There was every indication of continuing 5200 support alongside the 7800 (and an adapter to play 7800 games on the 5200), as well as several other projects (some on hold due to restructuring -like the 16-bit computers iirc).

 

Given that, even with emphasis shifted to the 7800, there was the very similar A8-bit computer architecture to facilitate ports to the 5200 and potentially offer a steady stream of later games, plus in spite of the crash, not only are there examples like the 2600 selling well though the end of the 80s, but the Intellivision selling as many units post crash as it had before.

Edited June 30, 2010 by kool kitty89