10 Video Game Consoles That Flopped

Pioneer LaserActive, 1993

We kind of take for granted the ability of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs to hold massive amounts of information, but it wasn’t always that way. Back in the day, the optical medium of choice was the laserdisc, a foot-wide platter that was expensive as hell. Pioneer was one of the companies most invested in the format, which is the only explanation for them deciding to put out a laserdisc-based game system in 1993. The $970 Pioneer LaserActive played a handful of games, mostly video-based adventures. You could also shell out even more money to allow the unit to play Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 games, but that brought the machine to a price of more than $1,000.

Nokia N-Gage, 2003

When cell phone gaming started looking like a viable market, Finnish phone manufacturer Nokia decided to create a system that was just for games. The end result was the N-Gage, one of the most ridiculous pieces of hardware ever made. Designed to compete with Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, the N-Gage failed as both a gaming system and a phone. The buttons were horribly placed and to talk into it you needed to hold it sideways. In its launch week, it was outsold by the Game Boy Advance 100 to 1. Nokia took a huge bath on the system, producing two million units and selling a tiny fraction of them.

Mattel Hyperscan, 2006

Toy companies have long looked at video games as just another market to take over, not realizing that the creation of a console is a specialized and difficult task. Mattel tried to get in on the act in 2006 with the Hyperscan, a nutty system that used CD-ROMs for games but let you scan trading cards to change the play experience. The system was made of incredibly cheap materials (it only retailed for $70) and the games were equally shoddy. It was intended for kids who weren’t yet old enough for real video game systems. Only five games were released before Mattel took the thing off the market in 2006.

Gizmondo, 2005

Nintendo is the undisputed master of the portable video game domain, selling millions and millions of Game Boys and other devices. They make it look easy, which is the only way we can explain Tiger Telematics, a Swedish carpet company, thinking they could do the same. Their console was the Gizmondo, a doomed portable that was on sale for less than a year. Prone to overheating and retailing for $400, the machine sold less than 30,000 units despite a hardcore marketing blitz. Tiger Telematics lost almost $300 million producing the device and went out of business in 2006.

Apple Bandai Pippin, 1995

Looking at the Apple of today, which can do no wrong in the hardware market, it’s easy to forget that they had some tough times in the 1990s. One of their lowest points was an attempt to crack the video game console market with the Pippin. In collaboration with Japanese game company Bandai, they created a white box based on the Mac OS to compete with the recently released Sony PlayStation. Unfortunately for Apple, not only was the Pippin woefully underpowered, it was also insanely expensive, hitting retail at $600. And with only 18 games available (including can’t-miss titles like "Mr. Potato Head Saves Veggie Valley" and "Playskool Puzzles") gamers stayed away in droves. Only 42,000 consoles were sold out of more than 100,000 manufactured.

Philips CD-i, 1991

You need to hand it to Philips – they knew early on that disc storage was the future of video gaming. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the chops to capture the market. In 1991, the first CD-i consoles hit the market at a staggering $700 retail price. The system was remarkably robust, able to play all kinds of software, but the quality of the titles was uniformly horrible. The system is best remembered today for featuring titles starring Nintendo characters like Link from "The Legend of Zelda" that were made by other developers and were hilariously bad. Sales were turgid, especially after the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were introduced in 1995, and Philips cut bait on the CD-i in 1998.

Sega 32X, 1994

Sega was pretty much always in second place during the video game wars of the '80s and '90s, but that wasn’t such a bad place to be. Unfortunately, a series of bad decisions led to their gradual decline. The first was probably the introduction of the Sega 32X, an add-on to the Sega Genesis that allowed the system to play CD-ROM games. In theory, it was pretty cool, boosting the system’s processing power and allowing it to play 32-bit games. In practice, though, it flopped hard because Sega was also releasing a full-bore stand-alone CD-ROM system, the Saturn, just six months later. When a company competes with itself, it’s bound to lose, and the 32X fell off the market quickly.

Phantom, 2004

The only thing worse than a video game console that fails on the open market is one that fails before it even gets to the market. Enter the Phantom. Developers at Infinium Labs first started hyping up their revolutionary console in 2003, claiming that it would offer games on demand through a subscription service, eliminating manufacturing costs and bringing a vast library of PC games to home gamers. The release date of the system got bumped multiple times until the console was canceled in 2006. Infinium lost almost $100 million of investor money on the project.