Destructoid Checkpoint: The Games Console Graveyard

Gaming has had a lot of hardware failures. Seemingly smart enough ideas to make it through ideation, prototyping, manufacturing, and eventual sale, but that just never went on to set the industry on fire. In light of the coming hardware generation, let’s take a look at some famous failures and how tenuous a grip even major players can have on the chance of success.

The Atari Jaguar (1993)

The Atari Jaguar launched into controversy. Touted as the world’s very first 64-bit game system, it possessed the fatal flaw of being difficult to develop for due to a complex architecture and poor programming tools. This difficulty led to a small library, and having to compete against the Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and the game-changing Sony PlayStation turned it into an also-ran.

Most importantly, Atari was out of friends at this stage. Third parties were not willing to overcome inherent issues to produce games because Atari had failed to bank any goodwill through years of mismanagement. The controller was also a headscratcher, with too many buttons and a terrible form factor. The Jaguar would be the beginning of the end for the company that had started it all.

The Virtual Boy (1995)

Back in 1995, Nintendo believed they were getting a jump on the whole virtual reality thing by introducing stereoscopic 3D to the home market. Designed by Gunpei Yokoi, a man who helped change gaming forever with the development of the D-pad, the Virtual Boy was designed under intense time pressure, launched with a small library of games, and generally failed to live up to what people wanted from virtual reality in the first place.

The system itself was uncomfortable, caused headaches and nausea, and came with warnings to take regular breaks while using it, which is essentially the antithesis of what people want while gaming. With tight budgetary constraints stripping away important features in order to have something that could be reasonably priced for curious consumers, this was, in a way, the complete opposite of what had made the Game Boy so successful. The importance of matching the required development time with the right launch window cannot be understated. 

Sega Dreamcast (1999)

If the Jaguar ended a dynasty, then the Dreamcast was the start of a whole new era. Considered ahead of its time for good reason, the Dreamcast was looking toward an online multiplayer future with a built-in modem, online browsing, 128-bit graphics, and more. It also had a superb library, with games like Soulcalibur, Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, and Phantasy Star Online keeping the idea alive that Sega truly was a valued and capable competitor to Nintendo. 

In the world of entertainment, steel sharpens steel, and a competitor on the ropes doesn’t lead to forced improvements. What killed the Dreamcast wasn’t its own failings, although the lack of a CD-ROM was not a strong look; it had just been too long since Sega was truly relevant in gaming, and it lost two generational battles with the Genesis and 32X. 

Meanwhile, the PlayStation 2 offered people a shot at the world’s cheapest DVD player, and the loss of third-party support delivered a killing blow. This was the case of an overall great product having just a couple of flaws that stopped it dead because the opposition, at the time, had none.

Ouya (2013)

The Ouya is one of the most interesting consoles of the modern era, more for how it came to be than for what it actually did. It was perfectly placed to take advantage of crowdfunding, pulling in a Kickstarter fund north of $8 million. The console was supposed to put development in the hands of the internet, with an open-source, hacker-friendly device for a mere $99. The premise was that it would take advantage of the indie surge, tapping into talent all around the world outside the traditional studio and console structures.

There was a gulf between expectation and delivery. A $99 console sounds great until it’s in your hands and you discover all the corners that were cut to reachh that price point. It also didn’t really have much to offer in the growing world of smartphones. The Ouya will go down in history as evidence that just because you can raise funding, it doesn’t mean you can build a product.

Google Stadia (2019)

Technically, this is the highest-profile failure on the list, just because it’s Google. That said, the company fails far more than they succeed, so maybe this was destiny. Everyone wants to be the Netflix of gaming, and this was Google’s effort. Stadia was supposed to let you stream games from powerful data centers that did all the tough computing for you. Google even paid big money to get big games, like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077, as well as investing in first-party studios. 

Stadia’s failure was largely due to greed. Google wanted to be Netflix only when it came to ensuring you didn’t own anything, but not when it came to payment. You would have to pay full price for data that would reside on their servers only as long as their servers were on. Google’s history of pulling the plug on projects didn’t inspire confidence, and the system never got going in any meaningful sense before Google called it a day.

The good news here is that refunds were offered for hardware and software, so at least people were not left out of pocket.

There are nearly endless lessons to pull from the history of gaming hardware, so we can only hope that the current console makers learn from them.

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And that’s it for this week!