Saving the System II: More Failed Consoles that Went Wrong Instead of Right

Return to the video game graveyard and discover how so many young, plastic lives could have been prolonged.

By: Todd Ciolek
December 15, 2011

Failed game systems come in two flavors. Some are simply bad ideas, conceived in delusion and marketed in hubris. These systems, one could argue, deserve to die early and unpleasantly. Other systems aren’t to blame for their downfalls. They fail because something went wrong at a higher level, and they end up the victims of a few bad decisions, misguided marketing, or the specter of internal corporate squabbling.

We’ve covered three of these unfairly doomed systems before, and now we return to the halls of failure and the game systems that rest there. We’re playing by the same rules, so we won’t change a console’s internal, game-playing capabilities. We’ll just look at what these three game platforms could’ve done to succeed — and what happened when they didn’t.