Saving the System: Where Failed Consoles Went Wrong Instead of Right

Thanks to the power of hindsight, find out what could have rescued doomed hardware from retail death.

By: Todd Ciolek
November 4, 2011

Consoles only get one chance in the game industry, and that chance isn’t always a good one. Theirs is a crowded playing field where third place is last place and there’s no mercy for the unsuccessful. It’s tempting to wonder just how some failed systems could’ve done better, especially in the turbulent 1990s. What follows is a look at just how three consoles might have survived if they’d been marketed, funded, and supported better.

To keep this little exercise from descending into an embarrassing stretch of game-system fan fiction, we’re not going to change the systems themselves and redesign them into things they never were. Instead, we’ll consider how they could’ve fared with different approaches in the North American market — and then we’ll remind everyone of the depressing reality that took hold.