
Nonethelesss, we have cherry-plucked ten of the more notable console failures for your enjoyment. Let The Celebration of Defeat commence!
Not even a depressingly woeful TV commercial - that tried to sell the system on the strength of how many colours could be displayed on screen at any one time (every gamer's priority, even then) - could prevent this cheap-feeling box of acrid cat vomit from having all the staying power of an impotent drifter. Consider it the gaming equivalent of a 38 year-old man rocking up to student night at a university bar while cosplaying as Chun-Li.
And to think... they all sneered at us when we said the Amiga was dead. Idiots.
The Multisystem was meant to arrive with a controller that could transform from joypad to steering wheel to joystick - and optional extras including light guns, and that hydraulic chair thing above (as demonstrated by "Jumper Jesus"). We do confess to being more than a little excited when we saw previews in the games mags. Unfortunately, Konix bit off more than it could chew with the Multisystem - and eventually ran out of cash before it could ever be released.
Konix? Wrongix, more like. Pwned.
The terribly-named GX4000 was Sugar's stab at entering the console market - and the pack-in racer Burnin' Rubber promised much (even if it wasn't a game about BDSM friction burns, as we'd hoped). Regrettably, that was about the only game ever released for the thing. It was eventually canned after shifting just 15,000 units. Silly Sugar. Silly sod.
Which is a shame, as the unit clearly made wearers look like Cyclops out of the X-Men. If he suffered from elephantiasis of the eyelids.
Hilariously, Nokia initially claimed to have shifted 400,000 N-Gages worldwide in its first two weeks on sale, before this was downgraded - following the release of figures published by market research firm Chart-Track - to a slightly less impressive 6,000.
So. Basically. We were right. We've always been right. Eh, Amiga owners - y'big eejits ye?
Intriguingly, the format (there were multiple different models of hardware) was the first non-Nintendo system to feature Nintendo characters: the Zelda and Mario franchises appeared as the aforementioned tedious edutainment titles. The perfect gift for the child you hate.
Another interesting fact (again; this isn't interesting): the one exclusive news story Digitiser ever managed to break was something to do with the launch of the 32X, that we overheard in the foyer of Sega Europe HQ. Sega's PR guy was baffled as to our source, but perhaps not as baffled as he must have been when he opened the notebook on his desk later that week, to find a penis drawn on one of the pages. We'll solve that mystery for you now: it was us.
No doubt, it didn't help that players had to hunch over a dining table in order to use the thing, meaning that long-term play led to curvature of the spine, probably.
The unreleased Jaguar Duo was meant to combine the original 64-bit "wet trump" with the even moister honk that was the Jaguar CD. However, like a slow-motion plane crash, Atari's financial woes finally put paid to the Duo - as it did to everything Jaguar-branded.
And, indeed, Atari itself - a company not so much mauled to death by a jaguar, as being asphyxiated by having one fall asleep on its face.
It proved to be a foolish move, when the device failed to appear, and Sony ploughed all its work to date on a standalone console of its own - and a brand that continues to give Nintendo brainaches to this day. Oh, Nintendo... it's like that film where the guy accidentally gives birth to Hitler, then goes back in time and murders Hitler... forgetting that HE WAS HITLER ALL ALONG!!!
Note: we may have misremembered that film.
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