The hardware that history passed by
Marketed as the first 64-bit console, the Jaguar suffered from poor developer tools, a baffling 17-button controller, and a library of fewer than 70 games.
An open-licence hardware platform launched at $699.99 — twice the price of its competitors — that never attracted the software library needed to justify the cost.
Nintendo's tabletop stereoscopic console displayed red monochrome 3D graphics and caused headaches and eye strain, selling fewer than 800,000 units before being quietly discontinued.
A multimedia player that gained gaming capabilities almost accidentally — and became notorious for its four officially licensed Zelda and Mario games, widely considered among the worst ever made.
A Genesis add-on rushed to market to compete with PlayStation and Saturn announcements, cannibalising Sega's own install base and confusing consumers with a proliferating hardware ecosystem.
A technically capable console undermined by a shock early launch, a $399 price point, and a dual-CPU architecture that developers outside Japan found nearly impossible to program efficiently.
The first handheld with a colour LCD screen, hardware sprite scaling, and backlit display — launched the same year as the Game Boy but overwhelmed by Nintendo's software library and battery life advantages.
A technically capable NEC/Hudson joint venture that dominated Japan as the PC Engine but found only modest success in North America against entrenched NES and arriving Genesis competition.
A handheld promoted as a gaming PDA with internet connectivity and a touchscreen — none of which worked well — competing against the Game Boy Color with a poor game library and worse screen.
A GPS-equipped handheld run by Swedish executives with undisclosed criminal connections that sold 25,000 units at $400 before collapsing spectacularly amid a Ferrari crash scandal.
An Apple-designed multimedia platform licensed to Bandai that sold 42,000 units at $599 — one of the lowest-selling named consoles in history.
A children's educational platform combining a book-like cartridge format with a drawing surface — genuinely successful in Japan but a footnote in Western markets.
Nokia’s attempt to fuse a mobile phone and a Game Boy rival into one "taco"-shaped device, undone by an awkward design, a $299 price, and the infamous "sidetalking" call posture.
Amstrad’s 8-bit console, launched into the teeth of the 16-bit era with a threadbare library and a cartridge-supply crisis, lasting barely six months on the market.
The powerful but ill-fated successor to the Atari 2600, crippled by notoriously unreliable non-centering joysticks, a lack of backward compatibility, and the 1983 industry crash.
A full Sega Genesis you could hold in your hands, released in North America only — arriving just as Sega abandoned the Genesis, and drinking six AA batteries in under three hours.
An Amiga 500 in a black hi-fi case with a CD-ROM drive and no floppy disk drive, sold for $999 to an audience that could never work out what it was supposed to be.
The best-built handheld of its generation, with a microswitched clicking stick that fighting-game players still covet — killed not by the market but by SNK's own new owners.
Released in February 1993, the FM Towns Marty was the world's first 32-bit home console — a living-room version of Fujitsu's FM Towns computer that arrived first and sold almost nothing.
A 32-bit Japanese console from 1995 marketed specifically to girls, whose defining feature was not its games but a built-in colour thermal printer for turning screenshots into stickers.
Not a console but a chip: VM Labs' Nuon added 3D gaming to ordinary DVD players from Samsung and Toshiba, trying to put a games machine in every living room — just as the PlayStation 2 put a DVD player in every console.
NEC's successor to the PC Engine launched in Japan in December 1994 with a 32-bit CPU but no polygon hardware, betting on animated video just as the PlayStation and Saturn made 3D the only thing that mattered.
Coleco's all-in-one home computer bundled a printer, tape drives and a word processor for the price of a single competitor — then shipped late, broke often and helped drive the ColecoVision's maker towards bankruptcy.
SNK's answer to the $200 Neo Geo cartridge was a CD console with arcade-identical hardware and games at a quarter of the price — and a single-speed drive that made players wait up to a minute for each load.
A LaserDisc player that became a Mega Drive or a PC Engine when you slid in a $600 module — Pioneer's 1993 bid to own interactive video, which sold about ten thousand units.
Mattel's 1983 home computer was so underpowered that its own programmers called it "a system for the seventies". It lasted about four months on the market.
A black-and-white cartridge console with keypads built into the case instead of joysticks, launched in January 1977 — and made obsolete within the year by the Fairchild Channel F and the Atari VCS.
A $99 console from 1982 that had ports of Pac-Man, Galaxian and Defender ready to go — and never released them, because Atari's exclusive licences made them a legal risk. It lasted eighteen months.
Commodore removed the keyboard from the C64 and sold it as a £99 cartridge console in Europe in 1990. Most C64 cartridges needed a keyboard, so most of them did not work. It sold about 2,000 units.
A British console with a controller that turned into a steering wheel, flight yoke or motorbike handlebars, and an optional motorised seat. It was shown in 1989 and never shipped — but its designers' next chip became the Atari Jaguar.
A Genesis and 32X combined into one machine for under $200. Sega advertised it in 1995 and cancelled it that October, and the "prototype" in the photos was a non-working mock-up of wood and plastic.
A $30 headset that projected a red LCD game onto a mirror in front of one eye. Tiger launched it in 1995, the same year as the Virtual Boy, and it is routinely ranked among the worst consoles ever made.
Atari repackaged its 65XE home computer as a $159 games console in 1987, with a detachable keyboard and a light gun. It sold out its first production run, then faded beside the NES.