The Story Of 5 Failed Console Expansions

Runner [Music] two months ago I produced a video looking at canceled console expansions which proved to be very popular with my audience so is inevitable that a follow-up video would follow at some point and here we are but this time around we won't be looking at more canceled console expansions instead we'll be looking at five that probably should have been canceled due to how badly they failed in the market as I said in the previous video console expansions have a pretty shaky history even once it did manage to make it into the mainstream never really succeeded like their manufacturers hoped for example the PC engine super CDs lack of Western penetration or the fairly low attach rate of the Sega Mega CD for a console that was leading the market at that time but in this video we are going to be looking at those or even expansions that did well in specific regions like the famicom disk system or ColecoVision expansion module these are expansions that came with really high hopes but fail so hard they were gone within a year or so of their debuts just to make things more interesting I've also listed these in chronological order so this video also serves as historical timeline of failure as well as an education in ineptitude so with this intro out the way it's time to get on with the show as I proudly present the story of Five failed console expansions [Music] last year this Atari now the kid wants a computer a better idea the supercharger from star path don't cost much plug it in the Atari and play supercharger computer games that cost under 15 bucks each and the supercharger comes with this phaser Patrol game hmm rocket stuff and the kid can fight those common mutants from space because they're out there give your kid as available at fine stores everywhere [Music] from almost the moment the first genuine contenders the Atari 2600 hit the market people started to think about ways they could try and expand the console to keep up with the competition this included both Atari and various third parties indeed I covered one of these to Mattel's supercharger module and youfore mentioned canceled console expansions video but with this first entry on the list we look at another unit with a very similar name that did make it to market the star path supercharger or Arcadia supercharger as it was originally known and let's start on that name change actually because that's an interesting story in itself you may be aware that when the Arcadia supercharger first hit the market in August 1982 there was another console on the market that shared a very similar name in the form of the Emerson Arcadia 2001. there were not only concerns over the similarity in the company name to this new console but also potential lawsuits for trademark infringement so the company came up with a new name in Star path the design for the supercharger is actually supposed to achieve two different things expanding the stock Hardware of the Atari 2600 and reducing the cost of its games and the second part of this is particularly interesting because the storage medium for the supercharger is actually regular cassette tapes the device itself plugged into the 2600 cartridge port and added 6K of ram a big upgrade on the existing 128 bytes as well as a cable coming out the side to connect it to the headphone jack of any regular tape deck although the only real Hardware upgrade was the extra memory this on its own opened the opportunity to deliver far more advanced Graphics than seen in regular cartridge games at the time this was made most obvious by the alternative Port of Frogger that was released for the supercharger which came about because the rights for ROM cartridges and magnetic media have been sold separately by Sega this has far better visuals than the already impressive Port released by Parker Brothers there were 12 games released in total for the supercharger with two more in the Prototype phase when style path went under the timing of the superchargers release was very unfortunate in actual fact coming about just before the great North American video game Crash hit which stopped it from getting the success it really deserved however there is a somewhat happy ending to this story because after star path to declare bankruptcy the company was taken over by epics who were looking to expand into making more arcade-like games this brought them the core of the team that went on to create the Famous Games series and indeed one of those canceled supercharger games in sweat was evolved further to create the best-selling Summer Games the first in that series [Music] as we all know the first genuine rival to the market leading Atari 2600 was Mattel's much more advanced in television from the moment they started advertising the console in 1979 Patel Electronics promised the ability to convert the intellivision into a fully blown home computer by adding the keyboard component to your existing Master component and it's been said that many consoles were sold on the back of that very promise unfortunately things didn't go quite as Patel planned referred to internally as both the blue whale and the intellibutor the planned keyboard component would have offered 16 kilobytes of fully expandable Ram built-in cassette storage for programs and data an optional 40 column thermal printer and a secondary CPU to run all of these expanded features independently of the intellivision's cp1610 processor sounds a bit like the clico Adam add-on doesn't it this unit was aimed purely appearance emptying their pockets rather than the kids playing the intellivision as a range of business productivity and educational software is Promised as part of the initial lineup for the keyboard component as well as a selection of more advanced games however it soon became clear to Mattel that the ikc was far too ambitious for its own good I was going to cost far too much to produce they also discovered a number of bugs and reliability issues that stopped it working as intended David popper in television Chancellor and the rest of his Engineering Group kept going back to the drawing board time after time trying to find ways to overcome these problems with our success so Mattel took the decision to cut their losses and quietly cancel it but the people he bought a new television based on the promise of a home computer upgrade were becoming very disgruntled and complained to the Federal Trade Commission aka the FTC who launched an investigation into Mattel electronics for fraud and false advertising Mattel claimed that the keyboard component was a real product that was still being test marketed and they even released a small number of keyboard components and a handful of software titles to a select few retail stores as well as offering them via bail order to any customers who complained loudly enough in order to help support this claim it didn't really seem to satisfy the FTC though so Mattel decided to put a proposed Plan B into action this came from a second group within Mattel Electronics led by Richard Chang who had already been designing a simple computer to introduce children to basic programming but on the side they had also been asked to find solutions to the intellivision keyboard component too their idea was something called lucky standing for low user cost keyboard interface which downgraded the original specifications greatly this new unit would have just 2K of ram no secondary CPU and the option of cassette interface rather than this being standard it wasn't all bad though as it also included a built-in basic if a rather rubbish version of it two extra control ports and added a second ay3 8910 sound chip which expanded the system's audio capabilities six voice synthesized sound and can be paired with an optional 49 key music synthesizer keyboard it wasn't what was promised by Mattel but it fulfilled the obligation to provide a computer add-on for the intellivision which was ultimately enough to keep the FTC happy Patel finally unveiled their computer add-on now renamed the entertainment computer system or ECS in the last quarter of 1982. this wasn't the end of their woes with this project as they had to buy back all of the existing keyboard components from retailers and were then also hit with a lawsuit by the manufacturer contractor to make the keyboard component comp Pro Inc they sued for 10 million in Damages claiming breach of contract fraud and non-payment of the last 1 300 units bateau had no choice but to settle this lawsuit caused yet more delays that meant the ECS missed the incredibly important 1982 Christmas season and wasn't formally shown to the public until the January 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a few months later the ECS finally hit the market along with a small lineup of games and other software which was enough to get the FTC off their back and dropped the ten thousand dollar per day fines by the time the ECS made its retail debut the internal shake-up at the top of Mattel electronics and caused the company to shift its focus away from Hardware add-ons in favor of much more profitable software so the ECS wasn't widely advertised and a planned program expander that would have added another 16 kilobytes of RAM and a more sophisticated fully featured extended basics of the system was canceled in the end only half a dozen titles were released for the ECS and the project proved to be a huge loss maker for Mattel [Music] foreign console expansion brought images as sega's failed mushroom-like add-on to mind it's undoubtedly the most famous and high profile example of this video's very subject and a story that I'm sure pretty much everyone out there is more than familiar with so I go into great levels of detail on this one I think many would point to the 32x as the start of the once great company's downfall a device that only came about because of the almost endless bickering between Sega America and their Japanese parent company Sega Enterprises his bad feeling was reportedly born out of jealousy as the sake of Mega Drive had failed in Japan or it's been hugely successful in North America apparently Sega America also used to bring this point up constantly in discussions about the company's future to try and gain extra leverage in the decision-making process which further put noises out of joint in Japan and this bit of backstory is very important because it directly relates to how the 32x7 came out see over in Japan so he was so upset about the failure of the Mega Drive they just wanted to move on and saw the Saturn as their future whilst over in America Tom klinsky and his team were still riding high on success and felt that the Sega Genesis was far from dead so we're looking at ways to prolong the life of the console where it has it they're also scared about the impending release of the Atari Jaguar feeling had the potential to take the market by storm and take away sega's huge piece of the pie before the second had even landed so a 32-b expansion for the Sega Genesis was the only problem the life of the console but also rival any other new consoles coming onto the market instead of the Saturn they also wanted to release a new Standalone console called the Neptune that would combined with 32x in Genesis into one very Sleek looking unit the 32x was featured not one but two Hitachi sh2 risk processors a bit like the Saturn in many regards that would be capable of delivering over 32 000 colors and 50 000 polygons a second it also added 512k extra Ram split between main RAM and video RAM to help deliver this performance and could also be linked to the Sega Mega CD for even more advantages including much more capable full motion video released a year later than the console it was targeting the jaguar in November 1994 Sega supported the 32x along with a big advertising campaign as well as delivering a host of Big name titles including ports of hit arcade games like Virtual Fighter virtual racing and Star Wars arcade but they struggled to get third parties to sign up they were happy to sit back and see how the market played out with all these new machines like the PlayStation The Seekers and Saturn on the horizon and consumers very much seem to feel the same way happy to stick with a 16-bit consoles until they were given a really good reason to upgrade to the Next Generation despite huge interest in the add-on in January 1995 just over a year after launch it was reported that sacred sold just 600 032x units with all but 100 000 of these in North America the Saturn was due for release within the next few months they've become clear that the argument for the release of the Neptune was no longer feasible with the cost of the hardware being so close to proposed retail price of the more powerful Saturn so the decision was made to discontinue the 32x and within a matter of months they were retailing for less than a hundred dollars sixty pound Less in their original RRP just 40 games were released from 32x with six of those also requiring a mega CD add-on and the device will be forever remembered for what it did to Sega as a company rather than what it did to actually enhance the Genesis [Music] not long after Atari announced their revolutionary 64-bit Jaguar console they quashed all the queries about why I was using cartridges instead of CDs by revealing it would be joined by a CD add-on within a year of release thus going down a similar route to the Sega Mega CD and NEC super CD ROM this would give Jaguar users The Best of Both Worlds and allow Atari to refine the new technology and make relevant upgrades in the meantime the initial specs for the Jaguar CD suggested they would offer only a few basic upgrades over the existing Jaguar Hardware in the form of additional storage CD audio and full motion video along with the option of adding an MPEG cartridge a video CD compatibility but then Atari announced that the CD add-on had been delayed until 1995. there are lots of different stories flying about they explained why such as the new games not being ready Atari wanted to build a bigger user base for the console itself and most interestingly a need to revise the hardware to enable the Jaguar to better compete with the upcoming Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation but then 1995 came around and the Jaguar CD was ready for release along with the first stream of new CD based games a much room and Hardware upgrades were nowhere to be seen and the specs of the unit were identical to what was initially announced after the Jaguars debut lots of people criticize this decision and the initial run of games was do little to change people's minds the Jaguar is already selling very poorly and the Jaguar CD did little to change that both being discontinued the following year with only 15 releases in the CD format to most people it seemed absolute Madness to release such an add-on for an already failing console but you have to realize that Atari were hoping that the jagu CD would reverse the console's fortunes but given how bad the atariator wouldn't bungle The Joker itself the Jaguar CD was very much doomed from the start much of the early CD software was lackluster with titles like blue Lightning baldies and Primal Rage criticized for being on CD in the first place but it's pretty clear they could have been played from cartridges just as well better in the case of Primal Rage in fact it is horrendous loading times promised big name CD focused titles like Mortal Kombat 3 Black Ice white noise and Demolition Man never arrived with around 90 of all announced Shaker CD games being canceled due to its failure in the market what's particularly interesting about this is that the initial run of Jaco CD and it's produced by Philips of just 25 000 units sold out almost immediately and Atari had another 25 000 units in order however it's widely thought that the second run whenever actually produced and this is the reason why working Jacob CD animals are now so rare and sought after [Music] almost as soon as Nintendo and out the then Ultra 64 console there was one big question on everyone's lips why was it using cartridges instead of CDs compact discs has already become the default format for video games with the emergence of the pccd ROM as the dominant computer platform and of course the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn the then Market leaders in the console industry indeed another cartridge-based 64-bit console had already failed in the form of the Atari Jaguar with its own aforementioned attempt to rectify that mistake in the form of the Jaguar CD add-on failing even harder so why did Nintendo think that this was a good idea well Nintendo's surname to calm people's concerns in a series of magazine interviews where they claimed that a CED add-on for the ultra 64 would be released in June course but almost as soon as the duty renamed Nintendo 64 console hit the market all the chatter about the CD add-on went quiet and stayed that way with Nintendo staying pretty tight-lipped on the subject then in 1999 three years after the console's launch Nintendo finally made an announcement regarding a disc based add-on for their newest console rather than utilizing CDs they would return to another dying medium floppy disks and people were rightly baffled by the move called the Nintendo 64 Dynamic Drive or N64 DD for short it would plug into the extension port on the other side of the console and enable it to use proprietary 64 megabyte magnetic discs for expanded and rewritable data storage as well as featuring a real-time clock Fountain audio library for further storage efficiency and a modem for online play and various other services describing it as the first writable bulk data storage device for a modern video game console Nintendo very much painted the 64 DD as some sort of Revolution that would introduce new types of advanced games that had never been seen before it was launched in Japan in December 1999 with Western releases to follow however as history tells us that never happened because the n64dd was far from what was promised by Nintendo and was riddled with issues that must have left Sony rubbing their hands into light firstly there was The Limited storage capacity of just 64 megabytes per disk compared to around 700 megabytes for a CD there was also the increased unreliability of magnetic media and finally the proprietary format of disk that Nintendo used which should also be more expensive to produce than a CD discouraging third-party developers just as the use of cartridges had done before it Nintendo announced that they had produced half a million N64 DD units and expected the takeout to be high but sales were almost non-existent with only 15 000 users signing up for the online service and the Western release completely canceled the add-on was discontinued just over a year after its release and despite there being over 60 games announced for the N64 DD just nine yes nine were released four of which were Mario artist productivity packages making things even worse this absolutely dismal failure in the marketplace means that the n64dd goes down as by far Nintendo's biggest failure [Music] [Music] another one time I look at five failed console expansions can you think of any of the enhancement add-ons that failed in the marketplace or did you actually own one of these back in the day I want to share your experiences we also love to hear the thoughts and views of my audience so please get talking in that comment section before I go though I must think all of my old patrons and continue to support my channel and make videos like this possible however special thanks to following patreon to YouTube hackers in particular they're much appreciated pledges Grady Haynes mucho Valentino Saturday Robinson Carl Olson dos gamerman Sonic Mania 999 Paul Daniel Andrew McKay retro resolution Matt Standish James Taylor trogged all the berninator mins a big guy big mcmc Ben P Stein Tabby kitson Daniel skoronsky and electron star collapse if you also want to help support all my creative Endeavors including this YouTube channel then please go check out my patreon right now you can get access to hotels.com technically in downloads exclusive videos creative insights and much well besides I've been the lad I thank you for watching and I'll see you all again for another video very soon

Channel: The Laird's Lair

Views: 16,839

Keywords: Atari Jaguar, Atari, Jaguar CD, Jag CD, Sega, Mega Drive, Genesis, Mega CD, Sega CD, 32X, Nintendo 64, N64 DD, Atari 2600, Atari VCS, CD-ROM, N64, Starpath, Super Charger, Epyx, Arcadia, Mattel, Intellivision, ECS, Keyboard, Keyboard Component, Expansion, Add-On, Peripheral, INTV, Randnet, Compro, Advert, Commercial, FTC, Online, Famicom, Mortal Kombat 3, Primal Rage, Dave Chandler, Richard Chang, Specs, Tom Kalinske, Japan, CES, Saturn, PlayStation, Module, Disk, Tape, Home Console, Summer Games, Cartridge

Id: L-gQmHcpo54

Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023