Top 10 Game Console Failures


Older and wiser, the games industry is still no stranger to failure. Thankfully, due to a wider market and a new found ability to learn from the mistakes of the past, disasters come and go without toppling the biggest names in the industry (well, we assume they do). For those nostalgic for a time when pieces of dark colored plastic came and went in the blink of an eye, here’s a top ten list of games console failures:

10. Neo Geo

Neo Geo

The absolute hardcore of the hardcore are typically defensive of the Neo Geo’s inevitable inclusion in lists such as these, and not without reason. The fact of the matter is that the Neo Geo was about a generation ahead of the rest of the home console market and it offered some fantastic Arcade quality gaming in the home. It was basically an Arcade machine in a home console format, after all.

Collectors swear by it, but hindsight is 20/20 and eBay prices for Neo Geo cartridges are considerably less than the obscene $300 you once had to pay per game. The console itself was $650, and bares inclusion for that alone. However, it’s only a failure so far as mainstream success is a criteria for failure. The Neo Geo was clearly only ever intended for the enthusiasts and with new software titles being released as late as 2004, it actually stuck around a lot longer than consoles that sold millions more units.

9. SEGA Saturn

sega saturn

SEGA’s true 32-bit machine was scuppered in part by the 32X, a diabolical piece of hardware we get to later. The Saturn wasn’t a bad machine by any stretch of the imagination, it was merely priced to reflect the fact that it was slightly more high powered than the Playstation and therefore more expensive to manufacture. The hardware was sound, but software was a problem. Sega came out two years after release and admitted that the development tools hadn’t been great, and it wasn’t long before all confidence was lost in the machine and the people who made it. SEGA lost 30% of its employees and $260 million.

8. The Original Xbox Gamepad


Original Xbox Controller

This list continues with a smaller scale failure. Or rather a big failure, with a daftly over sized controller that (in retrospect) actually provides something of a mission statement for the Xbox brand. Though Kinect is trying to bring that coveted wider audience into the living room, it undeniably has a software library built around having massive man hands. Forget your pansy Playstation-sized gamepad for the average palm. These weathered, hard skinned hands are for strangling, not moisturizing.

Rather patronizingly, a ‘type-S’ revision was made for the Japanese market, only to be officially adopted in every region a year after the console’s release. But the stupidest thing about this mistake was that SEGA had already done exactly the same thing with the Saturn. Chunkier western model replaced by more sensibly sized Japanese version two years after release.

7. Nokia N-Gage

Nokia N-Gage

Now here’s a case of being too ahead of its time. Mobile gaming has really taken off since the N-Gage crashed and burnt, to the extent that I’m not entirely sure I won’t be putting today’s more traditional handhelds (3DS and Vita) on a list like this in five years time. We’ve even got devices like the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play doing the N-Gage thing (and not necessarily doing it better).

So why did N-Gage kick start mobile phone gaming? Well, it wasn’t a capacitive touch-screen phone for starters (that’s arguably the real revolution in handheld gaming). But it was also a classic case of a ‘jack of all trades’ device. The full phone keypad necessitated buttons too small for gaming, the screen was daftly in portrait (rather than landscape) and when you used it as a phone, it looked like you speaking into a Taco.

6. Apple Pippin

apple pippin

History may have been thoroughly rewritten on this one since the iMac onwards, but if you concentrate, you may be able to remember a time when Apple products were desperately uncool.  And thanks to the iPhone, the comic stylings of an Apple gaming console may also be lost on some of you.

The Pippin was very true to Apple’s form in the nineties. Firstly, it was grossly overpriced compared to competing devices with better features (Playstations were $300 at launch, the Pippin was double that). And secondly, only 18 games were ever made for it in North America. Manufacturing partner Bandai expanded the library to 80 titles in Japan, but it was doomed to obscurity.

5. Atari Jaguar

atari jaguar

Lies, damned lies and statistics. Atari’s last stand was sold as the first ’64-bit gaming system’, but the claim was disputed considering that the fundamental components were using 32-bit instruction sets. Of course, this meant more to us back in the days when console power was still advertised in terms of ‘bits’. But it was clear that the Jaguar didn’t have either the power or the third party support to compete with the supposedly inferior consoles from Sony and SEGA.

The Jaguar killed an Atari brand that had already suffered major setbacks in the two preceding hardware generations. 125,000 consoles were sold two years after release, with nearly as many still in inventory. Some of these ended up in UK Game stores, sold as retro novelties in the early noughties.

4. Virtually Every CD-based Console


The optical media plague that spread across the industry in the early 90s seems very strange in retrospect. Not only did a whole host of new manufacturers try to crash the console market with consoles based around CD media (CD32, CD-i and the aforementioned Pippin), but CD add-ons started growing, abscess-like on already successful machines (Sega/Mega CD being the most obvious).

They were onto something of course. The Playstation proved that optical media was the way forward for consoles, and Nintendo lost significant market share when it stubbornly stuck to cartridges in the same era. Even they were tempted into the CD add-on game with the unfortunately named N64DD.

The problem was, the possibilities of games on compact disk inspired some very lazy thinking. CDs were used for music and movies, so CDs should be used for music and movie games! A high proportion of terrible FMV games (including Night Trap and Phantasmagoria) with minimal interactivity ensured that these platforms bombed, and bombed hard.

3. Current Generation Manufacturing and Design

red ring of death

The big players are making all the right decisions with their current designs. They’re in step with the march of technology, whilst offering technology that may or may not take. Aside from the Wii’s motion control gamble, they’ve been experimental without being too risky. The thing is, one major aspect of their internal design is fundamentally flawed (or it’s intelligently designed to fail, depending on your viewpoint).

The most famous flaw of this generation is the Xbox 360’s ‘Red Ring of Death’, but the ‘Yellow Light of Death’ in Playstation 3 models is equally baleful. The failure rate of 360 consoles was once said to be about one third of all units manufactured, and a lot of the problems its suffers are down to matters as simple as airflow, and the type of solder used in manufacture. Rather pathetically, it all seems to stem from the teasing that Microsoft received over the size of its original Xbox. The 360 had the liposuction treatment, and now sits there stuffing its face all the same, a ticking time bomb of heart-disease.

2. SEGA Mega Drive 32X

SEGA Mega Drive 32 X

There’s something in the 32X philosophy that most consumers could surely get behind. Instead of buying an entirely new console every few years, simply plug something new into your old machine and enjoy several years of next generation gaming. In practice, you end up strapping 3/4s of a new console onto an old device that probably already has a pointless CD add-on, but it’s not an entirely unappealing idea.

SEGA themselves weren’t behind it anyway. Or perhaps it’s impossible to tell what exactly SEGA were behind, considering they were lining up the Neptune in addition to the Saturn. The 32X suffered the same curse of a limited games library that all the above consoles labored under and it was given the axe as soon as it became apparent that the Saturn was going to struggle against the competition.

1. Virtual Boy

virtual boy

The Goggles! They do nothing! Well actually, the goggles give you full parallax 3D game play and you can have it every colour of the rainbow. As long as it’s red. Oh, and they’re not even goggles, since the device rests on a stand and you peer into it, like a Mutoscope peep-show. With seventies visuals and a 19th Century  form factor, the three quarters of a year the Virtual Boy spent on the market in 1995-6 is actually something of an achievement. Nintendo have a pretty flawless record with their hardware releases, but when they mess up, they clearly have to mess up well.

Steph Wood is a copywriter and blogger currently working on projects for Splash Direct, a Bathroom Furniture, Fixtures and Fittings company based in the UK.

Other Articles you Might Like
Liked it? Take a second to support on Patreon!


  1. Dude, this is a great post. However, you have ruined it by not including the Sega Dreamcast – everybody knows that was a big flop, although it was actually a good console.

    • Didn’t feel the Dreamcast was as much of a flop as the Saturn or 32x though. And it certainly wasn’t as utterly insane as the Virtual Boy.

      It may have bowed out rather early, but it never let its failure get out of hand in quite the same way as those other machines. It kind of competed against itself for a bit, then ran away as soon as everyone else turned up.

      • I agree that the Dreamcast wasn’t a true failure. It was my favorite system and I felt quite awkward when I bought an Xbox, leaving my Dreamcast to its attic resting place.

        • I’d have to disagree about the Dreamcast not being a complete failure. By having absolutely zero copyright protection on the software, pirates were able to just pop a game into tthe computer and burn a copy like stealing a cd back in the day. No modchip or software patches needed to pirate a game. This meant even 12 year olds could steal games. Pirates have always made up a minority of console owners, but with the Dreamcast, everyone was a pirate except for an honest few. Probably the biggest flop in the history of consoles for that issue alone. Sure it sold more than the VirtualBoy, but software sales dirve a console and the corresponding company. Hence why SEGA went into Chapter 11 protection and now only creates software. Dreamcast dismantled that company. SO, from a business standpoint, Dreamcast is the top failure for sure. Security is a must!

        • IGN rated the Dreamcast as the 8th best console of ALL TIME. It had Shenmue,Crazy Taxi,SoulCalibur,and probably the best 3D Sonic game ever: Sonic Adventure. In Japan,they were still making Dreamcast games until 2007. And just because people pirated games on it a lot is enough for you to dismiss it,joostin? SO WHAT IF PEOPLE PIRATED GAMES ON IT? How in the world does THAT make it a bad console? It made good games,it was not poorly put together,and the ONLY reason Sega went into bankruptcy was because of the pirating dilemma. That is not the Dreamcast’s fault. PEOPLE pirated games. Lack of security did not make it a BAD console. The Dreamcast did not end Sega. THE PIRATING DID. Sega went into bankruptcy because of the pirating. Nothing on the Dreamcast was not sound. The Saturn was worse. The downward slide of Sega started when at the end of the legendary Genesis’s lifetime,they made the Sega CD add-on. DO NOT FORGET NIGHT TRAP. Then came the CD-X, and then came the 32-X. That was Sega’s death warrant.

  2. Surely the failure to end all failures was the Barcode Battler… I’m not sure if you can call it a console but this hand held games machine combined all the ergonomically inept clunkiness of the Gamegear with the banal mediocraty of scanning things.

    That’s right, no pesky buttons to push, just can a barcode on either side of the console and sit and watch with glee as two barely-visbale pokemon like beings fight to the death on an LCD screen. Just terrible…

    • Is there a barcode battler app for the current generation of smartphones? It seems like there probably would be. But anyway, not really a console, even if wikipedia seems to think so. Also, wasn’t it quite inexpensive? I can’t imagine it died on its feet like the other more commercial failures in the list.

  3. MegaDrive? NeoGeo? Xbox Gamepad? They never flopped! And I’ve lost count how many consoles ATARI made and not one of them was successful. It’s as if they had a random gaming consoles generator.

    Right now, Xbox gamepad is MUCH better than PlayStation’s. MegaDrive was great! And people still play NeoGeo.

    • The Mega Drive and Neo Geo were both failures. Atari, on the other hand, only produced 3 consoles that were poor sellers: the aforementioned Jaguar, the excellent, but poorly received handheld Lynx, and the poorly planned XEGS.

      Their earlier consoles, however, were consistent hits.

    • ” It’s as if they had a random gaming consoles generator.”
      The list doesn’t even have the Mega Drive as an entry. Please try reading the article before telling me I picked the names out of a hat.

    • “Right now, Xbox gamepad is MUCH better than PlayStation’s.”

      Right now, emphatically YES, absolutely!

      However, this list refers to the original xbox controller. That beast, nicknamed “Duke”, was an awful monstrosity. How the frack was anyone supposed to use the awkwardly placed black & white buttons? The Controller-S was a huge leap in the right direction, but it wasn’t until the 360 controller than MS really got it right. And thank goodness they did.

      So, I agree for the inclusion of the original, Duke, xbox controller. Epic console fail indeed.

      Now, Neo Geo’s more of a gray area. I think it succeeded very well in the niche it tried for. However, Steph even referenced that, and so made it a compelling addition to the list. Though
      I would have swapped Neo Geo out for the 3DO instead.

  4. Nintendo 64 was actually a damn good console it gave us mario 64, super castelvania 4 and ocarina of time and since it is a recent post i dont see what trouble you could have with modern consoles i mean, they fixed the RROD

    • actually, super castlevania 4 was a super nintendo game, not nintendo 64.i the article was talking about the nintendo 64 DD, which failed epicly. and the xbox 360 slim is much better, but the rrod and disk scratching were huge oversights.

  5. And ofcourse #1 for the top 10 consoles way ahead of the pack would be turbografx 16 that proudly still holds the record as smallest console ever more then 20 years after its release and also offering there CD upgrade kit which made it as good or better then the Wii and some would say the Xbox 360 graphics wise.
    P.S. You should of added that Nintendo/Sony console that was released inearly 90’s or maybe it should be on the top 10 considering it made Sony go on its own ditching NES I dont want to think were gaming would be without Sony and yes M$ in the later years for the online play which was already present on PC anyways

  6. If you connected a CD-ROM unit and 32X adapter to your Genesis, you could hear the electricity meter on the outside of your house hum with the increased electrical demand. When all 3 units were connected, each one had its own power supply.