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 three 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 backed by a Swedish company 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.