VM Labs · 2000–2004 · Unknown (negligible; eight games released)
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.
Nuon was VM Labs' attempt to sneak a games console into homes by hiding it inside something people were already buying. Rather than sell a standalone machine, VM Labs licensed the Nuon chipset to DVD-player manufacturers — Samsung and Toshiba among them — so that a Nuon-enhanced DVD player, released from 2000, could both play movies with fancy navigation features (zoom, smooth scanning) and run 3D video games from special discs. The pitch was elegant: every DVD player sold could be a games console, reaching an installed base no dedicated console could match. The timing could hardly have been worse. Sony's PlayStation 2 launched in March 2000 and made exactly the opposite bet — instead of putting a game system inside a DVD player, it put a DVD player inside a game console, and that combination became one of the PS2's most powerful selling points. A cheap way to watch DVDs that also played the biggest game library in the world comprehensively out-argued a DVD player that also played eight obscure games. Nuon was competing for the same living-room space against the best-selling console of all time, and against the Xbox behind it. The software never materialised. Only around eight games and four enhanced movies were ever officially released in the West, the most notable being Jeff Minter's Tempest 3000, alongside titles like Merlin Racing, Iron Soldier 3, and Ballistic. That was nowhere near enough to give anyone a reason to seek out a Nuon-branded player over any other, and with licensing returns too low to sustain the company, VM Labs' funding fell through in late 2001. The company was soon declared bankrupt and sold to Genesis Microchip, which stripped it for parts. By November 2004 no Nuon-enabled players were shipping and no new software was in development. Nuon is a case study in a good idea beaten by a better one at the worst possible moment. The dot-com crash and the broader downturn hurt it, but its real problem was structural: it answered the question "how do we get a game machine into the living room?" at the exact moment Sony answered the same question far more convincingly from the other direction. The convergence of games and movie playback that Nuon bet on did happen — it just happened inside the PlayStation 2, not inside a DVD player.