Just browsing through Wikipedia and looking at the old consoles. Some I owned, some relatives or friends owned, some I’ve heard of, but never played, and some I’ve never heard of.
So, most of us know the most successful ones, but what are some consoles that you think should be remembered more highly? You know, the one that was actually good but way too expensive or had good tech and bad games, or was badly advertised or the company screwed up financially and didn’t launch it well. That sort of thing.
Mattel’s Intellivision. It had much better graphics than the Atari 2600 (its contemporary / competitor), but there were fewer games available for it (relatively few third-party games were made), and while it was successful for a short time, but it crashed and burned in '83, and Mattel spun it off.
Sega Dreamcast. It had great graphics, a great selection of games, and an interesting and new form of interaction with the controller itself in the form of the memory card which had an LCD screen and a tiny speaker - capable of only crude graphics and sounds, but still a really unique concept for the time. This concept would not come back into play until the Playstation 4.
I thought both the SNES and Genesis were the most rated (in their area of the time). SNES for best tech, Genesis for best game selection. Hardly underrated.
I have to admit, they fall into the “highly rated” video game systems of their era, to me. Unlike the previously mentioned Intellivision. I found out recently that my uncle had one back then (he didn’t like the controller, and so he sold it).
Intellivision had some pretty big hitting titles though - they had Donkey Kong, Pitfall, Dungeons and Dragons, Defender, and Frogger, among others.
However, it just got squished by the advance of technology. It was way better than the Atari 2600 but they were both out of date by mid-1983; things were moving FAST back then and a wave of home computers was torpedoing console sales.
Games like Donkey Kong or Frogger were on every system (and Colecovision had the home version of DK anyway) but Intellivision’s AD&D game was likely the first taste of first person adventuring a lot of people had and Utopia was the grandfather of the God Sim.
Wait, DID Intellivision have DK? I thought they had their own knockoff (Beauty & the Beast) because they didn’t have Donkey Kong.
Quoting my houseguest (he’s the sort of guy that buys old systems he had as a kid and resolders or otherwise restores some of them) :
To be underrated, it would have to be a good console which did not sell well or was otherwise not recognized. In that context, my friend suggests ColecoVision, the TurboGrafx-16, and Atari Lynx.
having owned every game system up to the ps2 except 4 (the 5200, odyssey, 1 and 2, Vectrex)
if the Colecovision had come out 2 years earlier than it did and not had such a horrible launch (a lot of systems had to be returned)it would have creamed atari but it didn’t do too bad
It actually says (though it’s hard to read), “Not for use with Intellivision II.” Wikipedia indicates that some of the Coleco games for Intellivision didn’t work with the second-generation Intellivision II, as Mattel apparently made a change to the ROM, to discourage third-party games (and, thus, I’m guessing, get owners to preferentially buy Mattel games).
Neat. I only knew two people who owned an Intellivision (my cousins and the kid across the street) and both owned Beauty & the Beast and neither owned DK so just assumed B&tB was basically “Intellivision Donkey Kong”.
Seconding the Dreamcast. Dollar for dollar, it was the best system I’ve ever owned. The loading times and graphics were way beyond anything the PSX (an excellent system in its own right) was capable of. The video-in-video memory card was way ahead of its time (I had a lot of fun with Gun Gun Slots!), and it could play four players without any overpriced peripheral. The game selection was comparable to the PSX plus lots of incredibly cool arcade-style titles older systems could never handle. I can’t count the hours I’ve burned on Sports Jam, Giga Wing, Street Fighter 3, Hydro Thunder, Chu Chu Rocket, Power Stone and Power Stone 2, NBA on NBC, it just goes on and on.
Everyone…absolutely everyone…was completely hellbent on tearing this system down. Nobody liked it. Nobody thought it had a chance. Just another Sega flop. From beginning to end all I heard was how the PS2 was going to completely gobble it up. A system which would not even be available to about 99.99% of its customer base for longer than most of them have been in college. (Remember? The constant shortages? The interminable waiting times? Month after month after month of empty shelves?) I mean, yeah, it eventually did (as did the XBox once Microsoft figured out how to make the thing actually freaking work), but could we not jump the gun by over three years? Sheesh.
Granted, there were problems with the Dreamcast…it was annoyingly prone to failures after the first few months and the peripheral support wasn’t too good…but it deserved a much better shake than it got.
I don’t know about underrated but we had two less popular consoles when I was a kid.
When NES was huge in the mid-80s, the kids in my household were cruelly deprived. In fact, one morning, we went garage sale-ing and coincidentally wound up at one held by a family that had a kid in my class and another kid in my brother’s class. They had NES and sold us their disused and badly obsolete Magnavox Odyssey 2, released in 1978. Us kids made the best of it but it didn’t have Mario, Megaman or the Metroid we really wanted. We didn’t get NES until about 1988.
A few years later, we went to a church charity picnic of some kind and won an Atari Jaguar console. It was billed as 64 bit but that’s controversial at best. The prize included one game, a Mortal Combat-ish fighting game called (looks up*) Kasumi Ninja. It was pretty lame.
*I couldn’t remember what it was called but knew there was a kilt-wearing, Scottish caricature character named Angus in the game.
My brother had the Jaguar and it was, overall, quite terrible. But the Alien Vs Predator first person shooter actually was tremendous fun, and I liked how you can play as three different characters: alien, Predator, and marine, with different capabilities for each. But holy shot did that console have some stinkers. We bought Club Drive on clearance, and it wasn’t even worth the five or ten bucks we bought it for. Ugh.
The Intellivision was quite good, but that controller sucked. The little number pad and overlays were an interesting idea, but it was just a mess of a controller, you’d lose the overlays, and that directional wheel was annoying. I mostly played backgammon on it, plus a game called Utopia which may have been the first or at least one of the first of the city-building games.
