Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Oct 31st, 2007
In past installments, I’ve discussed consoles and computers that ranged from the merely bad (the Emerson Arcadia 2001, Commodore Plus/4) to the ill-concieved (Nintendo Virtual Boy, Mattel Aquarius) to the downright “What were they smoking?†(ActionMax). All of which had two things in common (apart from generally varying degrees of sucktitude): First, they were all short-lived systems that barely registered as blips on the radar of the industry as a whole.
But therein lies the second thing they all had in common – if nothing else, they at least did make it to store shelves in the first place. Which is more than can be said for the consoles we’ll look at in today’s Retro-Active!
That’s right – on this Halloween night we’ll be delving into the frightful world of the “vaporware†systems, the ones that whether by management whims or just plain common sense never made it out of prototype stages. (And, in some truly scary cases, not even that far!)
Magnavox Odyssey Command Center (AKA Odyssey³): By 1982 Magnavox was clearly on the ropes in the video game market. The Odyssey², despite having sold over a million units, was on its deathbed, having had its system clock cleaned by Atari and Mattel, and the launch of Coleco’s advanced Colecovision system seemed to spell the tragic end of this particular Odyssey. Not all the video/board game hybrids or voice-enabled software in the world would save the O2 from becoming the first high-profile casualty of the console wars.
But Magnavox was not yet prepared to concede defeat. After all, they had literally launched the entire industry with the original 1972 Odyssey – they weren’t just going to give up and abandon a market they felt they should own by right of creation. Besides, the company did have enough success marketing the O2 in other countries through its international Philips division (under various names, including Videopac and Jopac) to stay afloat in the increasingly competitive field. Thus in 1983, they announced they were working on a new “next-generation†console to replace the O2 and compete with the more advanced systems on their own turf – the Odyssey Command Center.
Sometimes (inaccurately) referred to as the Odyssey³, the Command Center boasted the ability to play three different kinds of games. First, of course, were its own line of cartridges, boasting near-Colecovision quality audiovisuals. Second, it was going to be backwards-compatible with all existing O2 cartridges. And finally, there was a line of late-release O2 games that would play perfectly fine on the older system, but when plugged into a Command Center would reveal colorful, high-resolution backgrounds not available to those who didn’t choose to upgrade.
Unlike the other consoles I’ll be discussing in this installment, the Command Center actually qualifies as more than vaporware; about a dozen fully-functional prototypes were demoed at a CES-style show in 1983, of which at least two survive today. Although long thought to have been buried, in the late ’90s researchers discovered that the Philips Videopac G7400, released only in European countries, was actually a rebadged Command Center. So in a roundabout way, this ambitious project actually did get to see the light of day… just not in America, where the onset of the Great Crash compelled Magnavox to abandon ship.
Mattel Intellivision III: The original Intellivision holds a special place in the hearts of many Golden Age gamers. Who could ever forget the famous George Plimpton ads showing exactly how pathetic Atari’s Home Run looked in comparison to Inty’s baseball game? Or the two Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games available for the system, among the first true “epic†adventure/RPGs ever done for a console? Or perhaps you have fond memories of the TRON games, or Utopia, or Sea Battle, or any number of unique and fun games with no real equivalent elsewhere. Intellivision holds a distinction today as being the only “classic†console (apart from the Atari 2600) that survived the Great Crash, albeit in mail-order form, and continued to have new product released for it until 1989, well into the NES era. It’s also the only console from that era with intellectual property that’s now owned by the original development team for most of its games (the Blue Sky Rangers), who have since blazed a trail in terms of how retrogaming collections should be presented. In all, not a bad legacy at all for the console that at its height still ran a distant second to Atari.
But as any Inty fan knows, Mattel (who clearly had little idea how the video game industry worked) wasn’t exactly the sanest company to work for. Every week it seemed Marketing came up with some new scheme, some new gimmick that they were convinced would pole-vault Intellivision past Atari. Whether it was picking up doomed licenses for the 1984 Winter Olympics and the Rocky & Bullwinkle characters, releasing a steady stream of second-tier arcade titles (Lock ‘n’ Chase, Loco-Motion, Bump ‘n’ Jump), or pushing out an ill-concieved keyboard attachment to get around an FTC sanction against them for not delivering on a promised computer add-on, it was as if the marketroids were in a hurry to run Mattel Electronics out of business… which did in fact happen in early 1984, and nearly took the world’s largest toy manufacturer with them. And the Intellivision III was yet another example of Marketing run amok.
While the Intellivision II was a low-cost reissue of the original console (with cheaper build quality), Inty III was going to be a new system built from the ground up. It would feature simplified “trigger-style†joystick controllers with low-profile keypads, graphics on par with (if not surpassing) Colecovision, a built-in Intellivoice module to play voice-enabled games without a hardware add-on, and full backwards compatibility with original Inty games out of the box. And perhaps the best news of all for Inty fans: the new console would use actual joysticks, not the dicey control disc of old!
But, as with most things at Mattel, Marketing just couldn’t leave well enough alone. They demanded every additional feature they could think of be put in the system – everything from a four-player interface to wireless controllers to an integrated Intellivoice, all added mostly because Marketing decided they could ask for them. We now call this sort of thing “feature creep.†And with each new feature, the developers had to go back to the drawing board and find some way to squeeze it in somehow. Worse yet, they insisted that working demos of Inty III games be prepared for Winter CES in 1983… which would have been quite a trick, considering there wasn’t even a working prototype of an Inty III motherboard yet, let alone an OS to program for! Although some games were in fact demoed at the CES, they were actually “normal†Inty game demos, works in progress really, with what were deemed better-than-average graphics and/or sound.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Intellivision III never made it out of R&D before Mattel, hemmorhaging money by this point, ordered the plug pulled on the project. (Unbelievably, like compulsive gamblers who just don’t know when to walk away from the craps table, they were beginning work on a top-secret “Intellivision IV†project before Mattel Electronics shuttered!) But even this was not the end of the story. Following the founding of INTV Corporation, which would see Inty fans through the remainder of the ’80s, there were plans on the table to somehow resume development on the abandoned Inty III project, but – again – those plans never materialized into anything tangible (save for one INTV catalog touting it as “coming soonâ€).
(As a final note: Once their leftover Mattel stock of Intellivision systems ran out, INTV decided to reissue the original 1979-model console as the rebadged “INTV System III.†Needless to say, this is not the Intellivision III that was being worked on at Mattel, and should not be confused with it.)
Active Enterprises Action Gamemaster: Action 52, a little-known (in its day), ultra-rare unlicensed NES multicart from 1991, has become infamous in retrogaming circles as being quite possibly the worst cartridge ever made for that system (if not the worst of all time for any console!). It retailed for around $200 and featured 52 original games, none of which rose much beyond typical COMPUTE! magazine type-in BASIC quality (anyone remember those?). Worse, they were extremely buggy, with frequent crashes and incomplete levels. Several games simply flat-out refused to run at all, and are ironically only playable in emulators (which often break some of the games that did work on the actual silicon!).
The “creative†minds behind Action 52, Active Enterprises, seemed unbowed by the near-universal scorn in which their inaugural product was held by the gaming community. They even released a version for the Sega Genesis, and planned on spinning off the flagship game in the cartridge, The Cheetahmen, as a true multimedia franchise in the mold of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! And at the height of their hubris, they even planned on marketing their own handheld/portable console – the Action Gamemaster – which was announced at the 1994 CES.
Where do I begin with this thing? Well, for starters, it was going to be 100% compatible with NES cartridges… and SNES cartridges… and Sega Genesis cartridges… and even CD-ROM games (presumably SegaCD)… in addition to games written specifically for the Action Gamemaster itself! All of this compatibility was to be achieved via the use of cartridge/disc adapters, “each sold separately†as they used to say on Saturday mornings.
It gets better. There was to be a TV tuner, apparently built into the system. Car and AC adapters were also standard, and supposedly there was to be a TV output as well. Kitchen Sink Syndrome, anyone?
Just too many ideas, and not nearly enough industrial clout to get it pulled off. Naturally, if you thought Nintendo was about to let any system not their own run their cartridges, you’re crazy; this is, after all, the same company that once staged a public bulldozing of “pirate†NES systems and multicarts. Sega, despite the perception of being rather less monopolistic in intent than Nintendo at the time, felt similarly about the Genesis (though they did license the Genny technology to JVC for the X’Eye cartridge/CD system). The upshot of all this is that, had the Action Gamemaster been released with these adapters available, Active Enterprises would have absolutely been up a certain creek.
Not that it mattered anyway, since Active saw the light and pulled out of the video game market in 1994, with little to no work actually having been done on the Action Gamemaster or any of its promised hardware. All that remains of this system today are some preliminary design sketches and any leftover CES literature mentioning it. Not even the Cheetahmen could prevent this infamous vaporware from historical obscurity…
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If you liked that, try...
- Atari Exits Game Development
- Retro-Active: Consoles That Never Made It
- Retro-Active: Computers That Never Made It
- Retro-Active: Action 52 (Genesis)
- Switching Sides - A Gamer’s Lament(?)
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Ah yes, the Cheetahmen. Oddly enough, I think that idea would work today, what with the internet and its unearthing of all of the strange fetishes out there. You know the ones I’m talking about. But seriously… poorly designed anthro’ed Cheetahs whose idea of great costumes were hite T-shirts? Yeah, serious threat to the TMNT, I’m sure.
But you’re right — that cart was as buggy as hell, and featured graphics that weren’t even up to Atari 2800 standards. That is, when you could get the game to load.
WHITE T-Shirts, rather.