Repackaged computers

One of the things I wrote about last year was add-ons to make video game consoles into full computers. (link, the original piece is toward the bottom). What I failed to keep in mind was some old computers repackaged as video game consoles and could be made back into computers again.

The first console to do this was the Atari XEGS. It was released in 1987 by Atari Corporation and was based on the aging Atari 8-bit computer line. It was a failure due to a few reasons: Nintendo practically owned the console market and even a large library of legacy releases (and peripherals!) couldn't save them, Jack Tramiel's Atari Corporation had terrible marketing, and the fact it was sharing shelf space with the Atari 2600 (now a redesigned budget console called the Atari 2600jr) and the Atari 7800 (backwards compatible with the 2600 but less expensive than the XEGS). Needless to say, it flopped, and the three consoles were eventually discontinued for the Atari Jaguar, which did poorly as well.

Meanwhile, Tramiel's former company, Commodore, released a repackaged version of the Commodore 64 in Europe only (inexplicably, not the USA) called the "Commodore 64 Games System" in 1989-1990, which bombed due to the fact that it was just a stripped-down C64 that retailed for about the same price.

The Commodore Amiga CD32 was also released by Commodore only in Europe (an American version was planned but scuttled due to a federal law injunction), which was far more successful than the C64GS: it was essentially a repackaged Amiga computer released in 1993, and one of the very first 32-bit systems released. And despite the fact it could run Amiga software and hardware, it couldn't save Commodore, which went out of business soon after.

Possibly the most interesting one is the Pippin, Apple's attempt at a game console. The first mistake was making the technology and putting it up to different manufacturers to relabel it (which killed the CD-i and 3DO). So it wasn't Apple's fault directly for making it bad. The thing wasn't very good: it was marketed an Internet appliance but only had a 14.4k modem (which was pretty slow and low-end even for '95 standards) and wasn't as good as the "real" Macs or even the game consoles it competed against. Maybe it could've done better if it wasn't done by Bandai (pretty much the only manufacturer who signed on, a European one signed on later but made no games) and had one of the worst launch titles ever. As a result the Pippin was a complete failure, and one that Apple (and Namco Bandai) has tried to forget. Today, the "@World" (Bandai's name for it) is a rarity and an interesting collector's item that can run the Mac OS natively with a keyboard and mouse, but there's very little point to it.

I wish there was another manufacturer who tried the Pippin, it seemed like a horribly mangled good idea. I've expressed a desire that they could make a "plug-and-play" Pippin much like the Commodore 64, Sega Genesis, and Atari 2600 before it that could in theory be modified to a full system. Alas, it will never happen...

EDIT: No sooner had I written this that I discovered that there was a kid's computer released in 1997 by Tiger Electronics called the Tiger Learning Computer based on the Apple IIe and had real Apple IIe programs (like AppleWorks 4.0 for the Apple II) but there wasn't any floppy drive...they replaced it with a proprietary cartridge port. And thanks to the quirky and outdated behavior of the included programs (you could select you wanted to make a spreadsheet in AppleWorks, but it would prompt you to insert the disk, which of course, you couldn't). Reportedly it never made it out of test marketing in certain cities. However, it's not really listed here because it wasn't advertised as a game console, it was a kid's computer.