MR BIFFO
Our columnist looks at the consoles that arrived a little ahead of their time
Equally stupid-but loveable from Tiger was the Game.com
The history of gaming is littered with well-intentioned failures, flat-out disasters, and cynical, half-baked attempts to surf the zeitgeist. However, something I’ve come to realise is that – for all the warm, nostalgic, glow I may get from manhandling a ZX Spectrum, or an Astro Wars machine – it’s the also-ran hardware which I find more interesting than those which were a commercial success.
Often, these systems arrived at the wrong time, or were too ill-considered, or were too esoteric to ever find a foothold. The boldness of many of them is what I find myself appreciating. They’re the systems which took a risk, and in some cases paved the way for others to improve upon their noble experimentation.
We all know about the Virtual Boy – Nintendo’s first ill-judged foray into 3D – but less documented are systems like Tiger’s R-zone. Released the same year as the Virtual Boy, it boasted a sort of heads-up display which projected a bog-standard LED handheld game onto a screen that hovered just in front of the user’s eye. They released a tabletop version – which used a terrible screen akin to one of those old Seventies slideviewers my parents had for their family photos – and it was so monumentally stupid, it’s hard not to love it.
Equally stupid-but-loveable from Tiger was the Game.com – a black and white Game Boy challenger (released a full eight years after the full-colour
Atari Lynx), which had a touchscreen and internet connectivity. Somehow, Tiger acquired the rights to release versions of Sonic the Hedgehog, Resident Evil and Duke Nukem on the system. It all sounds good until you actually play the thing, and realise it had one of the worst displays in gaming history.
Grandstand is best known for its many, many tabletop and handheld LCD and LED games – having begun life releasing Pong clones – but it too dabbled in releasing a console with
interchangeable cartridges. However, Grandstand Light Games was no mere Tv-based consoles; it featured a built-in projector, allowing you to play games on your bedroom wall, or a cow’s stomach. It’s a great idea, way ahead of its time, but the fuzzy projection, and the basic LCD graphics, rendered it all but pointless.
Thing is, machines such as these – or the lostforever Konix Multisystem – have, in their own way, made a valid contribution to gaming history. Alright, you might not want to spend the rest of your life playing the R-zone instead of a Gamecube, but who’s more entertaining to talk to at a party; somebody who has their shiz together and will drone on about curtains and real estate who has never taken a risk in their life, or the one with the psychological scars with tales of failure to tell?
Where once we might have scoffed at these audacious follies, it’s long overdue that we stopped dismissing them, and embraced them as a vital part of gaming’s heritage. Or at least, paused to consider these for five or ten minutes before resuming our pointing and laughing.