A few years ago, I found myself in a flea market in downtown Montreal. Amid dusty furniture and faded French-Canadian comic books, I saw something that piqued my interest: a large black plastic box—a cross between a Nintendo 64 and something you might pull from the wreckage of a jetliner. Placed on top of it was a pair of sleek gray boomerang-style controllers and what appeared to be a modem. The device was simple and utilitarian, yet it had a hint of style. The colorful logo on the front of the device read “Pippin @WORLD.” What the hell was this thing?
A chain-smoking salesman seated nearby told me it was some kind of gaming system from Apple. It was mine if I had a hundred bucks. I contemplated snapping it up, but I figured it was unlikely to work—not to mention the fact that I’d have to track down games for it. The Pippin, however, always stuck in the back of my mind.
Today, the Pippin is a curious footnote in Apple’s corporate history, a device long since laid to rest alongside the TurboGrafx-16 and the Sega Dreamcast; dug up and enjoyed almost exclusively by a few masochistic hardware modders and eBay traders. And yet, Apple is now a leader in the video game industry, with players choosing from countless titles on the iPhone and iPad. In fact, last year, iOS and Google Play apps outsold portable games from Nintendo and Sony, according to a recent industry analysis. Is it any wonder that the internet was abuzz with recent (and later debunked) rumors of Apple once again entering the console market?
Apple’s rise to the top as a gaming giant, however, has hardly been quick or easy. In fact, the company’s first big foray into video games was a complete disaster.
Send In The Clones
The story of the Pippin reads like a geekier, technological version of a Greek tragedy. It has its heroes and its villains. There’s a strange artifact with supposedly untold magical powers. And like all good tragedies, it’s a story filled with its fair share of hubris, with characters who were destined to fail almost before they even began.
To really understand the Pippin, we have to jump back almost 20 years to December 1994, shortly before the ill-fated device was unveiled at a crowded Tokyo trade show. In the chaotic tech boom of the early ’90s, Apple was a very different company. Steve Jobs had been ousted several years earlier after a humiliating and much-publicized boardroom coup, and the company was now under the control of CEO Michael Spindler, an eccentric German engineer who had risen through the ranks of Apple’s European division.
Spindler’s tireless work ethic and hard-nosed policies had earned him the nickname “Diesel.” And while he was an exceptional engineer and strategist, Spindler’s people skills left something to be desired. He was known for leading incomprehensible meetings in which he’d rattle off stream-of-consciousness talking points and scribble illegible notes on a whiteboard. He’d then leave the room without answering any questions, relying on his assistants to explain what he’d actually meant. In one infamous anecdote, Spindler had landed a front page interview with the prestigious PCWeek magazine, but the conversation was such a mess—Spindler rambled aimlessly, jumping from one non-sequitur to the next—that the magazine’s editors had to schedule another chat. Spindler remained equally inarticulate the second time. The story was never published.

Michael Spindler c. 1994
Under Spindler’s watch, Apple remained the largest computer manufacturer in the world, but it was losing ground as a slew of inexpensive Windows computers flooded the market.
To make matters worse, Apple’s once-sizable coffers were being drained on a number of failed experimental consumer products, with Apple dabbling in digital cameras, portable CD players, speakers, and even TV appliances. Millions of dollars had been funneled into the Newton, a handheld computer that was the butt of jokes in Doonesbury and on The Simpsons. Apple was spending more on research and development than almost any other tech company—$600 million in 1992 alone—yet this investment wasn’t producing successful products.
Faced with mounting financial pressure and an eroding market share, there was increased talk of Apple merging with other companies or even selling off its assets. Spindler, however, was determined to turn Apple’s fortunes around. He came to the conclusion that licensing the Mac operating system to other hardware manufacturers—emulating Microsoft’s Windows model—was the only viable option to keep Apple from running aground. As such, Spindler approved the “clone” initiative. Starting in 1995, Apple-approved third-party manufacturers could create their own Mac-compatible computers.
The Pippin came directly out of the clone initiative. Based largely on the Macintosh, the console used a simplified version of the Mac OS. In terms of processing power and speed, the Pippin was a Ferrari compared to the lumbering Pintos of other game consoles at the time. The device packed a speedy PowerPC processor and, more importantly, included built-in internet access and a CD-ROM drive that could run a variety of multimedia programs. Apple pictured the Pippin being more than just a game console. It could easily be modified for use in business and education—a two-headed beast that would let you blow up evil aliens as well as surf the net on your TV.
Kill Them With Kindness

In keeping with the clone program, Apple’s plan was to license out the Pippin design to third-party manufacturers who would then customize their own versions of the system. Video games, in particular, were considered the low-hanging fruit that Apple hoped to snatch.
Bearding the lions of the home-gaming den was no easy task. The PC market was exploding, and the console market was dominated by Nintendo and Sega, with the Sony PlayStation hitting stores in Japan shortly before the Pippin was launched. Apple’s fledgling console would essentially be going toe-to-toe with industry giants who had crushed any competition that came their way. (A decade later, the same could be said of the iPhone, although with a very different outcome.)
I recently spoke with Julian Wilson, a veteran of the tech industry who was a director in the New Media division at Apple during the Pippin’s development. “What you have to remember is that at that time, there were multiple different games consoles coming out. But the leaders, the big guys, were the Nintendo—and the PlayStation later—and the [Sega] Genesis product,” Wilson said. “And these guys had already sold twice as many games consoles, up to ’96, than the entire PC industry. And they had what appeared to be a very aggressive, dominant relationship with the developers, where the developers accepted that their software was redundant as soon as a new [console] product came out.”
The idea, then, was for Apple to cozy up to developers, offering a console that would allow them to create a single game that could—in theory—run on multiple consumer versions of the Pippin as well as the Mac OS. It was billed as being a win-win, offering more bang for developers’ buck.
Apple “was committing in a contract to give you a longer shelf life for your code,” Wilson said. “In the traditional games console model, the device is subsidized because of the cost of the applications and the fact that every time a new device comes out, a new license needs to be bought.” So Apple’s model should have been attractive to developers. “They were tired of having to redo things.”
With Apple facing financial turmoil and losing its standing in the marketplace, the Pippin quickly became more than just another in a long line of experimental consumer products. Spindler instead saw the device as a chance to generate serious revenue by breaking into a new market. There was a lot riding on the outcome of the Pippin, not only in terms of Spindler’s reputation, but also the future of Apple itself.
Enter Bandai

As Apple courted developers to produce games and content for the Pippin, the first to bite was the Japanese toymaker Bandai. Founded 50 years earlier by Naoharu Yamashina amid the ashes of post-war Japan, Bandai had grown into one of the world’s largest toy manufacturers.
When Apple began its preliminary discussions with Bandai, the company was under the control of Naoharu’s eldest son, Makoto. Unlike his father, the younger Yamashina had grown up with a life of privilege and luxury, typifying the Japanese “Keio Boy” and spending much of his time driving fast cars, dining at exclusive Tokyo night spots, and sailing his private yacht.
As Bandai’s CEO, Makoto clashed with his aging father. The elder Yamashina had run Bandai using an extremely bare-bones production model. A toy line could be shut down at any moment with only minimal loss of resources and revenue. Electronics and more complicated products, on the other hand, require more investment in design and tooling, making them a riskier proposition. Naoharu preferred a traditional approach that focused more on developing well-established brands rather than taking a risk with entirely new product lines.
For his part, Makoto Yamashina was determined to modernize the company and make Bandai more than just an action-figure assembly line. The young CEO dreamed of creating an entertainment company that rivaled Disney and could target young audiences on a global scale.
Under Yamashina’s tenure, Bandai had branched out into a number of risky but lucrative fields, inking deals with a number of entertainment companies. The company purchased the rights to the Sailor Moon and Power Ranger characters from Toei, a Japanese film and television production company. Yamashina also went into business with (and later purchased a large share of) the Japanese animation studio Sunrise, which produced a series of popular animated films featuring Bandai’s Gundam robot action figures.

Makoto Yamashina in 1997
By 1994, Bandai had become a force to be reckoned with, generating $330 million in the U.S. alone from the sale of Power Rangers merchandise, according to Anne Allison, author of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys And The Global Imagination. Despite Bandai’s success, however, the two Yamashinas continued to butt heads. The company’s founder once publicly complained that his son had adopted a strategy of bringing out 10 toys in the hope that three would become successful.
Despite the internal squabbling, Apple viewed Bandai as an ideal partner. Bandai had some experience with game consoles, having created a number of systems in the ’70s and ’80s. The Nintendo Power Pad, a floor-mat controller for the NES, was originally a Bandai prototype. More importantly, Bandai had two things Apple coveted at the time: a portfolio of popular intellectual property, which could be licensed to game studios, and a lot of cash.
The details of the Apple-Bandai deal did not take long to hammer out. Bandai would be responsible for manufacturing and marketing the device, while Apple in turn would absorb all the research costs, collecting royalties for every Pippin sold and retaining the right to license Pippin to other companies. (Lacking the technical expertise to manufacture the device within their own production facilities, Bandai brought on Mitsubishi as a subcontractor to produce the Pippin.)

The Pippin ATMARK (Photo: Evan Amos)
In March 1995, shortly after the ink dried on Apple and Bandai’s deal, the first white Bandai Pippin—christened the ATMARK—went on sale in Japan. Retailing for a costly 64,800 yen (roughly $650 at the time), the console included a dial-up modem and four bundled titles. Yamashina was betting big, predicting sales of 200,000 Pippin ATMARKs in the first 12 months.
A few months later, the black-colored Bandai Pippin—this model was called @WORLD—was released in the United States. At launch, it retailed for $600, three times the price of the popular Nintendo 64. The @WORLD bundle included a six-month unlimited internet account from PSINet at an additional cost of $25 per month. Yamashina was confident again: He forecast that 300,000 @WORLD systems would be sold within a year.
For Bandai, there was as much riding on the Pippin as there was for Apple. Yamashina was determined to dethrone Nintendo and Sega, cementing Bandai’s place as an international entertainment juggernaut. As such, he earmarked nearly $100 million for Pippin manufacturing and marketing. Even with Bandai’s war chest, a Pippin failure would mean a major blow to Yamashina, both from a personal and professional standpoint. For Yamashina, it was the chance not only to take Bandai into the future, but also to prove his father wrong.
Bungie Jumps
Since the Pippin ran a stripped-down version of the Mac OS, the conventional wisdom on Apple’s Cupertino campus was that existing games and other software could be ported over to the Pippin with relatively little effort. One of the leading developers that Apple hoped to bring on board was Alex Seropian, the co-founder of Bungie Studios. Bungie had released Marathon, a hit first-person shooter, exclusively on the Mac—a rare triumph for Mac gaming at a time when computer game makers were focused on Windows.
Seropian, whose studio would later go on to create the Halo series, was directly involved in porting over Bungie’s Mac-exclusive title Marathon to the Pippin. “I remember us being kind of excited. We were focused on the Mac, and here was an opportunity to maybe reach more people,” Seropian told me in an interview. “I think we were somewhat skeptical but supportive at the time. It was something that Apple and Bandai really wanted us to do, and we had a really good relationship with them.”

Marathon
With financial and technical support from Bandai and Apple, Bungie set to work on Super Marathon, a Pippin title that would contain both Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal. Apple and Bandai were hoping to lure game enthusiasts with titles that were exclusive to the Pippin, and Super Marathon would spearhead that effort.
While their corporate patrons brimmed with confidence, Seropian and his team had mixed feelings. “My recollection of that whole experience—and the introduction to the Pippin, and the console space—was it was certainly made easier by the fact that it was Apple and we were big on Mac. But we didn’t have huge expectations out of it.” In fact, Super Marathon was fated for obscurity, barely remembered among the handful of titles that ever saw the light of day on the doomed console.
The Collapse
By the middle of 1996, it was clear that sales of the Pippin were catastrophically low, with no prospect for improvement on the horizon. Yes, Apple had Bungie on board, but developer interest was minimal otherwise. The resulting lack of software and the exorbitant consumer price tag were simply too much for Pippin to bear. Apple was also distracted by an internal crisis. Spindler’s attempt to reorganize the company was unraveling. Struggling to manage Apple’s numerous, disparate divisions, the discipline-focused CEO had implemented a more rigid structure that focused simply on product development, marketing, manufacturing, sales, and customer relations. The reorganization only muddled Apple’s structure further, however, and exacerbated Spindler’s lack of control. Moribund projects were allowed to limp along, siphoning away much-needed cash and resources, and employees struggled to reconcile conflicting messages from the marketing and sales teams. Spindler was losing his grip on Apple.
Despite this chaos, and despite the console’s dismal sales, an increasingly desperate Spindler took every opportunity to calm investor fears with his vision of the silver-bullet Pippin. In Business Week magazine, a financial analyst said that Spindler talked about Pippin “like it would be the savior of the company”—and, implicitly, the savior of Spindler himself.
It wasn’t. In 1996, Spindler was ousted from his position as CEO and replaced by Gil Amelio. The demise of the Pippin was the final death knell for Spindler’s career at Apple.
The Pippin was a financial disaster for Bandai, as well. The Japanese company failed to recoup practically any of their investment. As the elder Yamashina had predicted, the cost of developing and marketing the Pippin had been astronomical. The lean production model that had made Bandai’s fortune simply wasn’t practical for complex electronics. For both Spindler and Makoto Yamashina, the Pippin was a disastrously bad gamble.
Aftermath

As the Pippin continued to implode, Apple made a last-ditch effort to lure in manufacturers for the device. Unfortunately, the only other company to express any interest was a little-known Norwegian software company called Katz Media, which signed an agreement in June 1996 to produce its own version of the Pippin. Faced with the same lack of interest that Bandai had faced, Katz desperately attempted to repurpose and repackage the Pippin—as an interactive kiosk display, as an internet appliance for hotel rooms, and as a low-cost computer for hospitals, among other schemes. None of them caught on.
By 1997, the Pippin was dead. The device was a complete flop in Japan, Europe, and North America. (Apple’s diligence had ensured that Pippin failed in every market possible.) Sales were particularly dismal in the U.S., with Bandai shipping thousands of unsold units back to Japan. Exact sales figures of the device are hard to find, but estimates from several sources suggest that in all likelihood, only 12,000 to 42,000 @WORLD units were sold in North America. A far cry from Spindler and Yamashina’s lofty projections.
So what went wrong? “You could do a PhD on deconstructing what happened,” said Wilson, the former Apple manager. “I learned a lot at Apple, but one of the things that sticks with me is the importance of a vision. A vision provides a context for every decision.” He regards Pippin as a project that was never given a chance to succeed. “It was a distraction at the time, Apple had other things to consider and it was probably right that it didn’t spend too much time on Pippin.”
For Seropian and his fellow developers at Bungie, the death of the Pippin was a blip. They would soon go on to develop Halo for the Xbox in partnership with another tech giant, Microsoft. But when Apple was developing the Pippin, “we didn’t think too much of console gaming,” Seropian said. “Console gaming was a whole other industry that had its own jargon, and having Apple show up with Bandai—it was sort of like meeting a girl who went to school on the other side of the tracks, but we had a mutual friend, so we went on a couple of dates. But we didn’t have an expectation we were going to get married or anything. And I guess you could say she turned out to be a drug addict that ODed, and we never hung out anymore.”
When Steve Jobs became Apple’s CEO again in 1997, one of his first orders was to dismantle the clone initiative. That meant shelving the Pippin project once and for all, with Bandai stopping all production of the machine. Bandai felt the ripples of the Pippin disaster that same year, as the financially troubled company was briefly courted by SEGA, who hoped to absorb Bandai into its fold. The deal fell through, with both sides citing “cultural differences.” Some speculated that Bandai’s executives still had a sour taste in their mouth from their ill-fated dealings with Apple, another powerful tech company that approached Bandai with big promises.
Yamashina resigned as CEO of Bandai shortly after the SEGA deal fell through. His dream of elevating his father’s company into a global entertainment brand was over. Yamashina faded into the background, later dabbling in film and television production.
Officially, Bandai continued to support the Pippin until 2002. By that point, the damage had been done, with the Pippin effectively draining hundreds of millions of dollars from Apple and Bandai—and contributing to the downfall of both its chief executives.
Today, Apple maintains almost obsessive control over its hardware and software. The third-party wheeling and dealing that gave birth to the Pippin is a thing of the past. What’s more, the once-dominant console makers have felt the sting of Apple, as the company continues to attract consumers’ time and money with countless easily digestible games developed for the iPhone and iPad.
As for the Pippin itself, Apple acknowledges it with a single product information page buried on their corporate website. A financially ruined Katz Media later sold off its remaining Pippin stock to a company called DayStar Digital, which sold several thousand units before shelving the remaining stock. Thousands more Pippins remain unaccounted for, presumably lost, destroyed, available for sale online by niche collectors, or cluttering dusty thrift store shelves like the one I discovered in Montreal. The final resting place for a video game dream project that simply wasn’t meant to be.
Words by Adam Volk. Illustrations by Dana Wulfekotte.
Great article! This is the most attention ever paid to the Pippin by anyone, including Apple.
Incidentally, it’s too bad you didn’t buy it. Working or not, the Pippin’s worth a lot more than a hundred bucks on the ironic game console collector’s market these days.
Minor point, though: December of 1994 is not technically more than 20 years ago. At least not yet.
Next week’s article about the Xbox One’s time warp features will make everything clear.
It is now
There is such a thing as a “ironic game console collector’s market”? Maybe it’s time to stock up on Gizmondos…
I still have a Virtual Boy stashed away at home, and I don’t even own any games for it…
(that’s not true, I had some games but I’m pretty sure I lost them all, save for the one that is currently inside the Virtual Boy cartridge slot. Mario Tennis, maybe?)
At least the Virtual Boy wasn’t a money-laundering front for the swedish mafia.
VB has a HUGE market now. 250 NIB consoles, 150 loose. The plastic stabilizer alone is 60 bucks (a 1 inch piece of plastic).. seriously now.
The “legitimate businessman’s” game console.
But the Gizmondo has Colors, or almost had Colors, since it was clearly too hot for Gizmondo.
I was reading a list of every video game console ever released a few months ago and was really struck at how there were just so many! I had never even heard of most of them. For every runaway success story like the NES or the PS2, there are at least a dozen other consoles that were doomed to utter failure.
It makes me wonder what the business model is for these developers are when it comes to a new console. It seemed like many were hyped to death so that everybody would ideally go out and buy one as soon as it was released. When that didn’t happen, it was deemed a failure and then forgotten forever. It seems tto me that it would be smarter to have a long term goal, that way if your console doesn’t set the world on fire on its opening weekend, that isn’t the end of the line. Hell, look at what a slow burner the PS3 was.
Every decade for the last 40 years has been littered with the corpses of dead game consoles: The 70s had its explosion of Pong knock-offs, the 80s had scads of Atari competitors rise and fall in the span of three years, the 90s taught us a valuable lesson about FMV, and the ’00s proved that the state of portable gaming has not improved at all since 1989. I’ll be keeping a light on for the overpriced, always-connected, DRM-slathered megaconsoles that are yet to come.
Wait, you aren’t talking about the GBA and the DS, are you? If you are, well, I have some words for you, you cad! Words like “I disagree” and “you cad”!
They’re both great systems, but they’re still the exception to the rule. See below.
“the ’00s proved that the state of portable gaming has not improved at all since 1989.”
Huh? We’re talking a time period with the GBA, DS, and a certain device from the header of this very article. I guess a few people played the PSP too.
Let’s not consign an entire decade to the dustbin of history for the sins of the N-Gage.
The N-Gage, the Neo Geo Pocket, the Wonderswan, the Tapwave Zodiac, the Gizmondo, the Game.com, the PSP Go…
You’re right, though. It’s unfair of me to lump the DS and GBA in with this crowd. I very much enjoy them both.
@Mr_Glitch:disqus Jeez, now that you mention them, I’ve definitely heard of at least three or four of those. How could I have forgotten such inglorious failures?
Oh, right, I was playing my DS.
Mr. Glitch, don’t forget about POPStation.
I do actually get what you’re saying about portables, though it was perhaps phrased wrong. The PSP is the only one among that list I’ve owned – though every picture of the Wonderswan makes me wonder how the hell you play the Wonderswan – but it’s very much a Sony GameGear. Great looking games, the screen is better than Nintendo’s offerings, but it’s cumbersome and uncomfortable to hold, has terrible battery life, and eventually the developer support dried up completely. When I use it, I find myself thinking it’s a pretty terrible piece of hardware, whether I like what I’m actually playing or not.
It is also possibly the easiest console in the world to pirate games on now, making it slightly worse for business than the GameGear.
Oy, I forgot about the GameGear’s battery life. It would’ve been more cost effective for parents to let their kids burn money for fun.
That blasted thing must’ve padded Duracell execs’ pockets with bajillion dollar bills. ..
gamegear, nomad and turboexpress were very very enjoyable for hours and hours ONLY if you wee smart an bought the battery powerpacks and used rechargeable batteries. Otherwise it was indeed like burning money like Richard says.
Yeah, I had one of the power packs and it was never really an issue. Of course, it meant that to play it I also had to drag along an additional appendage, but how often did you ever carry a portable around with you? It’s more often something used while on a long car trip or flight. Even today I could carry my DS on the bus, but it’s not really ideal. I just sit and play it at home wishing that the games had been released on another, more convenient platform.
Shelve this one away for later; you’ll only have to change some nouns and dates for the Ouya and Steam Box retrospectives in 2033.
And probably the Wii U, if things keep going like they are.
The thing about the Steam Box is that it’s basically just a PC, so even if it fails (and Valve actually supports it vocally) it probably won’t be lumped into the same category as consoles.
And, god willing, the X-bone. Anything with DRM that megalomanical deserves to fail so bad it drags down entire company divisions with it.
Get used to not owning physical media – in a few years there will be NO physical media – will you still cry then? No, you’ll type in your credit card number because your mouth will be open and watery.
Ouya and failure? http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120220215354/fanball/images/d/dc/Impossibru.png
Ouya is already a failure, hardware is dated, software awful and full of bugs ( I know I have one).
A failure is you.
You knew exactly that you’ll basically get prototype when you backed Ouya on Kickstarter. As it is prototype, it contains alpha software. Retail, finished version will be much better.
Nah I’m fine thanks for asking, I see that use of proper etiquette is somewhat lost on you. Since you opened that can of worms here I go in the same vein.
You are either brainwashed by the Ouya people (which is highly unlikely since they are evidently incompetent) or are one of Ouya people. If latter is the case, two things to comment, the product is awful from software side and I would know it, since I worked with Android for a long long time on a low level. Secondly I want my money back.
I suppose you should invest some of that pent up trolling energy and do something worthwhile, I don’t know like petition them to make (I’ll use a simple term so you can understand) it less sucky.
I also own one and I am quite happy with it. There are a few bugs, but guess what its in beta we Kickstarters are beta testers that’s why we got it a month and a half early. Everyone of the problems I had have been resolved with all the software updates that have come through this month. Software is not perfect it takes time.
Well, speaking of Apple and gaming:
My Hackintosh OSX partition runs Steam better than my Windows partition.
Also, i’m still using a shitty old Geforce 9500 and Bioshock on OSX runs better than Bioshock on Windows.
I think OSX has a lot of potential in gaming. And Apple has a great history with the video gaming community.
I can foresee Apple TV as a gaming console TBH. One day, they might bring GamesCenter to AppleTV and walla! You might just get a console cheaper than the Wii! It might be inevitable as Apple is advancing Apple TV with a lot cool features.
Nah, if Apple wants to bring gaming to the Apple TV, then it will be with iOS-style games (Angry Birds, Letterpress, Tiny Wings, etc).
OSX, on the other hand, definitely has untapped gaming opportunities. Right now, many triple-AAA games get ported months after their PC and console counterparts are released, while indies do one better and mostly release their wares at the same time on Windows, Linux, and (in some cases) PSN and XBLA. Perhaps if Apple could sell the platform better to developers and publishers, who knows?
The thing is nobody wants to play Angry Birds on the big screen. BTW you can already do that, in a limited way with AirPlay. Apple’s success with gaming came in spite of them, not because of them. They just don’t have the DNA for gaming (as evidenced by history), it’s a good thing they are not making a real console, since it would be a flop.
If Apple had just had an ounce of sense and named it “The Phantom of the Opera” instead, they would have been swimming in an Uncle Scrooge sized money vault. Lesson learned? Theatre degrees aren’t useless after all (I try and still stay confidently)!
Wait, theatre degrees are useless?
Since when?
Don’t you have theatres in your town?
Why not move to New York and work at Broadway with your theatre degree? Or go to Moscow and do some Bolshoi?
I actually work at Juilliard, but, uh, my degree isn’t the best license to print money in the history of licenses to print money.
You should stop living comfortably doing what you love and start living egregiously doing something you hate! Get and engineering degree! Make those fat stacks! And then hate what you’ve become!
@paraclete_pizza:disqus Diff’rent strokes, yo. I’m an engineer and I don’t hate what I’ve become; I very much enjoy it. It’s challenging, rewarding work, and it has the added bonus of not leaving me penniless at the end of each month.
There may be a small oversupply of people with theatre degrees compared to the demand for such people…
Remember that one console that never go made, “The Phantom”? Remember all those jokes people made about the name? Good times.
Glory, glorrrrrrry!
Apple’s problem here was in failing to ink that Ben Vereen Simulator deal in time before the consoles shipped.
Alternate take-away from this article: videogame owners really, really hate Stephen Schwartz.
Isn’t Ben Vereen Simulator just Frogger?
To be fair, “Pippin” is probably the stupidest name for a console system ever. Well, at least til Nintendo decided “Wee You” was a good name.
Fantastic illustration. These are really great.
It was good of Sonic to don his grey mourning spines. Though he can’t seem to lose the red kicks. Him and Pope Benedict.
And Peach is too oblivious about everything to actually dress for the occasion. Either that or she just doesn’t OWN a black dress and the royal Toad Tailors couldn’t finish a new dress in time.
Of course, part of the failure to succeed here, as evidenced by Dana’s marvelous graveyard illustration, was that the Pippin didn’t have an iconic, cuddly character to pair with a console-launch title, endearing it to more than 500,000 global customers.
Which brings me to my audition piece for all of you today–although it’s mainly for the Juilliard representative in the back there, so please take your fingers out of your ears, @Kilzor:disqus . I will be singing a selection to the melody of Pippin‘s “Corner Of The Sky”. *ahem*
SEGA gave us Sonic the Hedgehoggggg
Nintendo’s got Peach and those two guyyyyyys
But if Jobs’ fucks
Want all my hard-earned bucks,
Gotta bake me an Appllllllllle
Apple piiiiiiiiie.
I thank you. Mattman Begins, number twenty-seven. (exits stage left, tripping over Xbox cords in the process)
Well, the Playstation somehow succeeded without a mascot. I know that Crash Bandicoot was supposed to be Sonys answer to Mario/Sonic, but he never really took off.
Of course, an anthromorphic Apple Pie as mascot totally would have turned the Pippin from a Fiasco into a Secret Success.
Playstation briefly had the not-at-all-hideous-or-terrifying-honest Polygon Man as a mascot, too!
Oh wow, I was always confused as to why this thing was the last boss in PS All-Stars. I thought it was some weird invention for that game alone, and now I learn it’s a legit Sony deep cut. Kudos, PS All-Stars dev team, for doing your homework!
Crash’s fame was fleeting, but he was pretty important to the Playstation’s early success. The Playstation’s affordable retail price had made it more successful than previous CD-ROM consoles like the 3D0 and Pippin, but it was the Crash-centric marketing blitz that elevated the Playstation to Nintendo and Sega’s level.
They also had Lara Croft, Cloud and Spyro. I’m not sure they were quite the “face” of the console, but I remember a lot of hoopla in the gaming press about these characters, and not being able to play those game because I was a N64 owner.
By the way, it’s strange that Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale (or PASBR, for short) features none of these characters.
If i’m not mistaken, Spyro and Crash are now owned by Activision, so Sony probably didn’t want to pay licensing fees. And i’m pretty sure Tomb Raider was first released on the Sega Saturn.
@Marozeph:disqus Yeah, I’m sure it was because the licensing deals fell through, but it’s still a bit strange for Sony’s Smash Bros. not to feature characters so strongly associated with the Playstation brand.
And I completely forgot about the Saturn! It seems that the original Tomb Raider was released for the Saturn first, but the sequels were only on Playstation and PC (and Mac).
Original Tomb Raider – surprise! – was first released for PC and then ported first for Saturn, then for PSX (Saturn port is awful btw).
In the UK the Playstation was marketed as a more “grown up” console, without all that multicolored kiddie stuff. I remember WipeOut having a “real” soundtrack of Chemical Brothers, Leftfield and Orbital being a big deal.
Or maybe that’s how people justified having one at college.
Actually, in Japan, Sony DOES have a simple mascot character: Toro the Cat!
My dad brought home an Apple Newton II from work one day, and I loved that thing. It could turn my handwriting into computer writing! That’s the only thing I can remember about it. It was freaking heavy too. Still, I was disappointed when I had to give it back.
Yeah, my dad was always bringing home computer stuff from work–I think we had an Apple II+ for a while, which I mostly remember because it had no start up screen or operating system; if you wanted to do anything, you had to insert a floppy disc first. I played hours of The Hobbit text adventure on that damn thing, although I never managed to get much further than Lake Town. (We also had Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, which I played until I realized it was just a lot of page flipping.)
Did any of you have a Texas Instruments keyboard? We had that before the Apple II; you plugged it into the TV and could use it for games and, I dunno, spreadsheets or something. I mostly remember a Pac-Man knock off where you were supposed to cover an entire maze with your tail.
Really, the biggest thing I remember from those days was how big the gulf was between my expectations for what a game could do, and what that game actually did. I knew I was being conned every time I looked at the box art, but I fell for it anyway.
Fantastic article. And while it’s neat that Apple has success these days with iOS stuff (well, neat for them, anyway), I really hope that the future of gaming isn’t just a bunch of stuff I play for thirty seconds and then never remember to go back.
Oooh, I did! The TI 99/4A! It was our first family computer. I spent hours on that sucker playing TI Invaders & Star Trek, and transcribing BASIC programs from that big, green volume of examples that came with it.
Just throwing this out, as I’m sure nobody gives a shit, but The Attack is the very first video game I’ve ever played.
I remember the “no operating system” days, and we used the Apple II at school from time to time. The first computer my family had was the Commodore 128, which had an OS, and I was fascinated by the ability to actually send commands directly to the computer. I probably spent as much time playing around in BASIC as I ever did actually running programs.
The odd thing about the 128, though, is that almost nothing seemed to actually be written for the 128, so the command I sent most often was GO64, which then dropped you into Commodore 64 mode.
And it’s definitely true that the box art in that era and the gameplay were not the same thing. Back then, even the video games required some imagination.
With apologies to TS Eliot
Apple is the cruellest developer, breeding
Consoles out of marketing reports, mixing
Bandai and Katz Media, stirring
Giant robots with hospital screens.
Bungie kept us warm, covering
Pippin in exclusive games, feeding
More than a marathon with rehashed levels.
Please do an article on the ill-fated Vectrex! I loved that machine…
An article on the Vectrex would indeed be interesting – IIRC it was actually pretty successful in Europe. And was there ever another console that used vector graphics?
The last Atari console tried to do vector graphics AND backwards compatability.
That would be terrific. I picked up a working Vectrex at a Goodwill for 10 bucks a few years ago. Best thrift score ever!
The rise and fall of 3DO would make for a pretty entertaining read, too.
Wow, either I’ve never heard of this or I’ve completely forgotten it. Considering I voraciously read gaming magazines at the time and still remember the Lynx, the N-Gage, the Neo Geo, and the Jaguar, I’m wondering if they had an advertising budget higher than triple digits.
Likewise; I had never heard of this thing before. I do remember some of the various consoles from back then, like the Jaguar. Remember when everybody was really into how many bits each system had? Nintendo (Ultra) 64 was such a big deal, holy cow, 64 bits! That doesn’t even really mean anything to the consumer, except that it’s a higher number than what previous systems had (SuperNES was 16-bit, and wasn’t Saturn 32-bit?). The funny thing about the Jaguar was their slogan was “64 bits. Do the math.” because it had two 32-bit chips. I don’t know why, but nearly two decades later, that cracks me up. It adds up to 64 bits! What a selling point!
Of course, we’re not much better these days, are we? What the hell is 4G anyway?
We’re really not.. the advent of the new console generation has re-opened the numbers-based hardware fanboy arguments all across the internet again. One would think that the two consoles being pretty indistinguishable graphics-wise this generation would temper that this go-round, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Guess those marketers really know what they’re doing, eh?
I always feel sad reading these stories about grand enterprising ideas that don’t work out. It’s like dining at an empty restaurant. It’s just heartbreaking!
And it’s too bad, too. I actually really like the Pippin console design (though the controller’s a mess). It’s nice to have more competition, and I’d like to see what Bungie and Bandai would have cooked up, had the Pippin worked out. Oh well…
Every time it’s brought to my attention that Apple is now a leader in gaming, I feel a bit sick to my stomach. I’ll play Tiny Wings or Dungeon Raid while I’m waiting in line or am otherwise indisposed, but I wouldn’t compare anything on the iPhone to an experience that I’d get from a console or on PC. Most of these games are so simplistic (by design and also because of the limitations of touch controls) that it’s like comparing hamburger to prime rib.
I’m scared that game developers (and publishers especially) are going to learn the wrong lessons from this era, where cheap, $0.99 games give a massive return on investment and bloated $59.99 games with credits sequences that are longer than the ending to Return of the King sell 5 million copies and are deemed failures.
On the other hand, we’re getting tons of quality games from small independent studios, so if the AAA market collapses in favor of ten Angry Birds clones a year, core gamers will probably flock to these games like never before. That’s just my speculation, at least.
While i would say that a crash like 1983 is possible, i don’t think it will kill off the industry like it did back then. The commercial and (to a lesser extend) artistic potential of Video Games has been proven, so someone (maybe even Apple) will be there to pick up the pieces and start again if everything comes crashing down.
Maybe it’s just time to scale down a bit. The current “more is better” policy can’t go on forever. Does a game like Tomb Raider really need multiplayer? Wouldn’t AC3 actually be better with a smaller world an less pointless features? It’s fascinating how quick Video Games evolve (a game from the Atari era might as well have come from Mars), but this immense speed can lead to a lot of dead ends.
I think the market is too diversified at this point for a “crash” to happen, at least a crash of the same magnitude as the one in 1983. Publishers are hilariously risk-adverse (see: why Kickstarter is popular now). They’ll just shutter the bloated studios that churn out the Resident Evils and Tomb Raiders and instead just focus their efforts on Resident Evil: Zombie Shooter and Tomb Raider: Tomb Runner for iOS. At $2.99 a pop (with $1.99 level packs, $0.99 ammo packs, and $5.99 skin packs), it’s the future of gaming!
You’re probably right about the gaming market as a whole, but the consoles might be in for some trouble: the Wii U isn’t exactly selling like hotcakes, the XBone probably put off a lot of people with it’s “Fuck the customer”-attitude and the PS4 is still a cipher in many ways.
But who knows? Maybe the E3 will show tons of can’t-miss-games and everyone starts lining up for Next-Gen (or is it Next-Next-Gen?) again…
I’m scared that game developers (and publishers especially) are going to learn the wrong lessons from this era, where cheap, $0.99 games give a massive return on investment and bloated $59.99 games with credits sequences that are longer than the ending to Return of the King sell 5 million copies and are deemed failures.
…still waiting to hear the problem…
Problem is $.99 games = farting apps, $59.99 = proper games like Tomb Raider or GTA. So they probably go into farting apps. Would like more farting apps or maybe proper games?
$0.99 iOS games that I have enjoyed substantially more than any entry in the Tomb Raider series since the first one, an incomplete list:
Angry Birds
Tiny Wings
Gridrunner
Super Hexagon
Minotron
Geometry Wars Touch
And that’s off the top of my head without even looking back at my app store purchase history. Increase the price ceiling to $9.99 and the list gets much longer.
So yeah, still not really seeing the problem here. To paraphrase Jello Biafra, mobile gaming is killing the AAA gaming market and we should all do our part to help.
Apple leading in gaming kind of makes sense when you think about how much time people have spent playing solitaire and minesweeper. Just great games to play when you’re supposed to be doing something else, specifically, sitting in a cubicle. Except now you can get that escape anywhere- grocery store line, during the 30 min of trailers at a movie, on the toilet… I’d venture to say that if you measured how much time people spend playing games on Apple devices while sitting in their living rooms at home, it would be WAY lower.
I’d like the game industry to scale down a bit, actually. Microsoft and Sony have spent billions on their respective machines without turning a profit… Sony has spent three billion dollars on the Playstation brand last year, making the Pippen’s losses seem inconsequential by comparison.
It’s not sustainable. These two companies can’t dump money down a hole forever, and the lion’s share of publishers (already pinched by the high cost of game production) won’t be able to keep up with a new generation of cutting edge hardware. Something’s got to give. If developers need to make phone games or indie games to turn a profit (and this is what most of the game industry has forgotten… you need to TURN A PROFIT to stay in business), I’m all for it. Either the game industry needs to get back to basics or risk not BEING at all.
I have a Pippin, you can import them from Japan for a lot less than $100 and they’re fully compatible with whatever American titles you can find. The only thing worth playing for it is Super Marathon. There’s a decent size library of Japanese titles, but they’re mostly Anime games like you’d find on the PC-FX. There’s no reason to buy the thing unless you’re a collector, although I do like the controllers. The track ball on them works suprisingly well.
I feel if I ever saw a Pippin when it released, I’d be inordinately excited to try the track ball.
Is the Pippin in any way compatible with older (PowerPC) Macintosh computers? I thought it used similar architecture…
The Pippin is basically a PPC mac in a console case. It even has a vga port, printer port, etc. You can run Pippin games on a Mac but you can’t run regular mac games on a Pippin but only because of a software lockout. Supposedly there’s a developers BIOS out there that will let the Pippin run any mac software. Not sure how that would work since the Pippin doesn’t have ADB ports for a keyboard or mouse.
For keyboard you could make on-screen, virtual one and trackball plus one of gamepads buttons could work as mouse.
Splendid article. Reminds me a lot of the old gamespot.com opus The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte. I love tech eulogies, for some reason.
“Apple and Bandai were hoping to lure game enthusiasts with titles that were exclusive to the Pippin, and Super Marathon would spearhead that effort.”
Amazing how history repeats itself somewhere – this has been the Xbox strategy for the last two consoles!
Great article, really fascinating and well researched.
God bless you Gameological for taking the time and the effort to write well-researched and expertly written* articles such as this one. This site is a light in the stormy sea of video game journalism. May it shine on for a hundred years.
Also, who names game console after a Hobbit with a propensity for messing things up. Ill omens my friend.
*front-runner for sentence of the year is “Bearding the lions of the home-gaming den was no easy task.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKITYu7z-AY
hang em high!
spying on my family!
I once found a Pippin at a rummage sale; a developer unit, including its floppy drive. It now sits in the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario where they have it working and playing games.
Very interesting article overall, though I must quibble!
“…the Japanese animation studio Sunrise, which produced a series of popular animated films featuring Bandai’s Gundam robot action figures.”
That’s backwards! Gundam was originally conceived as a TV series in conjunction with a different toy company (Clover), but the toys Clover produced did not sell well, as Gundam’s more serious tone proved popular with older audiences. Bandai came in soon after Clover bowed out, producing model kits based on the show’s robots, which were popular with the older fans.
Following Bandai’s involvement and subsequent investment in Sunrise, Gundam has become a hugely successful franchise in Japan, often described as that country’s Star Wars, spanning multiple TV series, films, manga, video games, etc. (but no musicals yet, alas).
So, more accurately:
“Yamashina also went into business with … the Japanese animation studio Sunrise, for which Bandai produced a series of model kits featuring the studio’s Gundam robot designs.”
It’s fun. It’s like a plastic marble.
It might seem silly now (and, yeah, that controller is just painful-looking now), but at the time, it was a pretty good deal for what might have been a decent Internet appliance/game console, if, you know, any company not named “Bungie” had developed decent games for the Mac. (I’m not counting ports of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D.) I was a big Marathon fan, and if I hadn’t already gotten an LC 475 (which I held onto until the early aughts), I’d have given serious thought to getting this thing.
Come to think of it, the Pippin’s not too far removed from the iDevices of today. After all, the iPad is basically a single-task Internet/entertainment appliance with an underlying OS that’s well-hidden from the average user. Maybe the Pippin was the right product at the wrong time.
This was a sad
nostalgia trip; made all the more surreal by my vivid recollection of the nineties.
I haven’t spent a lot of time on gameological, but the most striking thing to me about this article is how civilized the comments actually are. ESPECIALLY since this article deals with an Apple device. Well done, internet!
Aple sux lol onli n0bs uz dem lolol *fahrt*
(Well someone had to lower the tone.)
I never had this machine, nor have ever found it at any thrift store, pawn shop, or flea market. However, I DO own a Commodore CD32, another ill-considered game console by a computer manufacturer that was in way over its head.
As the legend goes, Commodore first released the system in Europe, and after a successful run in that territory, tried to bring it to America. Unfortunately, a tech company which Commodore owed royalties filed an injunction against the company, and a court blocked sales of the CD32 in the United States. Commodore had ordered thousands of consoles from the Philippines, but the injunction prevented them from selling the units, ultimately leading to the company’s bankruptcy.
I’ve not spent much time with my CD32, because peripherals are difficult to find and the system won’t play burned games unless they’re on older, lower capacity CDs. (Heaven help you if you try to find official games…) Still, it’s a nice conversation piece for my collection, and it is backward compatible with Amiga computers if you’ve got the right equipment.
It was really just an overpriced Amiga with a CD player bolted on rehoused in a big black box. Kind of looked like an xbone. I think they were an attempt to cash in on the CD-rom hysteria but the only thing I remember it having that the Amiga didn’t was some crappy encyclopedia.
You’re thinking of the Commodore CDTV. The CD32 is actually pretty cool looking.
The CD32 is a much much better console if you mod it to play UK titles, or better still buy a UK CD32 in the first place. There’s a rather huge library of CD32 games over there, and most of them won’t play on an American CD32. There’s all sorts of unofficial “best of” ISOs out there with 100’s of older floppy based Amiga games on a CD, too.
Another cool Computer-to-Console machine is the FM Towns Marty. Even though it was only released in Japan, there are a few good shmups for it as well as most of Lucasarts’ early 90’s adventure games.
You’re totally right.
Odyssey^2, I had it. My kids will have it. I came out with above average reflexes and mental agility, and I don’t have much faith in my personal genetics, so environment it is! THEY’RE GETTING DA CUBE.
Apple should now buy out nintendo wii and rebrand it. That way they can conquer tv.
Sounds to me like someone hasgot it down pat, Wow.
http://www.AnonStuff.tk
“Bungie had released Marathon, a hit first-person shooter,
exclusively on the Mac—a rare triumph for Mac gaming at a time when computer game makers were focused on Windows.”
I would note that at the time Marathon was released (December 1994), Windows games were marginal; this was pre-Windows 95, and even after 95 was released it took a while for DOS games to fade away.
Nice. Now I know what happened to Apple’s console days. Thanks. Still, I think that Apple could pull of console gaming if they really tried.
How much did each unit cost to manufacture and how much was spent on it total?
What was the cost of manufacturing for each unit and how much was spend on the Pippin total?
Good article. I collect consoles and have considered getting a pippin for a long time but it really is a crappy console to collect for. When one cant make a top ten best games list you know youre in trouble ;-)
And at this moment in time, some of the asking prices on ebay are absurd.