Re: [NTLK] Too Quiet on the List(Pippin)

On Jan 9, 2009, at 3:13 PM, SteveCraft wrote:

> It was a good idea, a little too ahead of its time, a little too
> expensive
> when released, and had a lot of promise before it was axed. Sounds
> like our
> favorite PDA, huh?

I think it was mostly the timing that killed the Pippin; it was /
late/ to market compared with the other fifth-generation hardware
(the $400 1994 Saturn, the $300 1994 Playstation, the $700 1993 3DO;
it beat the $200 Nintendo 64 to market by six months). The Pippin was
also a 2D game system just as 3D was getting off the ground.

Lack of software really hurt the Pippin too. And did they even
advertise the thing? I only learned about the Pippin fairly recently.
I certainly never saw a TV ad for it back in the day. Or if I did,
they weren't at all memorable.

The price was probably a factor, but since the 3DO sold about two
million units, a high price isn't killer. (However, the 3DO was very
heavily advertised. And its games DID look better than almost
everything else out at the time; that helps, too.)

There have been several video game consoles that were basically
computers without a disk drive; the only one I can think of offhand
that was reasonably successful was Commodore's $400 CD32; it was an
Amiga 1200 with a CD-ROM and no keyboard or floppy (but had ports for
them), released in 1993 and sold about 100,000 units before Commodore
mismanaged itself to death in 1994.

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Received on Fri Jan 9 19:24:01 2009