The Apple Bandai Pippin: WAY Ahead of its Time

[Pogue-Mahone]

The Apple Bandai Pippin was a console designed by Apple Computer from 1995-1997 that used CD-Format games. It was supposed to be a combination of a gaming console and a personal computer, but failed miserably.

It retailed at $599 and only sold 42,000 units before the system was discontinued. To put into perspective, the Virtual Boy is also considered a market failure, but was on the market for less than a year, retailed at $180, and sold 770,000 units.

What's interesting about this console is that it was probably one of the first game consoles, if not THE first, that allowed people to surf the web from the console. But the Pippin only displayed in composite video, so that made it tough to read text on the TV screen.

It was also up-gradable with computer-like devices, like keyboards, modems, memory expansions, a floppy disk dock, and it even had a serial I/O port to hook up a printer.

At the time, the Sega Saturn ($399) and Sony Playstation ($299) were dominating the market, so the $599 price tag kinda killed it.

A somewhat funny quote from the Wikipedia article:
"In particular, computer illiterate people did not know what an "@" sign was, as in @WORLD. Consumers in America could not grasp the idea of surfing the Internet using such a device."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Bandai_Pippin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin