This October marks seven years since Steve Jobs passed away leaving behind a legacy of innovation and development that has undeniably changed the world we live in and how we live in it. From its early days, Apple has almost always taken the unconventional approach to creating hardware and software, tackling obstacles from an uncommon angle and often finding newer, better, more streamlined ways of doing things. This has led to groundbreaking advances and a modest list of not-so-successful ideas that failed to hit the mark or were perhaps too far ahead of their time.
It’s with this in mind, that we discuss Apple’s little-known singular foray into the world of gaming consoles, the Pippin.
The iPhone and iPad have blossomed into powerful mobile gaming platforms in recent years, and even the often joked about desktop and laptop Macs have more than enough computing power to run most modern desktop games. The Pippin, though, despite the pretense of being a basic home computer and/or educational platform, was a video games console through and through.
The Pippin was an ugly duckling in the highly competitive market of the mid-1990s, and unlike other machines of the time such as the Panasonic 3DO, weren’t intended as a proprietary, single console like we associate devices such as the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. It was instead meant to be something that could be licensed out to many companies. Apple had designed the brains of the machine, but would leave the manufacturing to other firms.
In terms of performance it did boast a few innovative features such as the fact that Mac computers of the era could play software designed for the Pippin since it shared much hardware with the Macintosh. With its educational usage in mind, rather than being solely an entertainment platform it had peripherals like a full keyboard, optional wireless controllers and even a printer.
Wanting to get in on the lucrative console business, Japanese toymaker and anime publisher Bandai decided to be first to license the tech, and in February 1995 the first Apple Bandai Pippin consoles went on sale in Japan. The machine’s US launch would take place a few months later, in September. The Japanese-market Pippin ATMARK consoles were a rather classy white, while American-market Pippin @WORLD (pronounced At-World) consoles were black. In Europe, the Katz Media Player had a different but similar black design.
Bandai may have been the first company to release a Pippin, but aside from the tiny European release by Katz, there were to be no more. Unfortunately, the machine was a complete failure.
It never caught on for reasons which had nothing to do with failure to be a good idea. It had at its core a PowerPC 603 RISC CPU which could have rivalled the Sony PlayStation for it’s rendering power had it been properly utilized.
First, it was too expensive. At launch, the retail price of $600 was an unprecedented price for the time. Secondly, it launched into a market already dominated by Nintendo and Sega, and unlike other high-end consoles with the same price point such as the Neo-Geo, it had almost no software or games available.
While with Bandai’s support around 70 titles would be released in Japan, including the extremely popular Gundam franchise, that wasn’t the case in the US market. Over the console’s short lifespan, we only saw 18 games ever hit shelves. And not a single one approached the “must have” status a console needs to attract new customers despite having early internet support, the infrastructure just wasn’t there.
All in all, the Pippin would sell less than 50,000 units in its two years on sale, it’s rumored that less than 5000 units were sold to US consumers. Bandai would cease support for the console in 1997 when it abandoned its deal with Apple and tried to align itself with Sega instead with it’s Netlink internet peripheral for the Saturn, which also didn’t work out. Katz vowed to continue support for the console but they were ultimately getting their hardware from Bandai and couldn’t maintain support beyond its current inventory of a few thousand units.
It wasn’t until the Sony PlayStation line finally broke into the scene that Nintendo and Sega would be dethroned as the leaders of the console market, a distinction that they have shared only with Microsoft’s XBox line of gaming consoles.
The Pippin is one example of an excellent idea that just couldn’t find footing through no direct fault of its own. It lies in repose with other valiant but failed attempts at console gaming such as the Atari Jaguar, Philips CD-i, Sega Dreamcast, Memorex VIS, Pioneer Laseractive and Panasonic 3DO among others.