On Friday, a new interview with former Microsoft Xbox leader Peter Moore included his beliefs that his former company, and also Sony and Nintendo, have had discussions about the future of making dedicated game consoles. It is certainly an interesting conversation to have. As cloud gaming continues to grow, it is possible one or more of the big console makers could choose to abandon making hardware consoles in the next decade.
Back in the 1990s however, the console game industry was a bit like the Wild West. Nintendo and Sega were in the mix, and then Sony jumped in with its first PlayStation. Other game consoles like the Atari Jaguar and the 3DO tried and failed to get audiences as well.
In the midst of all this, none other than Apple attempted to enter the game console industry with a bit of a different approach. It created a hardware and software platform called Pippin that came out of the company"s desire to branch out beyond making Macintosh PCs.
Indeed, the Pippin platform was based in part on the Macintosh computers at the time that used the PowerPC processor and the MacOS. However, Apple didn"t want to make any Pippin game console on its own. Rather it wanted to create a hardware and software platform for third-party makers to use to make their own game consoles, with the Macintosh OS and PowerPC hardware as its basis.
Bandai was the first company to jump in on the Pippin platform. Apple and Bandai publicly revealed their plans to launch the Bandai Pippin game console in December 1994. In an article posted by the Los Angeles Times at that time, it stated Apple"s goals of making Pippin more than just a video game console platform.
At the simplest level the Pippin will serve as a video game machine or player of CD-ROM videos and music, but it will be possible to upgrade it by adding a keyboard, floppy or hard disk drive, modem and additional software. With the additions it would be capable of word-processing or communications functions.
Bandai ended up making two consoles with the Pippin platform. The first, the Pippin Atmark, launched in Japan in March 1996, while the second, the Pippin @WORLD, launched in the US in June 1996.
Both consoles shared most of the same hardware specs. That included a CD-ROM for games and other software, a PowerPC 603 CPU with a clock speed of 66 MHz, and 6 MB of combined video and system RAM. The consoles did have some features not found in the major game consoles at the time, including a dial-up modem. The controller made for the Pippin console had a trackpad in the middle designed to be used for cursors on screen for non-gaming apps.
Unfortunately, Bandai"s Pippin game consoles seemed to be doomed before they launched. In the US, the Pippin @WORLD was priced at $599.99 when it launched in 1996 which would be well over $1,000 in today"s market. It cost far more than the 1995 launch price of the first PlayStation of $299 and much lower than the $199.99 price of the Nintendo 64 that launched a few months later in September 1996 in the US. That resulted in poor sales of the console.
Apple signed an agreement with one more company, the Norway-based Katz Media, for them to make consoles with the Pippin platform. The result, the Katz Media Player 2000, launched in March 1997 in Europe and Canada. Katz decided not to sell the console directly to consumers but to partners like companies who wanted to offer the console as an internet box for people who didn"t want to buy a PC.
With the sales failures of the Bandai Pippin consoles and the odd business model for the Katz Pippin device, Apple"s attempt to enter the game console space ended just a year after the launch of the first consoles in 1997. That"s when its co-founder Steve Jobs returned to Apple as its CEO and canceled the Pippin platform. Bandai stopped selling its consoles soon afterward, although it continued to support existing consoles until 2002. Katz Media would shut down in 1998. The Pippin is now a nearly forgotten game console and became very much a side note in Apple"s history.