Apple’s Pippin: A recipe for disaster

When it comes to console wars today, the biggest companies that come into the picture are Sony with their PlayStation, Microsoft with Xbox, and Nintendo with their rich history of incredible gaming machines. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are the overlords of gaming. People usually don’t buy gaming consoles outside of these three. But what about other massive corporations like Apple? With Apple wanting to make another gaming console to compete with the big three and supposedly ‘poaching’ engineers specifically from Xbox to help create it, let’s have a look back at one of their biggest flops …the Pippin game machine.

Apple’s Pippin platform was named after Newtown Pippin which is a smaller relative of the McIntosh apple (see what they did there). According to Apple, Pippin was directed at the home market as “an integral part of the consumer audiovisual, stereo, and television environment.” It was intended to be more than just a platform for video games which is more in line with later PlayStations and Xboxes.

Pippin was never intended to be released on its own, instead, it was going to be an open standard by licensing the technology to third parties. One such third party was Bandai. Apple partnered with Bandai, the Japanese toymaker to distribute and manufacture the Pippin. In the ’90s when this console launched, Japan was gamer central, so partnering with a Japanese company was a smart move from Apple’s side.

In March 1996, the white-colored “Bandai Pippin ATMARK” was launched in Japan while in America where Apple was more popular it was launched as the black-colored “Bandai Pippin @WORLD” in June of the same year. It was priced at 599$ which would be around 1000$ today when adjusted for inflation. For comparison, the first PlayStation launched for 299$.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTkzfK-N1oQ&ab_channel=OoyamaCh.

The Pippin was designed as a scaled-down Mac meaning hardware wise it was pretty solid except the controller which was rough according to users. Some of its features were quite progressive even by today’s standards. Features like not having a region lock, like having a switch for NTSC to PAL conversion which even some of the future consoles lacked. Pippin was also the first console with a built-in internet connection and came with a modem in the box.

In 1996, not a lot of people had an internet connection or didn’t even understand how it worked. The built-in internet connection in the Pippin meant it was trying to do a lot at once. It was trying to be a browsing device, a computer (the controller even had a trackball), a media player, and of course a game console. This made the device pretty average at everything not to mention the quite frankly ridiculous pricing even by Apple’s standards.

Pippin also did not have a hard drive. The OS booted directly from the game CD’s which meant that loading times were extremely high as CDs are much slower than built-in hard drives. This also meant that without CD’s the device didn’t do anything because it had no storage for the OS.

Now the most important thing about a gaming console is its games. Pippin games were developed keeping the Mac in mind. You could play the same games on a Mac and a Pippin. The downside to this was the games weren’t well optimized for the console itself and as mentioned earlier the controller was quite clunky. The games themselves weren’t that great either and were very limited, except maybe Marathon by future Halo developers, Bungie, which was a port from the Mac, which was again not that well optimized.

The Pippin was expected to sell 200,000 units in Japan in its first twelve months, and 300,000 units in the US within twelve months of being released there. It ended up selling merely 42,000 units in its entire lifetime in both markets combined. Apple’s first attempt at making a console was destroyed by the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. Again, for comparison, the PlayStation sold around 102 million units in its lifetime.

I mean the next supposed Apple console surely wouldn’t be this bad but whatever it is it’ll never ever beat the KFC console that’s for sure.

Originally published at https://humanofculture.com on February 13, 2022.