The Hardware That Never Was

There's little more tantalizing for gamers than what might have been. What if the Nintendo-Sony partnership on the Super Nintendo CD add-on didn't fall apart, causing the two to become console war rivals? What if Sega hadn't pulled out of the hardware race after the Dreamcast? What if Atari had given its game developers credit instead of alienating its best and brightest until they left to form Activision?

While we don't always have great insight into the roads not taken by console makers, they do give us glimpses here and there. For instance, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Sega have all patented much of their hardware, either in function or in form factor. We dug up some designs from the last three decades and asked each of the companies to tell us about their old plans and why these items apparently never made it to market. While they were uniformly unhelpful on that front, there's still room for speculation. We've given our idea of the purposes and pitfalls of these abandoned accessories, but chime in and set us straight or offer your own theory as to why these particular roads turned out to be dead ends.

This was quite possibly the first and last time Nintendo met a portable redesign it didn't like enough to put in stores.

The GameBoy With a Girlish Figure

These days, Nintendo reflexively redesigns its portable hardware every year or two and gives it more makeovers than Sally Jessy Raphael in sweeps week. [Feel free to insert a more era-appropriate reference of your choosing here. -Ed.] However, it wasn't always so. Nintendo introduced the original GameBoy in 1989, but didn't even release the system in different colors until the 1995 Play It Loud series debuted with an assortment of extreme/obnoxious colors like green and yellow, along with a transparent system that let players get a glimpse of the GameBoy's innards.

Nintendo apparently considered a hardware refresh well before then, as the company filed a patent application in 1992 for this curvier design of a portable gaming system, which seemed to keep all the key parts in the same place (except for the headphone jack). Interestingly, in Leonard Herman's exhaustive reference book Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Video Games, he details a rumor making the rounds at that year's Winter CES of a new color GameBoy that would have been backward compatible with the existing GameBoy library and retailed for $99. The GameBoy Color would eventually become a reality, but not until 1998, when it hit shelves around the world with a $79 price tag.