Obscure consoles: Apple Pippin

Apple is a gaming juggernaut today. Millions use their iOS devices to play countless games available on demand. This came at the end of a long road for company. Their Mac OS operating system was never designed for gaming, and long stood in the shadow of the Windows PC.

Despite that, they decide to build a standalone console. Like many things the company did at the time, the Apple Pippin never made a lot of sense.

It was the mid-1990s and Steve Jobs had yet to return. The video game market was flooded with consoles already. Naturally, Apple jumped in screaming “me too.” The company never intended to release a system on its own. They instead chose to partner with Japanese game publisher Bandai. The result was a beautiful mess.

Looks like PowerBook, plays like one too

Like most Apple computers of the era, the Pippin was expensive and under-powered. The console used a PowerPC 603 processor at 66mhz and had a scant 5mb of RAM. Apple intended to market the Pippin into a low cost computer, rather than just a console. Perhaps they were channeling the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, the Pippin excelled at neither. All this came at a hefty $599 price tag.

The “Apple Jack” controller is the reason why we don’t use trackballs anymore

There was nothing particularly wrong with the Pippin. It worked, and it’s games actually did look ok, if not somewhat dated. It was also one of the first consoles to feature a built in modem. The controller was unique, featuring a trackball instead of an analogue stick. It also featured Marathon 2, which in many ways was Bungie’s prequel to the hit Halo series.

PC World put it best when they named the Pippin the 22nd worst tech product of all time.

“Underpowered, overpriced, and underutilized–that pretty much describes everything that came out of Apple in the mid-90s.”

Image courtesy of TNW