This article is a follow-up to
Closing Time: A Tribute to the Last Calls of Gaming. You probably should read that first, it's way more interesting than this. The original
Closing Time showcases the last games released for 25+ popular game systems. This sequel looks the final games for roughly a dozen unpopular systems.
What's with the "Grif's Tavern" subtitle?
For reasons I can't recall now, I made a lot of analogies between the bar/nightclub scene and video game consoles in the original
Closing Time. You know, comparing a hot new system to a trendy nightclub with patrons lined-up out the door until something even trendier comes along. Some bars were never trendy though, some were dives from day one. Maybe the owner didn't really know how to run a business, maybe they thought their success in one industry would translate to a different one, maybe the market just didn't need another watering hole. Video game consoles fail for these very same reasons (and a few more).
In my early 20s I spent too many weekends making the rounds of the local bar scene. It seems like we went to darn near every place within a 20-mile radius. One friend, who'll refer to as "
Lefty", had an unexplainable affection for dumpy bars. He felt some masochist attraction that drove him to sample the most decrement, and often scary-looking, establishments The rest of us never understood why but went along with it from time to time. It was one such indulgence that introduced us to Grif's Tavern.
Grif's Tavern appeared to be a run-down house that was converted to a bar. I briefly pondered if the second floor had an apartment for rent and if so what type of transient would live there. We pulled into the gravelly parking lot and trudged our way in.
Once inside it was now obvious it was indeed a house with most of the walls knocked down. We passed through what used to be a foyer when we noticed something unusual... we were walking on dirt. Not "
dirt" as in the "
it was really filthy" but a dirt floor. This was not your average dirt floor though, they painted lines in the dirt to make it look like tiles. To this day I can't get the image of a painted dirt floor out of my head.
We walked a few more steps in and I spotted someone from high school who I didn't especially care to see again. He recognized me, kind of. "
Hey Mike!" he bellowed with a wave. I responded with a nod and without saying a word we turned in unison and left Grif's Tavern. I drove by it some time later and it was converted to a Christan youth coffee house. I never let Lefty talk me into another of these barhopping experiments again.
These systems are the painted dirt floor of gaming systems. Before you start composing that hate mail let me just say that I own, and enjoy, a number of these systems. As someone who goes to classic gaming conventions whenever possible I respect that each of these systems has a loyal fan base today (OK, maybe not the Gizmondo).
Personally liking a system doesn't make it a success though. These systems all suffered from poor distribution, lousy game libraries, and/or short lifespans. I'm sure the handful of regulars at Grif's Tavern were sad to see it go too.
To give you an idea, the Virtual Boy was included in the original article. These are the systems even less successful than one warning it could cause eye damage to children. Paint the dirt all you want, it's still dirt.
As in the main
Closing Time article, this is only addressing licensed American releases. Even these forgettable systems managed a few homebrews after their official demise. Same disclaimer about consoles having different lifespans in different countries. I'm not really interested in tracking down how every system did in every market. Maybe one day I'll write "
Closing Time: International Edition" but I doubt it.
Now a lot of these systems are not especially well documented. For some systems I had to settle for "
well, it was one of these three games", I'm always open to updating this as definitive sources are found. Overall, I'm confident in the accuracy of these selections.
Enough rambling, on to the games..
Contents
Mobile optimized version of this article
Thankfully, Fairchild F games are numbered making it easy to determine which game was released last.
Alien Invasion, at #26, was the final game produced for this groundbreaking system. Yeah, "groundbreaking", it was the first game system with a CPU and programmable cartridges. It couldn't complete the Atari 2600 though and didn't even make it to the 80s (where it would have died in 1983 anyway).
The release year for Alien Invasion isn't written in stone so I went with the copyright year of 1979.
The Microvision was the first cartridge-based portable system and had a total of 11 games.
Alien Raiders and
Cosmic Hunter were the only releases it had in 1981 but the exact order is undocumented.
Although no emulators for the Microvision exist, there is a nifty simulator at:
http://home.comcast.net/~eichler2/microvision/MicroSimProject.htm.
If I count the 32X as a system then I suppose I can count the Intellivoice as one. Of course I wouldn't count the NES Light Zapper as a system. I guess I'll go with "if it plugs into a cartridge or expansion slot it's a separate system". Wait, then that would make the N64 Expansion Card count as a "system". OK look, I really just want to include the Intellivoice here, do I need to justify why?
A total of four games were released for the Intellivoice (not including World Series Major League Baseball since it required the ECS, see below). The first three were released concurrently with the attachment with
TRON: Solar Sailer bringing up the rear.
I've played the first three Intellivoice games more than I care to admit. I am a big Intellivision fan and thoroughly enjoy them despite the grainy vocals. TRON, on the other hand, is just weird and confusing. I can't make sense of it at all.
Yeah, I'm not including the plethora of other computers that were little more than a game system with a keyboard attachment. This is a matter of convenience though, while reading about the previous entry I spotted this one.
World Series Major League Baseball was the last game released for the ECS, it also supported the Intellivoice module but didn't require it.
World Series Major League Baseball was way ahead of its time. It was leaps and bounds ahead of other baseball games of the era including the Intellivision offering. Unfortunately very few were able to enjoy the game when it was new.
The Astrocade is very high on the "list of systems I wish I owned". I should probably start scouring ebay instead of hoping I accidentally bump into one somewhere. Like the Fairchild Channel F entry, this is based on the cartridge number: #2019 –
Cosmic Raiders. It's not a bad game, an obvious Defender clone but passable nonetheless.
A couple homebrew cartridges were released after Cosmic Raiders, but it was the last official release.
Mangavox introduced the first home video game console in the form of the Odyssey. The sequel didn't hold quite as much historical significance. It never caught up with the Atari 2600 and looked terrible compared to the Intellivision and Colecovision.
Power Lords was released moments before the system was discontinued in the United States. The game is odd, it took a few minutes for me to figure out whether I was controlling the snake or something else. I won't say it's bad, it's just not like anything else I've played before.
I have to go back and count which year saw more system deaths, 1983 or 1996. Both were a console bloodbath albeit for completely different reasons. In 1996 the Playstation was booming and Nintendo 64 hot off the presses. All the pretenders to the 32-bit generation were discontinued in 1996 along with a couple portable systems.
1983, on the other hand, was a total free-fall. The video market collapsed and systems starting dropping like flies. Among the casualties were the Vectrex and Arcadia 2001.
Like the Fairchild Channel F and Bally Astrocade, the Vectrex numbered it's cartridge catalog so it should be easy to sort out the last game. However, the light pen and 3D games were numbered separately making it hard to tell which one was really last. It's either
Polar Rescue,
Crazy Coaster, or possibly
Pole
Position.
The Arcadia 2001 was released in 1982, just in time to experience the legendary crash. In many ways it exemplifies why the crash occurred. Within a year it had a dozen games that were all knock-offs of titles already available for other systems. It also had numerous hardware variants manufactured by different companies. This only further confused shoppers already attempting to sort through stacks of Atari 2600 clones. Sure the graphics were sharper than most competitors but consumers didn't care at this point. It looks like something called
Super Bug is the likely winner here. However, some of these hardware variants also played different games. So
Super Dimension Fortress Macross, or maybe something else entirely, could be the last game published for it too.
I'm forced to list this one as "
unconfirmed but almost certainly the last Sega CD+32X game". Maybe I should put this in a sidebar instead, whatever. This is proof that personal recollection is a bad way to construct a list like this. In the original
Closing Time Sega CD entry I noted that I thought Fahrenheit was the last Sega CD+32X game. When I actually bothered to look into it I found it was likely the first Sega CD+32X game. I made the "
it's the last game I personally saw on the shelf" mistake.
After Fahrenheit, the folks at Digital Pictures decided to re-release a number of their Sega CD games in a Sega CD+32X format. Things now become difficult to sort out. Corpse Killer and Supreme Warrior were 1994 releases that received 32X versions late in the same year. An upgraded version of Night Trap came alongside them.
Slam City with Scottie Pippen is often lumped in with these previous three releases. However. the other versions of Slam City (PC, 3DO) were early 1995 releases so I have to think that the Sega CD version was also a 1995 release as some sources list. I can't say with confidence that the places listing it in 1994 are wrong though.
So there just aren't enough facts to call this one for sure, however all signs point to Slam City being the final Sega CD+32X release. At worst it's tied with the other Digital Pictures games.
The Sega CD and 32X would each enjoy a few months of new releases after Slam City, but publishers quickly abandoned the idea of developing games that required both attachments.
Here's another case of personal recollection gone wrong. In the missing systems section of the original
Closing Time I speculated that Highlander was the final Jaguar CD release. I made the same "
it's the last game I personally saw on the shelf" mistake. In reality it had a good six-month lead over
Brain Dead 13 which was the final Jaguar CD release. By then most stores slashed their Jaguar CD inventory. Over at Electronics Boutique/Waldensoftware, only Dragon's Lair and Space Ace remained. I don't know which chains carried it, but it was out there for those loyal Jaguar CD owners to find.
A year after the Jaguar was canned,
Telegames published a pair of shelved games developed by Jaguar licensees. Iron Soldier and World Tour Racing were both made available via mail order in 1997.
I paid $5 for my CD-i and sometimes feel ripped-off. OK, it didn't come with a controller or power cable so after I spend $20-$30 to acquire those maybe I'll feel otherwise.
When I started working on this article I expected to find the last CD-i release to be in 1996, 1997 at the latest. 1997 saw a release of Brain Dead 13 which seemed to be the curtain call for the CD-i. After a dry 1998, Solar Crusade saw its way onto both the PC and Philips CD-i. Why would Infogrames release a game for a totally dead system? Why did they decide re-branding as Atari was a good idea? Both questions are equally puzzling.
A few homebrew games, such as
Frog
Feast, have cropped up since the CD-i was discontinued.
Sidebar - Neo Geo CD - King of Fighters 99 (December 1999)
I included the Neo Geo in the original
Closing Time so I might as well include the even-less mainstream Neo Geo CD here. It has the largest game library of any system on this page, OK I guess if I bothered to count I'd probably find that the Odyssey2 has the most games but the Neo Geo CD certainly has the best games of all these systems. Despite this, it was an extremely obscure console in the US. Only the most hardcore SNK fans owned it.
The Neo Geo CD didn't have the longevity of it's cartridge based counterpart. While the Neo Geo would live on for another five years, King of Fighters 1999 marked the end of SNKs CD experiment.
It's almost eerie how close Tiger came to creating the Nintendo DS with the game.com – touchscreen, internet capabilities, inferior graphics to contemporary hand-held systems. Of course the DS has done so many things to compensate for not looking as pretty as the PSP, the game.com could never find a similar way to overcome the Game Boy. The internet capabilities were practically useless as they required an account with their proprietary ISP. The touchscreen turned out to be inadequate for gaming. The only remaining hope was producing a better library.
You can imagine how that turned out.
A total of twenty games were produced, several of them had great titles like "Mortal Kombat Trilogy" or "Duke Nukem 3D" that were poor imitations of the original. The grave for the game.com was already dug when the Game Boy Color arrived to throw on the dirt. Frogger, Centipede, and Scrabble were released for the Christmas season of 1999. By the following Christmas no sign of the game.com could be found in stores.
Sidebar - Gizmondo – Worst System Ever? (2005)
What qualifies a system as being the "
worst ever"? The SuperGrafx, with its measly seven game library, goes for hundreds of dollars on ebay now. It's a prized collectors item in spite of its commercial failure (or maybe because of). Will the Gizmondo ever be a system people drop wads of cash on? Doubtful.
I think I actually despise the Gizmondo. It represents everything you can do wrong with a game system:
-Focused on hardware capabilities over game quality
-Created by people with no game industry experience who figured they could buy a place at the table
-Poorly conceived features that are unrelated to gaming, i.e. SMS capabilities but no keypad, if you think a numeric pad is annoying for SMS just wait until you have a control pad and six buttons to work with
-Launch library that didn't appeal to any gaming demographic
-Optional ad-sponsored hardware available
It really just comes down to one thing though - I can't think of a system I want to own less than the Gizmondo. Think of every game system you don't own and rank them in the order you'd like to acquire them. What goes beneath the Gizmondo? Based on that alone I will happily label it the worst system ever and defend that position if the one Gizmondo fan on earth ever reads this.
Oh, so what's the last game for the Gizmono? Trick question, it had eight games in the stores for its US launch and none after that. The world never got to learn if "
Momma Can I Mow The Lawn" was really as crappy as the name sounded.
Some of the things I said about the Gizmondo apply to the N-Gage. However, it was marketed more as a phone than a gaming system unlike the Gizmondo which was marketed as.. well, I'm not sure what.
The game library for the N-Gage was actually decent though. I'm not planning to seek out an N-Gage out but there are a few games I wouldn't mind having. So I suppose it's ahead of the Gizmondo on the aforementioned list but below many others.
Now the N-Gage as a gaming platform isn't dead. If you own a recent Nokia phone you can download the N-Gage runtime and enjoy a variety of titles. As a cartridge based system (MMC format), the last game released was Warhammer 40,000: Glory in Death. I wish there were more RPG and strategy games for mobile phones. They fit the mobile format so much better than action games.
Despite my best web searching efforts I couldn't find anything that identified the last releases for the following failed
systems:
Pippin – The Apple/Bandai Pippin didn't last long and had a tiny library. Unfortunately there's no source that lists the release order for it's titles.
Amiga CD32 / Amiga CDTV – Both of these were flops in the US but enjoyed moderate success in Europe. Even the European release lists aren't documented especially well in the release date department though.
Neo Geo Pocket Color – I gotta think someone knows the answer for this one. The Neo Geo Pocket Color wasn't a commercial success in the US but has a decent cult following. Sooner or later someone will post a release list with dates.
Sega Pico – This is one of the most under-appreciated systems I can think of. It's a Sega Genesis with a touchpad, I find it to be a very innovative little system. Unfortunately there's no source I can find that lists when games were released for it. Being aimed at kids, it never developed the kind of internet following other obscure consoles have.
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