Stupid Decisions (or What Were They Thinking?)

[BillyHW]

(This thread could go into either the Classic Computing or Classic Gaming General forums, but I have to choose one, so here it is.)

 

 

I realize that hindsight is 20/20, but the history of computer/gaming is filled with stupid decisions that leave your head scratching, "What on earth were they thinking?!" Often these poor decisions led straight to bankruptcy for the companies making them, whether it was a quick or slow death.

 

These examples can be broken down into those that were More Obvious and Less Obvious at the time. Please post your examples, and also indicate whether you think it was More or Less Obvious at the time. (Can also post bad decisions that were Not Obvious at the time.) You can't really hold it against anyone for the Not Obvious examples, and you might be willing to forgive the Less Obvious ones, but you just want to give someone a good hard beating for the More Obvious offences.

 

There are so many examples, but I'll start it off with a few, in no particular order:

 

1. The 3DO and Atari Jaguar controllers (More Obvious). The Sega Genesis came out in 1989 with 3 buttons. Then the Super Nintendo made a generational change in the design of its controller in 1991 with 4 buttons across the face + the L/R buttons at the top. So how on earth could the "Next Gen" systems of 1993/94 revert back to 3 buttons across the face, *especially* since fighting games had become so huge by that time and they all needed the extra buttons? Why force people to buy another controller just to play fighting games? Most people won't even end up buying it, so games will have to be programmed for the stock controller. Had the designers of these systems just consulted a real gamer at any time in the development process these disasters could have been avoided. So dumb. Someone at Sony was smart enough not to repeat this mistake.

 

2. Too Many Product Lines: Apple (Less Obvious). Apple was certainly not the only offender in this department (please post other examples). I realize at the time that common business strategy was to try and have a product for every possible segment of the market, to try and dominate shelf space this way, and spread the probability of success around, hoping that one of your darts will hit the bullseye and win you the lottery. But all this did was spread your resources too thinly across all the models/platforms. Did these people think programming resources were limitless? Why on earth would you consider supporting 4 mutually incompatible computer lines (Apple II, III, Mac, Lisa). 3rd party support would equally have to be divided up between the lines. Most critically, the size of the user base would be divided up, and it was so important for a viable computer platform to have a critical mass of users to gain software support. They should have just deprecated Apple II in favour of Mac, or found a way to transition the Apple II smoothly into the Mac (maybe not even calling it Mac, but Apple IV or whatever). One product line to rule them all. It seems obvious now, but maybe less so back then, but they still should have known better.

 

3. Atari 2600 (lack of) licensing scheme (Not Obvious). They were the first big players in the market so they didn't really know and you can't really blame them. Everyone was learning the legal ropes of the business as they were going along. Losing the Activision lawsuit was a big blow to Atari's model. It took Nintendo to figure out a way to make the console market viable with their licensing scheme. Sure, some of Nintendo's practices turned out to be illegal, but the fundamental design of their licensing system is the foundation of the console market today, and is what keeps the big players in business.

[high voltage]

1. The NES controllers (most obvious)

A controller where the controls are the wrong way around. It was always 'FIRE' = left thumb and 'CONTROL' = right hand (except Vectrex, but we didn't take much notice).

Most magazines at the time complained about this awkward controller: too small and squarish, doesn't fit nice in your hand at all.

 

2. NES licensing scheme (obvious)

It never worked (just look at the Wii), lots of showelware/bad games on Famicom/NES/GB, go figure. plus the misinformation of the Quality Seal, kids thought that all games with this seal were of great quality and playability.

 

3: Too many buttons on joypads (obvious)

4 buttons on the SNES pad, plus 2 shoulder buttons...hold on, which one was I supposed to press now, damn it, wrong one, Jaguar had 15 (or 18 (Pro controller)) buttons, more confusing.....

 

4. Nintendos illegal activities (less obvious, because they got away with it)

Threatening shops if consoles other than from Nintendo were allowed to be sold, they'd withdraw. Not playing by the 'end of the year' tax rules. And many other illegal tactics which sure weren't allowed if an American company tried to do this.

Edited January 4, 2015 by high voltage

[The Usotsuki]

Most arcade games I've seen were stick on the left. Makes sense for a home pad to be stick on the left.

[roland p]

1. The release of the MSX Turbo-r seemed pointless to me.

The MSX2+ already wasn't a big improvement over the MSX2, basically adding hardware scroll and adding more colors for still pictures. The turbo-r only added a faster cpu. Now you have the MSX, MSX2, MSX2+ and MSX turbo-r...

 

2. Amiga CD32

I never 'got' the CD32. It just seemed wrong to me. To me it was more like a crippled amiga 1200.

 

3. Amiga 1200 still having 4 channel 8-bit sound, aga performance

This was highly annoying. Now my friends pc's had better quality sound than my amiga

Also, aga only did max 640x480.

 

 

The joypad of the NES seemed ok to me, since I first thought of it as a game&watch with a tv (in hindsight a consolized game & watch)

[BillyHW]

1. The NES controllers (most obvious)

A controller where the controls are the wrong way around. It was always 'FIRE' = left thumb and 'CONTROL' = right hand (except Vectrex, but we didn't take much notice).

Most magazines at the time complained about this awkward controller: too small and squarish, doesn't fit nice in your hand at all.

 

2. NES licensing scheme (obvious)

It never worked (just look at the Wii), lots of showelware/bad games on Famicom/NES/GB, go figure. plus the misinformation of the Quality Seal, kids thought that all games with this seal were of great quality and playability.

 

3: Too many buttons on joypads (obvious)

4 buttons on the SNES pad, plus 2 shoulder buttons...hold on, which one was I supposed to press now, damn it, wrong one, Jaguar had 15 (or 18 (Pro controller)) buttons, more confusing.....

 

4. Nintendos illegal activities (less obvious, because they got away with it)

Threatening shops if consoles other than from Nintendo were allowed to be sold, they'd withdraw. Not playing by the 'end of the year' tax rules. And many other illegal tactics which sure weren't allowed if an American company tried to do this.

 

When I mentioned the NES licensing system, I didn't mean their limiting the number of games, as this was easily circumvented by establishing subsidiaries or obtaining alternate publishers. I agree that it didn't really keep quality levels high. Anytime you have a successful system with the largest user base, you're going to get a lot of crappy games. What I'm talking about was using the licensing fees to subsidize the price of the hardware, to establish that large user base in the first place, that is necessary for a successful run. In turn the licensing fees spread the cost of R&D in hardware development across all developers that benefit from publishing on the system. It's how they all do it to success now. In fact, there was only one system I'm aware of that didn't have this business model, and it failed spectacularly. But that is the subject of my next post.

Edited January 4, 2015 by BillyHW

[BillyHW]

4. 3DO licensing model (More Obvious). I'm putting this in the more obvious category, because launching a system for $600 or $700 or whatever it was had to be obviously stupid to anyone at the time. There's no way you could ever succeed at that price, and then no way you could ever live it down. Even if you tried to slash prices later, it would seem to the market that you were panicking because no is buying your system, and people wouldn't want an expensive lemon on their hands. But what was behind this stupidity? My understanding was that EA and some other publishers were fed up with paying licensing fees, so they got together and developed their own hardware and then licensed out the specs to various manufacturers. These manufacturers had to essentially pay for this cost of development and the cost of manufacture, add on their necessary profit margin and voila, you have the price of your system. In turn the games were *supposed* to be cheaper because of the lack of licensing fees. But because there were no subsidizing of the hardware by software, buyers had to pay the full price of the hardware, which was very steep, and prevented any sort of large user base from establishing itself, hence all the pledged developers never showed up and the system started dying for the day it was released. And did we actually see the games being any cheaper? I sure didn't. They just sold for the same price with the publishers taking the whole amount for themselves, instead of having to share some of it with the hardware companies.

 

And to top off their stupidity, these idiots put 3 buttons on the controller of a $600+ system in the era of fighting games, which rendered them useless. Did they even put two in the box?

Edited January 4, 2015 by BillyHW

[Chilly Willy]

2. Amiga CD32

I never 'got' the CD32. It just seemed wrong to me. To me it was more like a crippled amiga 1200.

This one is easy to explain: it was an attempt to get around a US patent. Silly as it sounds, there was a valid patent on using XOR to invert the pixels on the screen. Every computer maker who sold a computer in the US had to get a license, and they ALL did rather than fight it. Even Amiga had a license on it. However, when Commodore had their meltdown, they didn't pay the license fee. This was right as the AGA machines came out. The patent holder got a restraining order against sales of the Amiga, so Commodore's biggest market was closed with xmas looming. So they tried a back door around the patent. Video game consoles did NOT license the patent... mainly because (at the time) no console had a BIOS rom that did anything more than show a logo and play a tune. There was no reason to license the patent - it was up to any games that used XOR on the screen to license the patent on their own. Unfortunately for the CD32, the patent holder knew the CD32 still had the Amiga kickstart rom inside, which violated the XOR patent. So they got a restraining order on the CD32 as well. And that was it for Commodore.

[Rex Dart]

1. The 3DO and Atari Jaguar controllers (More Obvious). The Sega Genesis came out in 1989 with 3 buttons. Then the Super Nintendo made a generational change in the design of its controller in 1991 with 4 buttons across the face + the L/R buttons at the top. So how on earth could the "Next Gen" systems of 1993/94 revert back to 3 buttons across the face, *especially* since fighting games had become so huge by that time and they all needed the extra buttons? Why force people to buy another controller just to play fighting games? Most people won't even end up buying it, so games will have to be programmed for the stock controller. Had the designers of these systems just consulted a real gamer at any time in the development process these disasters could have been avoided. So dumb. Someone at Sony was smart enough not to repeat this mistake.

 

 

Not all fighting games used six buttons (see the Neo Geo's four), and the 3DO pad did have five action buttons on it. But yeah, it took both 3DO and Jaguar more than one try to get the controllers "right".

[+save2600]

I always thought Nintendo's decision to use such a slow (talking clock rate) processor in the SNES was rather silly. Slow-down in games aside, there was a numbers war going on from a marketing standpoint by then also.

 

Any company that implemented tethered non-removable wiring for controllers and power supplies in their consoles. And to a lesser extent, tethered RF cables too.

 

Single button controller schemes on any system after the 2600. Especially looking at you Commodore!

[BillyHW]

I always thought Nintendo's decision to use such a slow (talking clock rate) processor in the SNES was rather silly. Slow-down in games aside, there was a numbers war going on from a marketing standpoint by then also.

 

Any company that implemented tethered non-removable wiring for controllers and power supplies in their consoles. And to a lesser extent, tethered RF cables too.

 

Single button controller schemes on any system after the 2600. Especially looking at you Commodore!

 

OMG, I was also going to mention the Commodore/Atari Computers 1-button controllers. Definitely a (More Obvious) example. How stupid did you have to be to include just one button on the controller? A lot of C64 games had to incorporate the space bar on the keyboard for an alternate button. And you still had to press up to jump. And weren't the Amiga and ST also 1-button? Amiga/ST Street Fighter II with one-button? That is utterly ridiculous and unforgivable, especially for computers that were sold as gaming machines.

 

For the Atari 2600 I can understand just having one button. But for anything after that it really needed to be 2 or more, minimum.

 

Tethered cables--also stupid stupid stupid. Definitely (More Obvious). Who were the guilty parties in this case? Let's list them. I can think of Intellivision. Who else was there?

Edited January 4, 2015 by BillyHW

[carlsson]

I'd say anyone who used or in particular went from using standardized connectors/pinouts to proprietary ones, not because those would be functionally superior or significantly cheaper, but just to halt the 3rd party market, belongs to this list. I'm sure many cases can be mentioned, I'll start with the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 models on which the 6-pin card edge connector for tape recorder and the DE9 connectors for joysticks were replaced by mini-DINs. The official reason varies between space saving (cost reduction) and improved reduction of interference, but I'm quite sure it mainly was an attempt to sell more Commodore branded tape recorders and joysticks for the sorry people who bought these.

 

For similar reasons, I think it was silly of Atari to not only use the SIO connector that barely has a reference number, but also with the ST line go all in on DIN connectors with extreme amounts of pins - 13 and 14 respectively, instead of using some far more common D-Subs. While I don't fancy the DB23 on the Amiga very much, at least those seem at least as post-market available as the DIN connectors, and easier to solder with, e.g. if you're making your own video cable. There are endless examples of this, one can also wonder where the four pin connector as seen on TI-99/4A, Colecovision, SVI computers, some 3rd party C64 floppy drives etc came from, as every manufacturer anyway had their own voltages and pinouts so what the market ended up with was a handful of systems with an odd connector where the power supplies anyway weren't cross compatible.

[+save2600]

Almost forgot about one of my more favorite bitches: Atari 520ST with no built in drive. And then to add insult to injury, offers a single-sided 3-1/2 external that required its own power supply!

 

That cute little Apple ][c monitor that was monochrome GREEN! WTF?!? Totally senseless shit right there. Thing should have been color, but could have had a green button if anyone (nobody) wanted to actually use it. Commodore even had the gee-whiz to include the useless green screen option on some of their monitors.

 

Saw one of those ][c monitors boxed and non-yellowed at the local Salavating Amy the other day. Got all excited, but then remembered what I was looking at. lol

 

The Amiga stuff that has already been mentioned are good (8-bit Paula, AGA too late, omission of higher refresh standards, etc.) but one thing that rarely gets a lot of hate is the Amiga 600. Seriously, talk about a concept and machine that was years obsolete by the time it was released. A machine like the A600 *should* have been released (or not at all) between the A500 and the A3000 and marketed strictly as a games machine or uber budget computer. But nope! Instead, it was very expensive for what it was and released alongside the A1200! WTF??

 

List goes on and on between dumb moves by Atari and Commodore:

 

5200 analog controllers, CX78 or any vertically oriented controller such as TI's or Commodore's own

Vectrex analog stick - and like the 5200, hardly any games took advantage of it!

Atari XEGS so late

Commodore's C64 cartridge only game machine

C128 for that matter (yeah, lets release another 8-bit around the same time as Amiga)

Commodore +4 (WTF?!?)

Atari 600XL didn't need to exist. Oh but wait, it did - just to compete with 1200XL! lol

Lack of easy memory expandability above 512k on the 520ST (should have had memory expansion through the cartridge port)

 

*BTW: The Amiga CD32 makes more sense to me than a lot of their other moves. Great concept as a console: power of an A1200 a year too late, but with a CD drive where all you had to do was pop in a disc and turn on. Nothing wrong with that at all and hey, we FINALLY got a REAL multi-button controller - but the machine was priced a bit too high for what it was maybe AND lack of games that truly harnessed what the machine was capable of is what really sucked about it. Just ended up with a bunch of lazy computer ports with CD soundtracks, if we were so lucky.

 

CDTV was cool also, but again - too little too late and poorly marketed. The whole multimedia thing was in its infancy obviously, but Commodore WAS there pioneering the whole scene that was to be.

[akator]

Almost forgot about one of my more favorite bitches: Atari 520ST with no built in drive. And then to add insult to injury, offers a single-sided 3-1/2 external that required its own That cute little Apple ][c monitor that was monochrome GREEN! WTF?!? Totally senseless shit right there. Thing should have been color, but could have had a green button if anyone (nobody) wanted to actually use it. Commodore even had the gee-whiz to include the useless green screen option on some of their monitors.

 

Saw one of those ][c monitors boxed and non-yellowed at the local Salavating Amy the other day. Got all excited, but then remembered what I was looking at. lol

 

80 Column Text. Word Processing. Spreadsheets. Reasonably sized color CRTs of the time, either shadow mask or Trintron, couldn't produce a high enough resolution for quality 80 column text. At least not something most people could look at all day for productivity/work.

 

A monochome phosphor screen, regardless of the phosphor color, does not have resolution limitations because there are not different colored phosphor cells (RGB) needed to mix color.

 

A 1280 color monitor for design and layout cost me around $1600 in 1991. Those weren't available for consumer purchase in the early 80s.

Edited January 5, 2015 by akator

[BillyHW]

7. 5200 Intentional Incompatibility (More Obvious). Making the 5200 intentionally incompatible with with the 8-bit computer line, in terms of cartridges and controller ports was idiotic. If they just made it compatible, they would have already had a large games library in place, and a marketplace of ready peripheral controllers. The 5200 should have been like an early version of the XEGS. Why on earth would you want to spread your and your developers resources around two essentially identical, but incompatible platforms. You're just competing against yourself and crowding out your own shelf space. It makes no sense.

 

Although I do wonder how Atari could have gotten around the computer rights vs console rights for certain games like Donkey Kong. If the A8 version worked on the 5200, could they get sued? I think they probably could have gotten away with it, as long as on those games that they only had computer rights for, they didn't advertise 5200 compatibility on the box, but the kids would know that they'd still work fine. It was the Wild West anyways, they should have just done it and handled the lawsuits later. And Adam did release Donkey Kong, so Coleco did the reverse.

Edited January 5, 2015 by BillyHW

[Osgeld]

 

That cute little Apple ][c monitor that was monochrome GREEN! WTF?!? Totally senseless shit right there. Thing should have been color, but could have had a green button if anyone (nobody) wanted to actually use it. Commodore even had the gee-whiz to include the useless green screen option on some of their monitors.

 

its not about color, most people didnt have color monitors on the II series, cause they wanted razor sharp 80 column text, which is hard when your pixel density is 1/3rd, and even in the day of HDTV its still not as good as the green screens were when your doing anything other than playing a game

 

same thing on the pc side, at first you had MDA or CGA, MDA was perfect for text but monochome, CGA didnt really do anything well, sort of like having color on an Apple II, but the II could do both which was handy I guess

Edited January 5, 2015 by Osgeld

[Keatah]

Good to see the Amiga mentioned in this thread. A shining example of what not to do in the computer industry.

[jhd]

2. Too Many Product Lines: Apple (Less Obvious). Apple was certainly not the only offender in this department (please post other examples). I realize at the time that common business strategy was to try and have a product for every possible segment of the market, to try and dominate shelf space this way, and spread the probability of success around, hoping that one of your darts will hit the bullseye and win you the lottery. But all this did was spread your resources too thinly across all the models/platforms.

 

Tandy/Radio Shack was also guilty of this. There was the "business oriented" Model II,12,16 series, the Model I/III/IV series, and the Coco 1/2/3.

 

Eventually, they added their own line of (mostly-compatible) PC clones.

 

None of these systems ever gained a large amount of third-party support (especially as compared to the competitiors), and the many different, incompatible platforms only served to fragment their own support and marketing efforts. There are also some stories of internal conflicts between the supporters of different product lines.

[MarkO]

its not about color, most people didnt have color monitors on the II series, cause they wanted razor sharp 80 column text, which is hard when your pixel density is 1/3rd, and even in the day of HDTV its still not as good as the green screens were when your doing anything other than playing a game

 

same thing on the pc side, at first you had MDA or CGA, MDA was perfect for text but monochome, CGA didnt really do anything well, sort of like having color on an Apple II, but the II could do both which was handy I guess

MDA was much Sharper than CGA, but at least the CGA was readable at 80 Columns.. ( Other than the SNOW Issue ) Unlike the Apple ][, which most all Color Composite monitors at 80 columns were very fuzzy..

 

MarkO

[Chilly Willy]

I always thought Nintendo's decision to use such a slow (talking clock rate) processor in the SNES was rather silly. Slow-down in games aside, there was a numbers war going on from a marketing standpoint by then also.

Actually, for a 6502 derivative, the clock rate was fine. What holds back the SNES is the 8-bit data bus. That's the GOOD point on the Genesis - a fast 16-bit data bus really moves the data.

[high voltage]

Don't know why so many people dis the 1-button joystick, hello you can jump (Smurf), it doesn't require a second button. With Space Shuttle you can use a 1-button joystick and THE WHOLE CONSOLE for controlling the game, anyone had problems with this? No of course not.

 

Of course you did way back sometimes needed more buttons, that's why you had the Booster Grip or the Atari Video Touch Pad or the Track & Field Controllers, or control a game with 2 joysticks (Spy Hunter and Dual Control Module), all those came included with the game, you didn't have to buy them extra.

 

Man, we played The Eidolon on A8 (great Lucasfilm game), 1 joystick and putting the computer onto the floor, controlling the space bar with our toes, now that's ingenuity.

 

BTW, many joysticks had 2 or more fire buttons way back (the 5200 stick had 16 buttons), if needed they could've been programmed for use of game in question.

[roland p]

'What were they thinking'

 

The sega nomad got a dstn screen. I was disappointed by that, I was already spoiled (though I didn't own one, a friend of mine had) by the turbo express' tft screen.

Edited January 23, 2015 by roland p

[Chilly Willy]

'What were they thinking'

 

The sega nomad got a dstn screen. I was disappointed by that, I was already spoiled (though I didn't own one, a friend of mine had) by the turbo express' tft screen.

Especially given the already high price, they could have afforded to add an extra few bucks for a better screen.

[BassGuitari]

The RCA Studio II. Pretty much everything about it says "What were they thinking?"

First, that combination RF/power switch. It's nice to only have to run one cord to the TV, but it's kind of a pain to dig around behind the TV to use the switchbox to turn the power on and off. I can only guess RCA was going for tidiness and convenience, but it backfired a bit in practice.

Speaking of the combination RF/power cord, it's hardwired to the board internally, as is the power LED, which is mounted into the front of the case. Short version: you can't completely separate the board from the case. The speaker/beeper is also mounted through the board, though I suspect this was done to reduce the height and size of the console.

The keypads on the console make some sense considering the Studio II supposedly originated from an earlier home computer design. Making them removable would have been helpful for simultaneous 2-player games, though. Some clone systems did this.

 

The cartridges are a little strange because it feels like you put them in backwards. They have labels on the front and back, and the title label faces away from you; it's the "back" side with the instructions on it that faces the player.

It's just a bizarre design overall. Of course, considering how obviously dated the Studio II and its software were even leading up to its release...why release it at all? RCA had to know the Studio II didn't have a chance.

[JamesD]

Coleco ADAM

Tape drives, slow daisy wheel printer you had to buy, power supply in the printer, all slots are different, too big, too expensive, simple word processor in ROM, BASIC on self destructing tape, etc...

Look up any rant about the ADAM in the Colecovision/ADAM section and it will pretty much cover it.

 

 

 

Commodore +4

No hardware sprites, no SID, no 1571 turbo mode, non-standard joystick ports, the arrow keys, etc...

No hardware sprites made it tough to port software though there have been some amazing ports only using software in recent years.

I think if the sound had been better it didn't necessarily have to be SID compatible. 3 or 4 channels and a few more settings would have probably been enough to draw less criticism.

Why didn't they include adapters for joysticks? Surely there is some way they could have done it without the FCC flipping out.

The arrow keys were sort of a good idea but they should have stuck with regular keys kinda like MSX.

[+save2600]

The C= +4 simply shouldn't have existed. What a waste of resources (time and money being two big ones) and materials when you think about it. C64 could have been turned into a simple crippled +4 with a single cartridge.