It's really funny, because all throughout reading that article I was thinking "this thing never had a chance". A custom architecture based on principles that are notoriously difficult to write tools for (VLIW), probably adding 50% to the BOM of very price sensitive consumer electronics, and an attempt to create a gaming platform by a company with no capability of producing first party titles and no commitments from credible publishers to do third party games either. How could that not fail?
But then the article ends with all of these people believing - even with 15 years of hindsight - that they genuinely were just on the verge of breaking through. Their technology was just too far ahead of its time and people didn't yet understand it!
To be fair, the game consoles were not a walk in the park either. PS2 VU programming was in some senses more complicated - on NUON you just had to stuff as many slots in a packet as possible e.g. you could write a jump to self and had like 20 slots for instructions in there (the jump packet itself and 2 delay packets, each was 6 or 7 instructions possible if memory serves) but on PS2 you had to be more clever with hiding latency between dual pipes. A loop on PS2 would be processing several items at once, eg stage 1 for the current idex, stage 2 for the previous index and the final stage for the current index - 2.
Programmers at the time were okay with this and it was actually fun. The tools though were much better for the competition, on PS2 I could set break points anywhere (even on memory reads) and see the DMA streams in the debugger, on NUON it was pretty much debugging with prints except you had to write the print yourself :)
Game developers go where the market is, regardless of the technical challenges, if they got their chips shipped with enough dvd players, people would start making games for them and it would snowball. Would it replace dedicated gaming hardware? Probably not, but it certainly could of eaten some of the casual market like the iphone did to the gameboy.
Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular. But that requires millions of units at a minimum, and even that might not be enough (what was the state of desktop Linux gaming in 2012?). For this path to work, the platform needs to become popular first. For the PC the early value proposition was productivity applications. For the iPhone it was good mobile web browsing, maps, etc.
A gaming system (which this was) can't wait for that popularity to happen through some other means. The games are the raison d'être of the system, the only reason for people to buy one. What was the end-user pitch here that'd get one of these to the hands of millions of consumers? "You can buy some other DVD player for $200, or this one that might some day play games for $300". Not very compelling, when both of them do an equally good job with the main task you're buying a DVD player for.
> Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular.
I wouldn't say this is an inevitability. Look at Nokia feature-phones.
Sure, from what I've heard and read an incredibly poorly designed ecosystem and lack of carrier interest, but you can't tell me Snake was the best the market could come up with...
It's really funny, because all throughout reading that article I was thinking "this thing never had a chance". A custom architecture based on principles that are notoriously difficult to write tools for (VLIW), probably adding 50% to the BOM of very price sensitive consumer electronics, and an attempt to create a gaming platform by a company with no capability of producing first party titles and no commitments from credible publishers to do third party games either. How could that not fail?
But then the article ends with all of these people believing - even with 15 years of hindsight - that they genuinely were just on the verge of breaking through. Their technology was just too far ahead of its time and people didn't yet understand it!