Every major video game console developer has made huge mistakes that either did significant damage to their brand or brought the company to its knees.  Wether its inexperience, overconfidence or poor judgement, nobody seems to be immune from these pitfalls.  In this series, I’m going to look at some of the biggest missteps from Atari, Sega, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.  Lets begin:

Atari

The first gaming juggernaut, Atari more or less commanded the entire video game market.  Competitors popped up, but were never able to put a dent in the domination held by Atari.  In essence, Atari was it own worst enemy.  Staffed by talented, but overzealous employees, the company was run into the ground by people who didn’t seem to have a strong grasp of the business side of this new industry.

One could argue that the port of Pac-Man and the highly anticipated E.T. started the crash of 1983 that nearly destroyed the entire industry, however that’s a short-sighted excuse.  Atari’s biggest fault was the lack of quality control, which eventually flooded the market with terrible games.  Great games like those published by Activision had to share space on retail stores with poorly-developed games and half-hearted clones of popular titles.

This lack of quality control caused consumer backlash that turned the industry upside down, as retailers rushed to purge their inventories of junk games before there were no customers left.  The concept of video games was damaged so badly that Nintendo had to use R.O.B. the robot as a trojan horse to get stores to carry the NES console, presenting it as a toy robot rather than a video game console.

Sega

After the Sega Master System was drastically outsold by the NES, Sega hit back fast and hard with the Genesis.  For most of the early 90’s Sega was a formidable rival to Nintendo, until they decided to introduce bulky expansions to the console that soured public opinion of Sega.  

The combination of the Sega CD and 32X expansions hooked to the aging Genesis and the library of games that required those expansions to play (and in some cases, both expansions were required) ended up making gamers frustrated rather than excited.

In the time Sega wasted developing those expansions, Sony was readying the Playstation for market.  Sega fell behind and their follow-up console, the Saturn was released at a higher price and with inferior 3D capabilities than the hot new Playstation.  In addition, Sega bungled the launch of the console so badly that retailers were caught off guard when the console was suddenly released without any real marketing or preparation.  The Saturn sold poorly and faded into 3rd place quickly.

The Dreamcast was a much better console than the Saturn and it was marketed very well, but it was too late.  Most of Sega’s fans had migrated to the Playstation, and the DVD-enabled Playstation 2 killed any momentum Sega was starting to gain by the late 90’s.  After discontinuing the Dreamcast, Sega became a third party developer, with their flagship franchises ending up on their rivals’ consoles.

Come back for part 2, which will take a look at Nintendo’s biggest mistakes.

Thanks for reading.  As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!