The truth about Pippin

Pippin was never designed for being a console but a special set-top box for Internet, TV and other things. Games were supposed to be a small application.

Apple had a hardware division in the MacintoshII/Quadra/68k era that was related to the video hardware in the platform, when they adopted the PCI bus instead of the NuBus then the graphical engineers became useless and they started a separate project named Pippin.

The name Pippin was circling around the development of the succesors of the original Macintosh as a low-cost screenless Macintosh but it was put into the oblivion until the video division came with the idea of a SetTop Box but as we know it was canned and released in the market by Bandai (and I don´t know if Apple released any model) but without any future.

The next itineration was the iTV in 1997, shown before Steve Jobs returned to the company. He canned the project and sold part the division to Bill Gates in middle of the Apple and Microsoft agreement, this people started the Windows Media Division (part of them came from Quicktime division) and WebTV and with the time they worked in the original Xbox.

 

To be honost I never considered it to be a console, even though it looks like one and has a controller, I just see it as a stripped down mac and I have never been a mac fan anyway.
And eventhough I want to experiance/buy all consoles at least once in my life I never really had the urge to buy this one (and the 3DO M2/Casio Loopy/Playdia and such for that matter) due to the rarity of the software and the software that is available is utterly crap and mostly do not even look like games or arn't games at all while you pay top money for it...

 

Gosh to think that the Pippin with it's decent games you can count on one hand, even if you are missing some fingers was a multimedia based console. Hmm that sounds familar... Lets say hello to the Commodore CD-TV, the Tandy VIS, the Philips CDi... we can also say hello to the Sega Pico, Bandai Playdia, Casio Loopy, etc... you consoles which weren't consoles, get back to the marketing room you came from.

 

At least the CDI had lot's of 'games' compared to this monster or am I defending a piece of crap just because of national pride? lol.. it even had zelda!! *couch couch..*

 

As far as I remember there was no Apple (maybe some proto build but thats it) the US release was done by Mad Catz

 

Whats your source for this info?

 

cd-i had some good things around. gamewise

it gets bashed a lot more than it deserves

 

I'd say it's on the fringes of what we'd consider a game console. But it still counts.

 

Of course its a games console, it has a pad and games, just shit ones.

 

So does the VTech Smile...