Forgotten Apple Game Console

No, it's not an Xbox, not a Playstation, or even a Dreamcast ...

In mid-1993, Apple stormed. Against the backdrop of a slowdown in Mac sales, Microsoft has been dominating the PC industry. Moreover, last year Apple spent $ 600 million on research and development of products such as laser printers, speakers, color monitors, and the Newton MessagePad — the first device that was positioned as a “personal digital assistant” or PDA. But the return on all of these expenses was small.

Poor text recognition in Newton quickly became a source of constant jokes. The confusion was reinforced by the fact that engineers and marketing were preparing for a radical transition from the Motorola 68k family of microprocessors (also known as 680x0), on which the Mac had been working since 1984, the PowerPC is a new, more powerful computer architecture jointly developed by Apple, Motorola and IBM. “Macs” with 68k series processors would be incompatible with software created for PowerPC. In addition, the software developed for 68k needed to be updated so that it could take full advantage of the PowerPC.

In such circumstances, the managing director (COO) was appointed Managing Director (COO) Michael Spindler, a German engineer and strategist, who climbed all the steps of Apple's European division to the highest management level. (The previous CEO, John Scully, was asked to resign.) Spindler started a radical and costly reorganization of the company, reducing morale and increasing chaos. He gained a reputation as a person who absolutely does not know how to communicate with people. He held meetings at which he talked incoherently, wrote illegible notes on the blackboard, and then left without letting anyone ask questions. His office was usually closed.

Under the control of Spindler, Apple became increasingly ineffective. The company has lost purpose and direction. In one year, management decided to lower Mac prices in order to increase market share, changed its mind the following year, and began to strive for profit. Innovation is almost completely gone from the company's product line, and she was inclined to think that was horrified: you need to allow the creation of Mac clones.

In 1993, Mac reached a 12 percent share of the personal computer market, and then the decline immediately began: the ratio of PC and Mac sales was ten to one, and the next year, the PC captured 90 percent. Apple's board of directors and top management speculated that letting other companies produce Macintosh equipment could somehow reverse the trend and that Apple could beat Microsoft in the licensing game and win back its huge market share.

Apple had previously licensed the Mac system, but only for specialized use in new markets - where they could not compete with the company's Mac sales. Eric Sirkin, director of Macintosh OEM products at the New Media Division, has entered into deals about using Mac OS in embedded systems. (OEM, or the original equipment manufacturer - this is when a product is licensed for resale as part or subsystem of another company's product.) But when the cloning program began, Sirkina was not interested. He doubted the value of other companies selling consumer Macs, so he withdrew. Shortly thereafter, a large Japanese toy company Bandai came to Sirkina via indirect channels with a proposal to create a Mac based on a game console. It was the territory of the newly created division of Personal Interactive Electronics (PIE), managed by former vice president of Philips Electronics Gaston Bastians. “They could not take the opportunity,” recalls Sirkin, and this disappointed some people from the PIE group.

Sirkin was already involved in project management (FireWire communication interface) and he regularly traveled to Japan, so he gladly agreed to take a look at the project. His colleagues from the PIE group gave him contacts in Bandai and he flew to Japan to discuss the idea.

Bandai, founded in 1950 by the son of a rice merchant, has become one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world. In the 60s and 70s, the company made popular toy cars, and by the 90s, it already had licenses for the production of toys on most of the famous Japanese mang and anime, including Ultraman , Super Robot , Gundam , Dragon Ball and Digimon. . The company also contributed to the American market by creating figures on the hit children's TV show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers , based on the Japanese show Super Sentai . In 1994, Bandai received $ 330 million from sales of Power Rangers .

The son of founder and CEO Makoto Yamashina wanted Bandai to be more than just a toy figure maker. In the future, he saw a company as an international entertainment organization like Disney or Nintendo. For several years he had been striving for Bandai to start creating his own animated films and TV series, and also actively engaged in home electronics. In the course of his work, he significantly diversified the product line. The company began producing sweets, bath products, clothes, videos, dolls, robots, figurines and video games. Yamashina Sr. once said publicly that his son’s business strategy was: create ten toys so that three of them have a chance to become hits.

However, after joining the leadership in 1987, Makoto Yamashina Bandai grew significantly both in terms of volume and income. Now he had an idea that would allow the company to compete with the giants of the home entertainment market. The central place in the idea of ​​Bandai was occupied by CD-ROMs, whose popularity was constantly growing, while the price of CD drives fell sharply. Often the first purchase for the majority was the video game Myst . And many of the Bandai licenses, including Dragon Ball Z , Power Rangers and Sailor Moon , were perfect for the gaming market. Bandai saw the possibility of sharing their property and CD format, which would allow it to win a place in the consumer’s living room. Bandai adored Apple and Mac, so she hoped to conclude a partnership deal with a Cupertino-based company to develop and release a multimedia gaming console. What is even better, if the system manages to remain a cheaper, more specialized Mac, the manufacturer will be able to avoid the problem of competition with a similar 3DO system, the amount of software for which was limited.

It was complicated

Behold the Pippin Controller


The console was named after the apple variety.


The console itself was vaguely reminiscent of the MacBook aesthetics of the time.

It fell to Eric Sirkin to explain that Apple, in its current state, is unwilling and unable to release a product under the Apple brand. “My task was to create opportunities for the Macintosh outside the mainstream market,” he says. Simplified Mac, which had the appearance of a multimedia system for the living room, matched the task, but only under the condition that it would not be created or produced by Apple. Sirkin explained that Apple could develop and create product designs, and then charge Bandai with a license fee for each system. Production, marketing, and branding were to fall on Bandai’s shoulders.

They liked this idea. Therefore, we held a series of meetings, flying back and forth, and began to attract my boss Satzhiv Chakhil, who also drew the attention of Ian Diri [head of the Apple personal computers division] to the project so that we would have a complete idea of ​​what we would do. It seemed to us a job that does not require the company a large investment and which could be a chance to transfer the company's technology to another market.

Soon, Apple and Bandai made a deal. Sirkin returned to Cupertino and assigned a development team to the project to help create the guts of the system. They gave the project the code name Pippin by the name of the apple variety, because this name was already registered by Apple, but has not been used yet.

The basic technology should have been taken from the Macintosh, namely from the new PowerPC line. To keep prices low, it was decided to take the lower level model of the PowerPC 603, rather than the more powerful and expensive processor 604. Pippin was supposed to be an inexpensive Macintosh for the living room. A clone with a different name and a different destination.

The situation immediately began to get complicated. Apple executives told Sirkin and the team that the system should not be like a Mac. Pippin could not be allowed to eat off some Mac desktop sales. It must be so low-powered that people cannot use it as a main personal computer.

This distancing from the Mac influenced Pippin in many ways. First, Apple considered it important that the device be manufactured and branded as a Bandai product. "People from Bandai would be glad to accept that Apple would be engaged in production," recalls Richard Sprague, who worked as an intermediary and translator between Apple and Bandai. "But they understood that production was the price they would have to pay for a multimedia device compatible with Apple."

Apple businessmen believed that the real money in the computer field came from selling software. “The problem with programs is that people copy them,” they reasoned. “Therefore, we are implementing the best copy protection in the world. We will limit the equipment so much that consumers will not be able to play on it with nothing except for the products we produce. ” According to Sprague, this led to reckless calculations and policies:

It would be great to have a car for $ 200, in which you can put a copy of Myst working on PC and Mac and just start playing. That would be great. But no, we had to make Myst developers have to create a special version of the disc especially for us. And there was a whole bunch of such moments so that no one could confuse the car with the Macintosh.

Apple hired Sprague in 1991 to help hire Japanese software development companies for the Mac. “In those days, the Apple market grew very quickly in Japan,” he recalls. “From all points of view, it seemed that the Japanese would dominate in all areas. Therefore, this country was an interesting, special place for business. ” Sprague was fluent in Japanese, so he often served as a translator for Apple executives who arrived. Once he was called to a “top secret meeting” between the head of the New Media Division Satzhiv Chakhil and the top leadership of Bandai, including President Makoto Yamasin.

“In the middle of the meeting, it suddenly became clear that Bandai was very angry with Apple,” recalls Sprague. "Yamashina was as polite as possible, but the evil spoke in Japanese about how Apple let it down - the deal was signed a few months ago, but Apple has not done anything yet." Apple was supposed to appoint an employee in Japan to work with Bandai.

Satzhiv, without blinking an eye, said: "But we hired a permanent employee, that's why I invited Richard Sprague." He asked me to translate it. I answered him: “Satzhiv, I already have another job. I ended up here just because you invited me. ” He replied: “Just don't give it in mind and tell it to him. I will decide everything later. ” Often the Pippin project was managed in this way. Just improvise on the go.

The growing managerial chaos at Apple had a strong impact on the Pippin project. “In the development team, we had to face many different problems,” recalls Sirkin. Once upon a time, four key software developers went on strike. “They said that they would not be able to release the product on time and that they decided that after six months of work they don’t want to work on it anymore,” continues Sirkin. “As a result, I had to fire them.” In their place, he appointed other software developers from his group, ready to recycle to deliver the project on schedule.

Third party failures

Pegasus prime


Pretty high quality graphics for that time.


Super marathon


Colonies of people in remote parts of the universe have been attacked throughout the history of video games ...


Unfortunately, this game did not affect the genre of first-person shooters, such as Goldeneye .

Presto Studios programmer Bob Bell recalls how abrupt this change was for relations with third-party companies. He worked on versions for the Mac and Pippin The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime , a remake of the adventure game Journeyman Project . “It seemed that the old guard was being replaced by young upstarts,” he says. Where the old team did not care, a new team entered the business, showing a strong interest in the project and quickly responding to requests.

This was great news for Bell, whose task was to ensure the smooth running of Pegasus Prime from a CD-ROM (on the Mac, Journeyman Project games installed most of the content on the user's hard drive). Presto came up with an advanced animation technology that reproduced short clips when moving from one location to another. At the same time, it was necessary to open and close files every time, which took much longer while working with CDs. “So I decided that I’d just make one giant movie,” explains Bell. Pegasus Prime on Pippin was supposed to open a film containing all animations at start-up, read the data structure defining the frames corresponding to the locations and bring them to the forefront, if necessary. "The film never closed, and the game became much faster."

Bell was delighted with Pippin. He believed that it would become an advanced technology — an excellent device that would be a hit. “I have never considered her powerless and I don’t think her reputation as the“ worst console in history ”has been justified.” On the contrary, he thinks she was interesting and competitive. Yes, she had little memory and there was no hard drive, but this is true for other consoles of the time. And he appreciated that, unlike his colleagues who worked on the PlayStation version of Pegasus Prime , he could use the Apple QuickTime library.

Bell was not the only one who believed in the future of Pippin. “When we uttered names like 'Dragon Ball' and 'Power Rangers',” Sprague recalls, “people were delighted because they thought“ wow, this console will be powerful ”.” People from Bandai also fully supported the project. Sprague recalls that they carefully studied the games industry and believed that Pippin is their future.

And this led to problems. “Yamashina, the head of the company, was the number one priority,” he recalls. “To get anything from Bandai, it was enough just to call. We had no problems with money or with resources. The project worked the best people. However, on the part of Apple, the situation was just the opposite. ”

“Yamashina was going to come to Cupertino, because there could have been a problem with which something had to be done, but no one wanted to meet him,” Sprague continues. Senior executives had little time for the project. "They thought it was a bad idea."

Sirkin recalls that, fortunately or unfortunately, the hype before the release of Pippin for a short time attracted the attention of Apple’s top management:

Before the release, Pippin was so successful that the managers considered him a very valuable project, and Eric, that is, I did such a good job, that our team was divided in half. They singled out a marketing group in one department, and a development team in another, which was supposed to help the project. In fact, this, of course, turned out to be a completely idiotic decision, because one of the reasons for our success was shared resources and organization.

Decline: "You can not make money on the Internet"

"Once we had a heated argument with people from the team," recalls Sprague. “The smartest people were present in the room - all with an MBA degree. They thought Netscape was interesting. But not awesome. He is not capable of much. Moreover, this thing, the Internet, will never appear, because "you can not make money on the Internet".

They insisted that making money online was possible using limited online services like Apple itself, such as AOL and eWorld — there was mail, news, chat, and chat features. To use all this, it was necessary to buy a subscription. Sprague continues:

At that time, Bandai contacted us and suggested: “Did you guys hear about the Internet? Our Pippin would be a great way to access the Internet. You can make the console ... so that people can use the Internet while sitting on the sofa in the living room, and those who do not know how to use the keyboard, that is, not the target audience of a PC, will go crazy when they see this thing. ” And we answered: “No, we cannot add the Internet to the console, because this is a media player, and the Internet will not be popular. So trust us. We don’t want to waste time and effort on a device that connects to the Internet. ”

Bandai employees, to their credit, did not believe Apple. Many people who tried Pippin were young and advanced, were at the forefront of Japanese society, so they saw the potential of the Internet. They insisted that Pippin be sold with a modem and software to exit online. “It was the most important thing for them,” Sprague says. "Get Internet access."

In the meantime, more and more outside observers began to notice the inherent problems of Pippin design. Sirkin was especially remembered for one review. "We had a developer conference in California that we held, and Bandai helped with sponsorship," he says. Bandai paid for the flight of many Japanese developers, and Apple paid for the travel expenses of American studios.

At the question and answer session at the end of Sirkin’s opening speech, one developer got up and asked: “Tell me, what can your gaming console do better than all the others?” Will it be an Internet device? Will she be a communication device? Will it be a great gaming console? ”Sirkin could not answer. Pippin was the best in anything. He could not support the same games as on the PlayStation or Sega Saturn, although technically he was more powerful than them, and could not perform computational tasks like a desktop Mac or PC. It was a Macintosh lower level without a hard disk with a new graphics engine added (to look decent on the TV screen), and a greatly reduced operating system (so that it could be loaded from CD-ROM at startup), on which only one application could run simultaneously.


Initial screen of the game L-Zone


The Pippin application catalog consisted of dozens of multimedia and educational entertainment projects, such as Dragon Ball Z , Anime Designer and Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, as well as games for the Japanese market only, such as Tunin'Glue and L-Zone .


Here is a description of the L-Zone , taken from MobyGames : “The player arrives in the mysterious city under the dome. It has no inhabitants, but it is full of strange mechanisms that can be run. There are also dangers in the form of robots and traps. The player’s task is to try to understand his goal and find a way to escape to the green planet. ”


Dragon ball z


Turnin glue

The company already had hidden doubts about the commercial potential of Pippin, but this question reinforced Sirkin’s doubts. “The project could not be attributed to any category. It was more expensive than a video game console and less powerful than a PC, and how could we explain this to the market? How to position it? ”

Mac game and multimedia developers were tempted to create product versions for Pippin. Marathon maker Bungie was one of the main developers of Mac games. She became one of those who agreed, hoping to reach out to a new audience and strengthen relationships with Apple and Bandai.

Super Marathon , which became the port for Pippin of the two unified in one set of games Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal , was a nightmare project for a single programmer Jason Rieger. Control of the game from the keyboard and mouse was necessary to bind to the strange AppleJack controller, which had four buttons on the front, two flip-flops on the top, three small buttons on the bottom, a cross and a trackball in the middle. Riger had to redo the rendering of text on many in-game computer terminals so that it could be read from a greater distance. Memory constraints meant cutting music and other functions. And all the technical problems that arose, he had to pass through friends of his colleague Alex Rosenberg to Apple, because Bandai US was engaged in technical support, but she did not respond to his requests.

The Game Technology Group in the Mac division later modified the GameSprockets technology (new development libraries that helped Mac games work better) for Pippin to make it easier to solve some of these problems. Closer to the Pippin release, friends called this group to help several of the largest Mac game companies who wanted to publish versions of their hits under Pippin. “None of them considered the completion of the work justified,” recalls one of the engineers of the group, Chris Desalvo. The speed of the games was too low.

Only three games made the full transfer from Mac to Pippin: Bungie's Marathon / Marathon 2 , Racing Days 3D race (which at the time was one of the best visually among the games of the genre) and Journeyman Project: Presto Pegasus Prime . The rest of the Pippin catalog consisted of several dozen multimedia and educational entertainment projects, such as Dragon Ball Z , Anime Designer and Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia , as well as games for the Japanese market only like Tunin'Glue and L-Zone .

Bandai expected that two Pippin models will be sold for the year worldwide with a circulation of 500 thousand pieces. The company was preparing to spend $ 100 million on an aggressive advertising campaign in Japan and the United States, positioning the console as new and cool. But the self-determination crisis of the system did not allow consumers to accept it. By adding just a few hundred dollars, they could buy a much more powerful computer with Internet access. A few hundred cheaper, they could buy game consoles with a large library of great games, such as the PlayStation.


Racing days


Apple New Media Operations senior director Steve Francesse told the Los Angeles Daily News that he had expected Pippin sales for three years in three million copies - among several manufacturing partners, not just Bandai (with deductions less than $ 15 for each sale), but each software sale was supposed to bring Apple $ 3 in deductions.

None of these indicators Pippin reached. According to North America, 5-42 thousand copies of the WORLD version were sold. Sales in Japan proved to be only slightly better, while in Europe the console, called the Katz Media KMP 2000, sold much worse. (The American electronics manufacturer DayStar Digital will buy the remaining Bandai stocks in 1998, after which it will sell another 2,000 systems.)

Where are our heroes now?

Today, Eric Sirkin runs the DiamondDox company, which he founded in 2014. The company provides cloud services for the storage of electronic heritage of users. After the Pippin project, Richard Sprague worked for Microsoft for sixteen years; He is now the first citizen-scientist at uBiome, a microbial genomics company. Makoto Yamashina left Bandai in 1997 after middle managers rebelled against a planned merger with Sega. He now manages an investment fund.

The Pippin project was closed in March 1997, after which Apple sacked 4,100 employees trying to save the Mac business that was still in decline. Sirkin offered to end the project, because he was sure of his death, despite the fact that his team worked hard to fix the problems of Pippin in the second generation model. “We had a real graphics engine capable of competing with game consoles, much better than the first generation,” says Sirkin. "And we did it ourselves, hoping that we will bring the second version to the market."

Part of the Pippin development team went before the official cancellation of the project in order to establish their own company to create set-top boxes with the ability to connect to the Internet. Later, the company bought Sun Microsystems. , ( , Apple NeXT), , , FireWire. Pippin Apple.

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