Some parts of videogame history are best left as footnotes. Consider the LaserActive, an incredibly expensive machine released in 1993 that is quite possibly the most poorly conceived and spectacularly useless game console ever created.
The doomed brainchild of Pioneer, the LaserActive was a laserdisc player that used the massive silver discs to run games, overlaying 16-bit graphics on high-quality video. It was a great idea, except for a few problems: The games weren’t that great, the unit was prohibitively pricey and the laserdisc format was a hair’s breadth away from obsolescence by the time of LaserActive’s birth.
The $1,000 system didn’t even play games by itself. You had to buy special “control packs” that slid into the front of the main unit. Pioneer forged agreements with Sega and NEC, meaning that a fully tricked-out LaserActive could play Genesis and TurboGrafx games on cartridge, CD and laserdisc. Each control pack cost $600 — such cutting-edge convergence didn’t come cheap. Oh, and it was a massive hunk of metal.
“It’s a monster,” says game collector Terry Herman. “It’s huge. I’ve got 170 or so consoles, but that thing’s a beast. Doesn’t get a lot of play at all.”
Why would anyone create such a monstrosity? I recently picked up a used LaserActive to get a closer look at one of the weirdest extinct pieces of videogame hardware ever.
The LaserActive was one of the first failed attempts at convergence on the part of videogame hardware makers and assorted wannabes, all of whom believed they had what it took to create a CD-based set-top box that played everything — movies, music, TV, games and the coveted holy grail: edutainment software, which parents would line up to purchase in hopes of turning their children’s passion for videogames into scholarly achievement.
In the early ’90s, there were several such hardware platforms, each less impressive as a game machine than the last. The 3D0 Interactive Multiplayer was perhaps the best-supported, coming as it did from Trip Hawkins, a founder of Electronic Arts and a man who knew the videogame business back to front. Philips had its CD-i, and had actually roped in Nintendo as a partner, convincing Kyoto that the CD-i format held the keys to gaming’s future.