Written by Kevin Stapf  on May 18, 2001

Special: Why do Black Systems seem to fail? The truth is out there!

Tweet

Comments

Power, Graphics, Sound, Games: one or two of these things don't make a great system. It is a combination of these things that make people look at a system before its launch and become impressed. The initial hype of the system may make cause some people to rush out and buy it, but eventually the system may die. It seems like a 50/50 chance that a system may succeed, but some people say that it will only succeed if the company is able to market the system well. If you combine all of these things it may look like the ultimate system, but there is one factor that many people overlook: a system's color. While this may seem like a minor area, if you look back on the past, it really isn't.

Ever since the beginning of gaming, companies have made the consistent mistake of using black as their systems color. You may say to yourself, УSelf, I don't see any problem with black. Its cool and it matches everything, so what could be the problem with it?Ф Well the problem is that black systems are the ones that most commonly fail. We shall start off with the king of old school gaming, the Atari, but if we take a closer look we have to wonder if it really was the king. It may have survived, but it really had no significant competition. Many competitors came and went, such as the Intellivision, the Odyssey, and the ColecoVision, but all these systems had one major thing in common, they were all black. Granted, the Atari was also black, but if a new Atari system wasn't released almost every year do you think that you would still remember the Atari name? Also if the Atari was so successful why have they since gone out of business?

We shall now turn our attention to more modern times that many of you can still remember. When Nintendo released its popular NES in 1985 they seemed to have learned from the past and released the NES as a white system. The NES then proceeded to blow away its competition, including Sega's Master System and Atari's new incarnation, which continued to make mistakes that plagued the past. All of their competitors released black systems. Now we move on to the greatest fight from a black system yet. The battle between the Sega Genesis (black) and the SNES (white) raged on for around 3 years, but in the end the SNES prevailed. Nintendo continued to sell great quantities of system even after Sega decided to throw in the towel and move on. While the Genesis put up a tremendous fight and even led the race for a while, in the end it eventually met its doom, just as its ancestors had years before.

The following system war brought in new competition from Sony and they seemed to have learned from the past and release their PlayStation as a white system. Sega also came into the battle around the same time as Sony, yet they went an alternate route; they released a black system in America and a silver system outside the US. As it turned out the US system failed and failed miserably, while their silver system sold tremendously well all over the world. Nintendo was a late entry into this race and they came; yet they seem a little overconfident. They tried to make their N64 look good and they made the horrible mistake of releasing it as a black system. Sony, as many of your know, dominated the sales charts and the trend of the failure of black systems continued.

Finally we move to the most recent battle and it seemed as though the Saturn may have just been an experiment for Sega as they released their next system, the Dreamcast, sporting a very sleek white exterior. The Dreamcast sold very well from the start then trouble struck, they released a sports package, and contained inside this deal was a black DC and from then on Sega was just asking to be put out of their misery. People moved on and seemed to have forgotten about the DC. Not so long ago Sega recently announced that they would no longer remain in the console race. Sony has also recently released their PlayStation 2 and, just as Nintendo seemed to have done earlier, they came in overconfident. They believed the incredible specs on the PS2 would drive people out to buy it, even it was black and that they did. The adoring public was chomping at the bit to get a hold of this system, but it was not meant to be. Tragedy struck and Sony was unable to produce their projected amount of systems and were forced to release a limited amount.

People then were forced to pay extravagant prices to get a hold of this system and when they finally did they hooked it up and realized that the system was riddled with bugs. Since its release, the system has been nothing but a disappointment and the trend has yet to be broken. Microsoft has finally decided to enter the race with their Xbx. Their first system appears to look like the next dominate force in gaming: will it be the first black system to control the market, we shall soon see. Nintendo's new entry, the GameCube, has the potential to be their best system yet and as it turns out they have been pushing this system, not as a black system, but as a purple system. Will this help them, we don't know, but it can't be any worse than a black system.