Pippin awful: Apple's doomed console

David Crookes reflects on Apple's ill-judged attempt to corner the gaming market with the Apple Pippin

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In the late 70s and early 80s, gamers loved Apple. The Apple II was particularly popular thanks to titles such as Karateka, Lode Runner, Ultima I and Castle Wolfenstein, while the Apple IIGS built up a sizeable library all of its own. Even in the 1990s, Apple tried hard to bring games developers on to the Mac, with those efforts resulting in standout releases such as Myth and Quake III.

But amid such activity, there was a real blip, one that many think made Apple wary of games for years afterwards. It arrived in the form of a console announced in December 1994: a versatile machine Apple hoped could not only compete with Sega, Nintendo, Sony and 3DO but also CD-ROM-equipped PCs.

That machine was the Pippin. Named after a type of apple, it wasn’t designed as a single, Apple-made console in the traditional sense. Rather, Apple envisioned it as a platform. Third parties would license the technology and build their own machines, and Apple would provide the underlying architecture.

It was a strategy that reflected Apple’s wider uncertainty at the time. The company was seeing sales of the Mac dwindle as PCs with Microsoft Windows powered ahead, and Apple believed it could emulate Microsoft by pursuing licensing deals, allowing other companies to take on the bulk of the work and the associated risk.

On paper, it had a certain logic.

One of the company’s strengths lay in CD-ROM. Apple had been selling its own AppleCD drives since the late 1980s, and the format was central to its wider push into multimedia. The effort was championed by Satjiv S Chahil, a vice-president involved in Apple’s multimedia development. He helped drive the take-up of QuickTime video and audio technologies as well as CD-ROMs. It was also clear that Apple was strong in the software market.