I’ll go first.
When I was a kid my family had a TI-99/4A. The 99 series was Texas Instruments’ only real foray into the PC and video game market, and it failed to be competitive with Commodore, Atari, and Amiga. Most games were booted from cartridges.
My favorites were Hunt the Wumpus, a sort of early survival-horror with a turn-based grid system, and Alpiner, a mountain-climbing game with various hazards, kind of a reverse SkiFree. It also had the ability to read data from cassette tapes to load text-based games. The one I remember is Hammurabi, a sim/strategy game which I didn’t really get as a kid. Now that I’ve gotten into strategy games like Civilization and Romance of the Three Kingdoms it would be interesting to revisit.
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I’ve played Colossal Cave Adventure on an ICL 2900-series mainframe from the 1980s at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley.
I had an R-Zone when I was younger. It was an absolute piece of shit. My mom found it at a garage sale. We had a racing game that I remember and then I remember like some K-mart ass style fighting game too.
My neighbour had Sega Channel when I was a kid. So ahead of its time. I know it’s not a system, but it was certainly obscure. I’ve never talked to anyone who knew what it was.
Sega was just ahead of its time for so long.
Here’s a few handhelds I have that most people have never heard of: https://i.imgur.com/eYZ4yP9.jpeg
- Mega Duck
- Supervision
- Game Master
- Gamate
I own a Virtual Boy. Not really super rare or anything but definitely obscure. Other than most people I love playing with it! Wish it had more games.
My best friend from high school had one with a broken stand/tripod. Everything else worked fine but you needed to lay on your back and balance it on your face, and end up with a big red ring around your face after. I remember Wario jumping from foreground to background and back.
Does anyone remember the add on voice to speech and advanced sound module that chunked into the right hand side of that machine. It was black magic back then.
Before it closed, the Brantford Computer museum here in Ontario had an amazing collection of machines. My wife took my friends and I there for my birthday one year and oh man what a trip. They had everything on display, from common systems like the c64 to really rare ones like the Unisys Icon. All up and booted, ready to be played with. But despite all these ultra rare systems the one that caught my eye was the Apple Pippin.
I grew up an insufferable mac fanboy (now reformed and agnostic), and as a kid I had heard tons about the pippin, but it was so obscure and terrible that I was sure I would never get to play one IRL.
But there I was, smile on my face, playing Super Marathon on that crappy pippin. I had the time of my life that day.
Thanks for everything Syd. RIP dude.
When my mates had ZX Specruns my parents bought me a Sharp MZ-80k computer. It was the dogs danglies with a built in monitor and tape deck. You even had to load basic from tape to get it started.
Used to program my own games or type them in from magazines. Lots of text based adventures, football manger type stuff, card and board games.
I had a Casio FX-795P as a kid. Not really a game system, just a calculator with a one-line text display, but it had a BASIC interpreter built in so I made some games for it (a couple of text adventures and a side-view shooter.)
My uncle convinced my parents to buy me a 3DO instead of a PlayStation.
The PC-9801 and Sharp X68000 had some pretty fun hidden gems. Is the PCEngine (TurboGrafx16) considered obscure?
We had a TI-99/4A as well. Munchman was a Pac-Man clone that we loved and A-Maze-Ing which was a simple but fun maze game.
After that we had Socrates which was a cheap edutainment console thing with built in games. I don’t remember the games but it was lacking compared to the TI.
I had a TI-99/4A! I coded a game for it, you ran around fighting robots and you could find a blaster and a jetpack.
The TI-99/4A had a lot of techical problems which killed its performance. They released a little module that you could insert into the game slot, then you insert the game into the module - this improved the performance drastically. Unfortunately I only heard about it many years later, I didn’t know about it at the time.
Somebody wrote an emulator which lets you run TI-99/4A games under windows or linux and I once tinkered with that and got my own game up and running again.
Those TI joysticks are just the absolute worst. Most underwhelming video game joysticks I’ve ever used, by far.
