Gaming hasn’t always been the concise and global industry that it is today, and it took decades of experimentation and plenty of failures to develop into the pastime that we all love so much. Many of these failures were surprising, such as the Nintendo N64, which, while popular, wasn’t nearly as successful as the Nintendo Entertainment System that came before it. But there are plenty of other gaming accessory failures that were so bad that they cemented a place in history as some of the worst accessories that the industry was able to produce.

The Laserscope From Konami

The LaserScope was a specialised headset controller that was meant to be part of an AR experience for the user. Designed and distributed by Konami, it was based on the same technology as the popular NES zapper gun, where the user was able to aim the eyepiece at the target, and then shout a keyword into the microphone. While the device did technically work as intended, having to constantly shout into the mic to get the game’s character to fire didn’t sit well with most parents, and it didn’t take long for a LaserScope to fade away into obscurity.

The Nintendo VirtualBoy

The VirtualBoy was a strange and uniquely bad gaming device that was meant to be an early ancestor to modern 3D gaming, and while it was novel enough to be interesting to gamers around the world, its limited library of games, along with the fact that it induced terrible headaches from eye strain, ultimately caused it to fail. The technology behind the VirtualBoy was extremely primitive, even by the standards of the time. On top of all of this, its limited capabilities meant that all of the games offered were in red, and there was simply no way of getting around this.

Nintendo Speedboat

Another miss from Nintendo, the SpeedBoat was designed to allow the player to lie their hands flat on top of the controller. This was meant to free up all of the player’s ten buttons, which they were supposed to use to mash the buttons as quickly as possible, which would only help today if the player was enjoying online bingo for real money and needed quick reflexes. Of course, it was a complete failure, as there were already a number of other alternatives that provided better, more comfortable functionality. It was a product released into a market that had no desire for such an accessory, and it proved to be a complete failure among even Nintendo’s most dogmatic fans.

The Gameboy Radio

The Gameboy Radio was a strange accessory that was meant to accompany the extremely popular Gameboy. The idea was to plug the Radio into a Gameboy, which would allow the player to listen to local radio stations. The antenna, however, was lacking, meaning that radio stations were usually too fuzzy to hear. The Radio also required a set of batteries on its own, which would force the player to lug around batteries for their Gameboy, and for their radio accessory that was barely capable of picking up most stations.