Ouya

About the family

The Vectrex reached stores in November 1982 for 199 dollars, with its own 9-inch black-and-white screen that draws games with lines (vectors), and the game Minestorm built in; it was created by General Consumer Electronics (GCE), later passed to Milton Bradley, and production ended in December 1984 (Museum of Play). The Philips CD-i, a multimedia CD player developed with Sony from 1986, reached stores in 1991, cost 1,000 dollars in 1992 and was discontinued in 1996; before that, Nintendo had planned a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo with Philips and Sony (Atlas Obscura). Bandai's WonderSwan came out in March 1999, only in Japan, for 4,800 yen: it was designed with Koto, the company Gunpei Yokoi founded after leaving Nintendo (he died in 1997, before the launch), ran up to 40 hours on one AA battery and could be played horizontally or vertically; the family, with the WonderSwan Color and the SwanCrystal, sold fewer than 4 million and ended in 2003 (USgamer). The Nokia N-Gage, a phone with game controls, arrived in October 2003 for 299 dollars; changing games meant removing the cover and the battery, a problem fixed in the N-Gage QD of May 2004; it sold about 3 million, according to reports, and Nokia announced the end of the platform in October 2009 (The A.V. Club). The Ouya, a small console running modified Android, raised 8.5 million dollars in crowdfunding after its announcement in July 2012, reached stores on June 25, 2013, for 99 dollars, and its hardware was discontinued on July 27, 2015, after Razer bought it in April that year; its services closed in 2019 (Inverse). Google Stadia, a cloud gaming service, started in early access in November 2019 and was shut down on January 18, 2023, with Google refunding hardware bought on the Google Store and games from the Stadia store (TechRadar).