Nuon



"Teach your TV some new tricks."

A rather interesting but mostly forgotten page in the history of gaming. This is the answer to a question that no one asked: what do you get when you cross the Atari Jaguar and a DVD player?

Rather than a single console, the Nuon was a standard designed by VM Labs (founded by a bunch of ex-Atari people) and licensed to manufacturers like Samsung, Toshiba, and RCA. It sounds like the 3DO's business plan, but this was not just a game machine. Instead, it was a super high end DVD player chipset that ran Nuon-optimized movies with interactive content, and also happened to make that player a rather powerful game machine.

It seems their idea was: some people will get it for movies, some will get it for games, either way we're selling this. But the plan didn't turn out so well. People who only wanted a DVD player wouldn't get a Nuon because it was much more expensive than a plain one, and there were few Nuon-optimized movies; and gamers wouldn't get it because it was not mainly a game machine, its library was quite small, and the insanely hyped PlayStation 2 was just around the corner.