One console that I can think of, going wayyy back... is the Atari 7800, I think if it came out when it was supposed to originally it could have been a real player in the 80's. Sure it would have lagged a little behind more advanced systems that were to come out in that generation but I think we never saw it's true potential. Games like Ballblazer kind of point to what was possible, like imagine games that utilized graphics chips in the cart like how the Pokey chip was used for the sounds, like mapper chips in NES carts. And if only given that it came out earlier, that it got the 3rd party support to keep the library large and diverse enough, especially if Japanese game developers were involved, who knows? Atari 7800 is the biggest 'What If...?' console for me.
I kinda fell off the Atari wagon once I saw Sega Master System. But Atari screwed up a huge opportunity thanks to greed in 1982/83. I always think back to that era and wonder what would have happened if the right people were at the top of Atari when the decisions to go to the next console were being made. You should play Atari50. It goes into this era in the interviews.
I see you're from Australia. An American system that died early and had lots of potential but couldn't realize it was the Colecovision. It was actually the number one system in the US in 1984 in terms if dollars, a year when Atari was basically on a fire sale.
The Atari Lynx was an impressive bit of hardware that never got to live up to its true potential. It was somewhat abandoned by Atari so they could concentrate on the upcoming Jaguar, that combined with the dominance of the Game Boy meant it never lived long enough for us to see what it was ultimately capable of.
I'd dare to say that out of all the Sega consoles, the 32X was the device that we never got to see it's full potential. I genuinely feel that it had a sort of "Mega Drive on steroids" kind of feel to it, and if given the game developers more time to work on new titles, we would've gotten to see it's full potential.
It's funny that both the Vita and the Wii U were mentioned, I had some gift vouchers and thought I'd put it towards a new console. At the time I was tossing up between the Vita and the Wii U, both of which were on the wane. I had to choose between a handheld with no 1st party support or a console with no 3rd party support, in the end I went with the Wii U due to the strength of the 1st party titles.
You have to give people a reason to buy the console. You have to have a "killer app". The reason I got an N64 was for Mario 64. The reason I got an Xbox was for Halo. The reason I got a Dreamcast was for MVC2.
Dreamcast showed great potential and games. It's just that people didn't buy it, either because they didn't trust Sega by then and the sheer dominance of Playstation.
Here are my pics: System: Atari Jaguar Reason: Atari launched the console but then canceled it a few years later System: Dreamcast Reason: The PS2 killed the Dreamcast System: Turbo Graphics 16 Reason: Nobody in the USA had one
