• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

NUON; the game console that was supposed to be a "PS2 and Nintendo Killer"

VGEsoterica

VGEsoterica

Member
Gaming magazines need to sell magazines...so they will certainly hype the ever loving crap out of something just to sell a few more copies...and back in the day NUON from VM Labs was the piece of tech every gaming magazine declared was the "next big thing". They literally said it could beat PS2 and destroy Nintendo. Now I didn't do much research but I am fairly confident Nintendo and Sony are still doing OK these days lolol

Basically Nuon is Jaguar 2. Most of the engineering team that built the Jaguar moved on and created the NUON. It's not a BAD idea...decently capable and relatively inexpensive hardware shoved into a DVD player to sneak a console into your living room without you basically noticing. Imagine if even 5% of all DVD owners back in the heyday of DVD bought a NUON? thats a massive install base.

Rumor has it that Sony was nervous about NUON too and Ken Kutaragi insisted PS2 get dvd support so it wouldn't have an area that was lacking AGAINST NUON. What a wild world we live in.

But GAF...curious who even remembers NUON from back in the day? Because for a hot second it was the chosen golden child of new tech

 
Yep I remember. Grpahics are basically a psx at a better framerate and 640x480
Libraries proportionally is weirdly good though out the like 8 games I think 4nkr 5 are good
 
VGEsoterica said:
But GAF...curious who even remembers NUON from back in the day?
Click to expand...

I remember NUON! I've got a Samsung DVD-N2000 and all seven of the games released in the US (including the original boxed release of Iron Solider 3).

Fahdis said:
Shoulda renamed it to "Nein" since it never released.
Click to expand...

NUON most certainly was released. It wasn't very widely available, and games were difficult to find in traditional retail stores. But, they were out there, for people who knew about them.
 
It's kind of like the spiritual successor to CDi and 3DO in the sense that it was trying to be the next multimedia standard accross various manufacturers.
Suprised to learn the design team was also behind the Tom & Jerry processors in the Jaguar. I wonder how it compares graphically to the Dreamcast or PS2
 
Gamers had ps2, n64, or Dreamcast on the menu. Nuon? How's onlive? How's Jaguar? Tons of consoles freeze up, got a ps2 that had AAA games at launch, its first quarter of games are some of the best.
 
For a very brief period I wanted one of these for Jeff Minter's built-in VLM light synth. If it had taken off as a standard, I would definitely have looked for Nuon compatibility in my next DVD player.

Incidentally, it was Minter's light synth for Xbox 360 that was the killer app for me. I bought one with no games, specifically for that.
 
Agent X said:
I remember NUON! I've got a Samsung DVD-N2000 and all seven of the games released in the US (including the original boxed release of Iron Solider 3).



NUON most certainly was released. It wasn't very widely available, and games were difficult to find in traditional retail stores. But, they were out there, for people who knew about them.
Click to expand...
yes NUON def released
 
It's so funny when new companies with zero experience think they are going to knock out 2 of the 3 market leaders.
 
Ps2 killer lol. GameCube and Xbox were 2 of the most underrated, overlooked consoles ever and they couldn't come close in sales. Many would argue both were just as good for different reasons, if not better. So yeah, this thing never had a chance. Ps2 had the biggest splash as the new next gen console, hype, games, DVD, and momentum.
 
Last edited:
I vaguely remember it. I'll watch the whole video later but I did click to where there was gameplay footage, it looks surprisingly solid for what it is.
 
I remember next generation magazine covering this but it always seemed like vaporware. Then it finally came out but it was so obscure that I have no idea why they even bothered.

That said I do miss the days when there were so many more players in the hardware space. Even if a lot of ir sucked (Philips CDI, anyone?), the market just felt more vibrant back then.
 
I remember this one. Thought the name was pretty okay. It had potencial.

But as I always say, games people.. Games..
 
What Is That GIF by PermissionIO
 
VGEsoterica said:
It's not a BAD idea...decently capable and relatively inexpensive hardware shoved into a DVD player to sneak a console into your living room without you basically noticing. Imagine if even 5% of all DVD owners back in the heyday of DVD bought a NUON? thats a massive install base.
Click to expand...

Agreed, it is a shame that the DVD consortium never agreed on a format for an interactive component to DVD, sort of a DVD+. Play some 2D games, maybe simple 3D or Flash games. The chipsets were unfortunately still expensive in the DVD era for this to have been commonplace, but DVD was so hot then and consumers were so eager to supe up their entertainment systems with features that the high-end DVD+ could have sold okay, plus DVD companies might have supported it well since any bulletpoints to add to the Special Features could have moved a few more discs. (When BD came around, the tech for this would have been a lot easier and cheaper, but the BD OS format was just a disaster in my opinion, the only good thing was that disc capacity increased tremendously but so much else in authorizing or encoding was a step back or sideways or subtraction from what a high-capacity DVD could have been.) Considering that two of the most successful DVD players in their day were the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox game consoles, it's easy to imagine the gamers would have been out there.

PSP UMD actually toyed with "Video + Game" for a bit. UMD was actually a nice format for combos, because the PSP itself was a very capable multimedia machine, plus everything showed up on your XrossMediaBar, so you could just scroll across all the stuff to check out on the disc. (Authorizers were limited to fitting everything onto a 1.8GB disc but its video codec support was advanced forms of MP4 instead of DVD's MP2, so disc makers could pack things in,)

Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of this video/game crossover done overall, despite the possibilities. Sony had some tech demos for movies with games in them, and there was even an announced/tested product called "Phat Putt" which would have been a golf game included in a compilation of hip-hop music videos/audio. Also there was WipEout Pure: Stealth Edition, which had that silly movie plus a special version of the game with an ugly new ship designed after the movie's plane. And, of course, HMP had select games in its porno UMD library offering bonus "space shooter" minigames, which were basically smutty Space Invaders.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/01/06/ces-2005-hands-on-phat-putt
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/lol-...-all-code-aka-region-free.55280/#post-1639513



(Xbox also had a combo package of I think a game demo for Star Wars Clone Wars or Battlefront and Attack of the Clones or the Clone Wars TV show? I think those were all separate discs though, I don't know if they actually dual-booted, and of course they only played on Xbox.)
 
Last edited:
I had one, because I wanted a standalone DVD player at the time anyway. Tempest 3000 was the most memorable game, which gave it a similar number of worthwhile exclusives to the Xbox One and Series.
 
Last edited:
CamHostage said:
Agreed, it is a shame that the DVD consortium never agreed on a format for an interactive component to DVD, sort of a DVD+. Play some 2D games, maybe simple 3D or Flash games. The chipsets were unfortunately still expensive in the DVD era for this to have been commonplace, but DVD was so hot then and consumers were so eager to supe up their entertainment systems with features that the high-end DVD+ could have sold okay, plus DVD companies might have supported it well since any bulletpoints to add to the Special Features could have moved a few more discs. (When BD came around, the tech for this would have been a lot easier and cheaper, but the BD OS format was just a disaster in my opinion, the only good thing was that disc capacity increased tremendously but so much else in authorizing or encoding was a step back or sideways or subtraction from what a high-capacity DVD could have been.) Considering that two of the most successful DVD players in their day were the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox game consoles, it's easy to imagine the gamers would have been out there.

PSP UMD actually toyed with "Video + Game" for a bit. UMD was actually a nice format for combos, because the PSP itself was a very capable multimedia machine, plus everything showed up on your XrossMediaBar, so you could just scroll across all the stuff to check out on the disc. (Authorizers were limited to fitting everything onto a 1.8GB disc but its video codec support was advanced forms of MP4 instead of DVD's MP2, so disc makers could pack things in,)

Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of this video/game crossover done overall, despite the possibilities. Sony had some tech demos for movies with games in them, and there was even an announced/tested product called "Phat Putt" which would have been a golf game included in a compilation of hip-hop music videos/audio. Also there was WipEout Pure: Stealth Edition, which had that silly movie plus a special version of the game with an ugly new ship designed after the movie's plane. And, of course, HMP had select games in its porno UMD library offering bonus "space shooter" minigames, which were basically smutty Space Invaders.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/01/06/ces-2005-hands-on-phat-putt
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/lol-...-all-code-aka-region-free.55280/#post-1639513



(Xbox also had a combo package of I think a game demo for Star Wars Clone Wars or Battlefront and Attack of the Clones or the Clone Wars TV show? I think those were all separate discs though, I don't know if they actually dual-booted, and of course they only played on Xbox.)
Click to expand...

Strangleholds deluxe ps3 edition included hardboiled (only way to get it in HD at the time) what a sweet bonus
 
MrA said:
Strangleholds deluxe ps3 edition included hardboiled (only way to get it in HD at the time) what a sweet bonus
Click to expand...

Oh right, that was a must-find at the time since Hard Boiled wasn't elsewhere in HD. (But was that two different discs?)

There was also a PS3/BD release of Macross: Do You Remember Love, which was the movie remastered (I believe also exclusively in HD in this pack) and also a PS3 remaster/remake of the Saturn/PS1 game (also only available here.) That was a single disc, and it was the only way (and probably still best way...sadly, no English subs,) to get that content

https://macross.fandom.com/wiki/The_Super_Dimension_Fortress_Macross:_Do_You_Remember_Love?_(Game)

Also of mention, the anime collection Short Peace was conceived as a number of short films plus a brand new short videogame by Grasshopper; the final disc however didn't even so much as include a download code for the game, as it was released separately.

...Of course, none of this is actually what Nuon tried to be, which is an agnostic format for content playable on machines beyond a single console platform. And none of it unfortunately caught on enough to drive the market to do Movie+Game more often.
 
Last edited:
CamHostage said:
Agreed, it is a shame that the DVD consortium never agreed on a format for an interactive component to DVD, sort of a DVD+. Play some 2D games, maybe simple 3D or Flash games. The chipsets were unfortunately still expensive in the DVD era for this to have been commonplace, but DVD was so hot then and consumers were so eager to supe up their entertainment systems with features that the high-end DVD+ could have sold okay, plus DVD companies might have supported it well since any bulletpoints to add to the Special Features could have moved a few more discs. (When BD came around, the tech for this would have been a lot easier and cheaper, but the BD OS format was just a disaster in my opinion, the only good thing was that disc capacity increased tremendously but so much else in authorizing or encoding was a step back or sideways or subtraction from what a high-capacity DVD could have been.) Considering that two of the most successful DVD players in their day were the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox game consoles, it's easy to imagine the gamers would have been out there.

PSP UMD actually toyed with "Video + Game" for a bit. UMD was actually a nice format for combos, because the PSP itself was a very capable multimedia machine, plus everything showed up on your XrossMediaBar, so you could just scroll across all the stuff to check out on the disc. (Authorizers were limited to fitting everything onto a 1.8GB disc but its video codec support was advanced forms of MP4 instead of DVD's MP2, so disc makers could pack things in,)

Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of this video/game crossover done overall, despite the possibilities. Sony had some tech demos for movies with games in them, and there was even an announced/tested product called "Phat Putt" which would have been a golf game included in a compilation of hip-hop music videos/audio. Also there was WipEout Pure: Stealth Edition, which had that silly movie plus a special version of the game with an ugly new ship designed after the movie's plane. And, of course, HMP had select games in its porno UMD library offering bonus "space shooter" minigames, which were basically smutty Space Invaders.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/01/06/ces-2005-hands-on-phat-putt
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/lol-...-all-code-aka-region-free.55280/#post-1639513



(Xbox also had a combo package of I think a game demo for Star Wars Clone Wars or Battlefront and Attack of the Clones or the Clone Wars TV show? I think those were all separate discs though, I don't know if they actually dual-booted, and of course they only played on Xbox.)
Click to expand...

Yes the concept behind the business plan is sound…if DVD players could ALSO be gaming consoles…the install base is exponential.

Instead they failed so we got GAME CONSOLES that were ALSO DVD players.
 
CamHostage said:
Oh right, that was a must-find at the time since Hard Boiled wasn't elsewhere in HD. (But was that two different discs?)

There was also a PS3/BD release of Macross: Do You Remember Love, which was the movie remastered (I believe also exclusively in HD in this pack) and also a PS3 remaster/remake of the Saturn/PS1 game (also only available here.) That was a single disc, and it was the only way (and probably still best way...sadly, no English subs) to get that content

https://macross.fandom.com/wiki/The_Super_Dimension_Fortress_Macross:_Do_You_Remember_Love?_(Game)

Also of mention, the anime collection Short Peace was conceived as a number of short films plus a brand new short videogame by Grasshopper; the final disc however didn't even so much as include a download code for the game, as it was released separately.
Click to expand...
1 disk for hardboiled/ stranglehold
 
I remember this well. MCV UK had a front page article on it and also suggested Sega was considering a similar business model following Dreamcast's demise. I think that would have actually been the end of Sega!
 
Last edited:
I have played one a few times. The only game that stands out in my memory is Tempest 3000 though, which was great but also kind of blurry with some frame rate issues so I don't think the hardware was very good.

I think the idea of adding some more powerful multimedia and 3D graphics capability into DVD players wasn't a bad idea, the problem was that they really didn't have the backing of the hardware industry behind them and there were so very few systems that supported it. If it actually has OEMs making it standard across a range of models we might have seen more support.

In any event it was never meant to compete with PS2, it was kind of going for the reverse. PS2 was the game system that was a Trojan horse for the DVD format. The Nuon was meant to be the DVD player that would put a game system in your living room.
 
VGEsoterica said:
Basically Nuon is Jaguar 2. Most of the engineering team that built the Jaguar moved on and created the NUON.
Click to expand...

The main people who built the Jaguar wasn't working on Nuon, only a few ex-executives. Flare engineers were working on the real Jaguar 2 but Atari left the market before it was released. VMlabs was founded in 1995 the 1st Jaguar was still on sale.

Drew1440 said:
Suprised to learn the design team was also behind the Tom & Jerry processors in the Jaguar. I wonder how it compares graphically to the Dreamcast or PS2
Click to expand...

This is misconception, the designers were still at Atari working on Jaguar II and Duo.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Modern Warfare 4 was supposed to be a launch title for the next Xbox, Microsoft wants Activision to be more agile and less reliant on annual releases
Opinion Rumor Game Dev 
30
737
IbizaPocholo replied
I feel like the one company that should be a new challenger to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft is Nvida
2
83
289
Xyphie replied
Nintendo will be at the Gamescom 2026
Event Game Dev 
28
116
undeadhero replied
Digital Foundry: "Forgotten" Console Games That Demand To Be Remastered
2
61
1K
subskark replied
Do you really anticipate Microsoft will be out of the "console" game?
2 3 4
155
838
Sooner replied
Top Bottom