10 Obscure Consoles You've Probably Never Heard Of

9. View-Master Interactive Vision

Released in 1988 by the Ideal Group, who are still going today and specialise in toys for disabled children, the View-Master was one of several failed consoles to use VHS tapes as a storage medium. The console was sold using the slogan "The Two-Way Television System that makes you a part of the show!" and was very much aimed at younger children. Ideal used their many connections within the toy market to get licenses for games based on The Muppets, Sesame Street and a number of different Disney characters, and in fact the unit itself came bundled with a title called Disney€™s Cartoon Arcade, as well as one joystick-style controller and all the usual hook-ups. Despite the high spend on obtaining these popular characters and marketing the console almost nobody bought one preferring to stick to more mainstream cartridge based machines and before long, Ideal went back to what they were good at; making toys, and there is no mention of this abject failure on their official website.