Bandai Playdia

» see bandai.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

playdia never reached turkey. it was a japan-only kids console from bandai with a sticker price near twenty five thousand yen and a library of dragon ball z and sailor moon discs. ten year old me in ankara in 1994 was nowhere near the buying decision and would not have known the difference if the system had been on a shelf at vakko or migros. the audience was japanese elementary school kids whose parents had spare yen for a second console under the family tv.

the hardware was strange. bandai went with two 8-bit processors at a time when the playstation and saturn were 32-bit machines getting ready to launch. a NEC microcontroller at 12mhz handled the main work. a toshiba chip at 8mhz handled the wireless infrared joypad. the cd drive was single speed. the console was aimed at preschool through early primary, not at gamers, which let bandai cut hardware corners and price under the consoles it was competing with from sega and sony.

the library came in at 23 titles between september '94 and the 1996 discontinuation. most of them were anime full motion video quiz software with very little real gameplay. bandai banked on the dragon ball z and sailor moon licenses to pull kids in. it did not work at the scale they wanted. sega pico had the head start in the japanese kids edutainment slot and crushed playdia inside two years. banpresto, bandai's amusement subsidiary, took the unsold inventory and turned it into arcade machines that sat in family game centers for a few more years.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the rise was short and was mostly a launch event. in those days. bandai had a strong tv brand in japan from the toy and anime side. they read the kids segment as wide open after the famicom and made a bet that a cheap cd-rom edutainment box with their own licenses would do the job. the bet was wrong by 1995. sega pico had already moved 400,000 units in north america alone and dominated japan with the storyware book format that playdia did not have anything to answer with. playdia carried on shipping cd tie-ins for a year and a half before bandai stopped releasing software.

~ the actual end ~

playdia ended quietly in 1996. honestly. bandai had bigger problems by then, including the pippin failure with apple on the other end of the catalog. the company merged with namco in 2005 and the playdia history became a footnote in the namco bandai retrospectives that came after. the carts and discs sit in japanese auction sites for low prices. the units themselves are not collectible at any serious tier because nothing on the disc rewards revisiting it.

~ what got buried with it ~

this part you had to be in japan for, and i was not. playdia is the second of the failed-bandai-console graves alongside the apple bandai pippin, also dead by 1997 in north america. the design idea behind playdia, a cheap anime-themed cd-rom box for elementary school kids, did not get tried again at this scale. sega pico kept the genre alive through 2005 in japan with the beena successor still selling. bandai went back to making toys and trading cards and let the console hardware experiment go. for them it was the right call.

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