Nuon

» see vmlabs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Nuon was not a console. It was a chip you were supposed to buy without knowing you had bought it, sitting inside a DVD player that cost about the same as any other DVD player and could also run games. Samsung shipped the first one at the end of May 2000, an Extiva branded DVD-N2000 at around three hundred dollars with a controller in the box. Toshiba followed with the SD-2300. RCA shipped players too, with the commercial game support switched off, so they would load homebrew and nothing else.

The man behind it was Richard Miller, a British engineer who had been at Atari Corporation and was deeply involved in the Jaguar, a machine he still describes as good and unsupported. He quit and sold his house, then started VM Labs at the beginning of 1995 in a spare bedroom, with $200,000 from five people of whom the first was his landlord. Motorola put in seed money and took a license, and it fabricated the early silicon.

None of this reached me. Nuon's whole retail window was 2000 and 2001, which is exactly when my gaming was happening on rented machines in Turkish internet cafes, and no shop within reach of me was stocking a three-hundred-dollar American DVD player that came with a controller. It was easy to miss anywhere, though. It sold through electronics retail, where, as one of the people who worked on it put it later, a customer walked into a store and saw a wall of DVD players and a wall of prices, with nobody on hand to show what was different about this one.

~ the record ~

~ project x ~

Internally the chip was Project X for years before it was Nuon, and the generations each had their own name: Oz in 1997, then Aries-1, Aries-2 and finally Aries-3 in 2001, the first one designed entirely in-house and fabricated at TSMC. The Motorola hardware carried the codename Blackbird. VM Labs showed the Nuon brand properly at CES in January 2000, close to five years after the company started, which is a long gestation for a startup living on angel money.

The money explains the rest of it. VM Labs raised roughly $30 million across its entire life, and the people who built it told Ars Technica afterwards that the job had needed $60 million. That money had to cover a from-scratch multicore media processor through four silicon revisions, plus the software stack, the developer program and the Hollywood licensing effort around it, in a company that mostly had fewer than thirty employees and about fifty at the end.

~ eight games ~

There were eight commercial titles, total, and roughly forty announced ones that never shipped, among them Myst and Madden NFL. The one anybody remembers is Tempest 3000, written by Jeff Minter at Llamasoft and published by Hasbro Interactive, out in North America on 13 December 2000. Minter had come over from Atari after finishing Defender 2000 and his first job at VM Labs was not a game at all: he built the VLM-2, a music visualizer, before anyone asked him to go back to Tempest. By 2003 Tempest 3000 had sold more than twenty thousand copies, which is the single best-documented sales figure for anything on the platform.

The rest is a short list with odd edges. Freefall 3050 A.D. shifted under ten thousand units. Iron Soldier 3 had to be recalled because it did not work properly on some players. Ballistic came bundled with Samsung machines and The Next Tetris DLX came on a Toshiba demo disc, so neither was really sold at all, and Crayon Shin-chan 3 only ever came out in Korea. Four films were given Nuon features, including Buckaroo Banzai and the 2001 Planet of the Apes. In a store, the games were filed with the DVDs, because that is what they looked like.

~ the phone stopped ringing ~

Two things killed it, and only the second was bad luck. The engineered one came from Sony. According to Bharath Ram, who ran business development at VM Labs, Ken Kutaragi looked at what Toshiba and Samsung were announcing and concluded that Nuon could take the ground out from under Sony, so he put a DVD drive in the PlayStation 2 over the objections of Sony's own home-entertainment people, who were afraid it would eat their own player sales. If that account is right, the reason a PlayStation 2 plays films is that a company of under thirty people in Los Altos frightened Sony, and the same decision removed the entire reason to buy a Nuon.

The unlucky one was the calendar. Miller spent 2001 raising money full time, in the middle of a round and in acquisition talks at the same time, and then it was September. His description is flat: after 11 September, the investors literally did not pick up the phone. The company ran out of cash, and the lawyer, Nicholas Lefevre, resigned his position and personally put together the money and the paperwork for a Chapter 11 filing in December so that the thing could not be stripped by creditors in the dark. Genesis Microchip won the assets at a bankruptcy auction on 28 February 2002 and closed on 22 March for $13.6 million in cash plus assumed liabilities. By July it had canceled the development work and the licensing plan and let most of the people go. The parts of the design that were any good went into display chips with no name on them.

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