ZAPiT Games

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

~ the last words ~

The Game Wave was built for households that wanted a games machine which would not bring anything violent into the room. That was not a product category Turkey sold, and it was not a household I lived in. In October 2005 I was a university student with TTNet at home, and every console within reach of me was a PlayStation, which is to say the exact thing the Game Wave existed as an alternative to.

ZAPiT Games was formed in 2003 in Mississauga, Ontario, to build a family-oriented home console, with National Semiconductor and Altera among the partners it named. The first prototype came together in October 2004, and the Game Wave Family Entertainment System reached Canada a year later, roughly a month before the Xbox 360 went on sale. It is the only home console ever both designed and distributed in Canada.

It cost 99 dollars in the United States with a trivia disc in the box, 4 Degrees: The Arc of Trivia, swapped later for VeggieTales: Veg-Out! Family Tournament. Everything shipped on DVD and the unit worked as an ordinary DVD player when nobody was playing, which was most of the time. About 70,000 of them had sold as of 2008, a number that traces back to a video rather than a filing and should be held loosely.

~ the record ~

~ the box ~

Inside was a Mediamatics 8611 with 16 MB of SRAM and 2 MB of NOR flash, an Altera CPLD, and a separate two-channel audio DAC that existed specifically to avoid paying royalties. Games were scripted in Lua. Four infrared remotes came in the box in blue, yellow, green and red, each running on its own beat frequency so that six could be used at once, with purple and orange sold separately for 30 dollars. The soft case held six of them and had "Unity Through Play" printed on the outside. Composite and S-Video out, no digital audio port.

~ the funny part ~

Nothing about the Game Wave was explicitly religious, and it found its audience in Christian households anyway, on the strength of trivia and an absence of guns. In 2008 ZAPiT partnered with Big Idea, which owns VeggieTales, to sponsor something called The God Made You Special, Live! Tour. A console with a DVD decoder chip in it and a royalty-dodging audio DAC ended up being sold beside Sunday school supplies, which is not a market any hardware engineer plans for.

The library stopped at thirteen titles. Three of them were the same quiz game under the name Rewind, which came out in 2005 and then twice over again in 2006 as Rewind 2005 and Rewind 2006. The rest were word and card games, plus a Sudoku disc in October 2007 and the VeggieTales tournament that December. There was a follow-up console planned for 2009.

~ what came after ~

The 2009 date rests on one sentence in a Vice piece by Jordan Pearson published on 22 December 2017, saying that four years after launch it was gone. Both Wikipedia articles cite that sentence and nothing else. There is no press release and no statement from anyone who worked there, not even a month to narrow it down. Pearson's own line on the cause is that it is unclear why the Game Wave never made it, and that remains the state of the record.

Something kept moving afterward under license: a Game Wave operation in India with its own site archived in 2011, and a disc called Quiz Konnect dated 2010. The domain went the other way. Somebody else picked up zapitgames.com and by 2013 it was serving Japanese fax-marketing copy, which is the squatter's version of an unmarked grave. Syd Bolton at the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario kept five of the consoles, and a machine whose date of death nobody can name is about as discontinued as hardware gets.

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