VM Labs Nuon

The Nuon was one of the strangest ideas in console history: a game platform with no console. VM Labs, a startup founded by former Atari and 3DO engineers, developed a powerful media processor and licensed it to consumer-electronics makers, who embedded it inside ordinary DVD players. The result, reaching the market around 2000, was a line of DVD players from Samsung, Toshiba, and others that could also play Nuon games and offered enhanced, interactive DVD playback.

The pitch was seductive at the turn of the millennium, when the DVD player was the hottest device in the living room. Instead of asking families to buy a separate game box, VM Labs would ride the DVD wave, offering a controller port, snazzy on-screen visualizers, and the ability to spin, zoom, and navigate movies in ways standard players couldn't. Buy a slightly nicer DVD player, the reasoning went, and get a game machine for free.

The execution never came together. Only a handful of Nuon-enabled players ever shipped, each with slightly different capabilities, fragmenting the tiny installed base. The game library was minuscule — a scattering of titles including a well-liked version of the abstract shooter Tempest 3000 by Jeff Minter — nowhere near enough to make anyone choose a player for its gaming. Meanwhile the PlayStation 2 arrived as both a superb DVD player and a proper games console, obliterating the Nuon's entire reason to exist.

VM Labs foundered financially and the platform was effectively dead by 2001, with the company's assets soon absorbed elsewhere. The Nuon survives as a favorite among collectors of the obscure, and as a genuinely interesting what-if. Its core insight — that gaming could hide inside the devices people already owned — was sound; it simply arrived at the exact moment a rival made the standalone console irresistible again.