Virtual Reality

I'm going to say VESA Local Bus. It was a short lived expansion bus standard in the early 90s which was superseded by PCI the year after it was introduced, however it was quite popular while it was around.

You beat me to it. :D

First thing that came to mind.

So I guessing you are about 10 if Zboard, WOW and Eve consist of "memories"?


The original 3D movie perhaps with the cardboard glasses. SX/DX and math-coprocessors. Zip drives. Light guns. Anything from the Amstrad company. Floppy discs, 5.25/3.5".

pkzip Command & Conquer demo across 7 3.5" floppies. Disc 5 always failed.


Oh, I have one to add, Game for Windows Live. That lasted just long enough to make M$ a fortune. Thank our lucky stars they are not repeating that one...

Motion Controls, until they became a necessary weasel for VR. It's been tried in some form or another ever since the very first systems. Some attempts were [url=https://www.giantbomb.com/sega-activator/3000-8/]stupid than others.

VR, and only until very recently. I feel it's actually here to stay now that the resolution fits.

Now AR on the other hand is a full on gimmick and fad.

Here's one: Personal robotics, when idiots come together and try to give robots human qualities. C3PO is one of the most useless robots in Star Wars. Inversely, R2D2 only speaks in Droidish, and has an amazing array of tools and a mouth so foul they beep out every word.

The Collectathon: The idea of collecting things is appealing, or less people would be excited about pokemon than they have any right to be. The thing is, some games took this idea and really stretched things in a Funky way that simply drives people bananas. In fact, the genre was thought to have died after a gang of roving simians beat the ever living tar out of it.

In the late 90's (I think it was) there was a peripheral that was basically a force feedback seat cushion. You plugged it into the PC and sat on it whilst gaming and when something like an explosion went off near you it kicked you in the ass. Really it did. I'm not making this up.

Anyway it was advertised in PC Powerplay and had a very brief show of interest for gadget geeks before, for some odd reason, PC gamers actually decided they really didn't want their asses kicked quite literally when gaming. They initially sold well for just over $100 Australian. A year later they were being sold in the el'cheapo electrical outlets for $19.

I think it's time the force feedback cushion made a comeback.

What? No one mentioned the Power Glove yet?
Oh, and then of course there were magneto-optical drives and the Zip-drive, which was seen as promising for a short while, before the CD-Rom killed it.

There was the Virtual Boy, a "portable" Nintendo console that attempted VR before the technology was truly ready for it. I suspect one of the main reasons for its failure was the lack of color; everything was (IIRC) red, which was worse than the Game Boy's green-and-black color scheme. (Also, GB had 4 colors, while VB had only 2.)

I love the Power Glove. It's so... BAD.

The mouse - it'll never catch on.

- Super-floppies. Those "Iomega Zip Drive" things were actually quite neat for their time.

- HDR. When done correctly HDR can look good (especially in photography) but in the real world the effect is often very subtle, eg, a reduction in banding. What games devs who boast "HDR support" do though is make the HDR on/off settings in game adjust a lot more in addition (eg, they add color / saturation / contrast filters, or in comparison side-by-side marketing "bull-shots" will artificially desaturate the non-HDR shot), at which point what you're seeing ends up 5% HDR / 95% the same post process based re-coloring you can do yourself using utilities like ReShade or SweetFX...

- HD Audio discs. Remember Super Audio CD vs DVD-Audio which marketed quality 8x higher (192khz) than the normal limits of human hearing? Not only could most "Golden Eared audiophiles" not hear any difference vs half-price CD's, it turned out some albums were just straight CD rips with 22khz cutoff anyway...

- 3D TV / nVidia 3D Vision. Created due to normal 1080p TV's reaching market saturation point (and needing something, anything for you to rebuy), then flopped when no-one remembered to ask whether a typical family of 4 would be willing to sit there like geeks with matching uncomfortable goggles / headsets... Although this is TV rather than PC, there was a related "nVidia 3D Vision" shutter glasses thing, for which a total of just 38 games supported it, the newest of which was 2013, so I'm pretty sure it's dead too...

Does FireWire count? And Thunderbolt.

Though, are they really fads if you've never actually seen a component (or a cable, for that matter) to plug into those ports on your PC?