In the last century, we had some really fascinating copycat consoles, and the best thing about them was the practice of naming them after action heroes from the movies of the time. Hands up everyone who had Rambo and Terminator consoles!
We live in a time of the most boring console names ever. With PlayStation, only the numbers change from generation to generation, now Nintendo has also taken that path, and for Xbox, I’m sure that in the midst of a total identity crisis in the next generation, the name will be shortened to Xbox only. In contrast, in the 80s and 90s we had a veritable frenzy with the names of gaming devices.
The Sega Mega was super-duper. And then after that came the Sega Saturn – dear brother, a space odyssey! We had an Atari Jaguar and an Atari Lynx – wild as in the forest! 3DO Interactive Multiplayer – um… what?
However, you probably knew about even more powerful consoles. They were particularly popular in our climate Rambo and Terminator consoles!
Imagine the situation: you are a 6-7 year old kid, the best movies in the world are Rambo: First Blood and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. And then you see a “game box” at the local market that says Rambo TV Game and/or Terminator 2: Super Design Ending-Man. Well, a short circuit happens in your head!
Of course, at that age you are not aware that the Rambo and Terminator consoles are actually Chinese copies of the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System consoles. But let’s be realistic – Rambo and Terminator are better names for games. And who cared that they weren’t licensed gaming devices anyway?
Back in 2013, colleague Pedišić described the Terminator 2 console in HCL retro dose with these words:
“Terminator 2 was one of the many NES clones housed in a case that copied the appearance of the Sega Mega Drive 2, and with it came yellow cassettes that often did not even contain standard NES games, but their inferior Russian and Chinese copies. The target market of this console was post-socialist countries, unaccustomed to capitalist reality, which could be stuffed with almost anything. However, somewhere in the wartime year of 1992, when the console appeared on local at flea markets for relatively little money, its success was guaranteed despite the lack of quality and originality. In our country, everyone was crazy about Terminator, for poorly made controllers, one of which in most cases did not work, for its ‘1000 in 1’ or ‘9999 in 1’ games…”
You know what was the biggest irony of the “9999 in 1” inscription? None of those games were either Rambo or Terminator! And when you realized that, you practically got a doctorate in marketing. But hey, can you really be disappointed that you didn’t get a Rambo / Terminator game if you got ten thousand? Well, there weren’t really that many, but it’s like at that age you can count to that many – if it says so on the box, it’s probably true!
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like today if action heroes / movies were used to sell consoles. PlayStation 5 would surely be John Wick 5. Xbox Series would be Mission Impossible. Would consoles sell better than they do today? Would Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise agree to be AI-powered gaming assistants? We’ll never know!
Joking aside, Rambo and Terminator as console names were just the spirit of a time that will probably never happen again. The period when action heroes were the most famous faces in the world. That era of the wild market where copies of consoles were more popular than the originals. It was crazy and unforgettable.