Exapunks: TEC Redshift Player

The year is 1992. Electronics giant TEC rushed the Redshift — a microdisc-based gaming handheld — to market to capitalize on the video game boom. It arrived underpowered, its gimmicky 3D mode gave users headaches after a few minutes of use, and it flopped spectacularly. Five years later in 1997, the Redshift has become a beloved hackable device, cheap and easy to find at garage sales, and the homebrew scene built around it is thriving — hackers trading increasingly clever homemade games that push the hardware beyond anything TEC imagined. TEC, of course, made no profit from any of it, and never released another console.