QOTD: Which Dead Companies Do You Miss?

[Stardude82]

Interplay is still with us although maybe not for long.

Hey how about Wang Laboratories... I remember playing "Super Star Trek" off 8" floppies in the 80's.

 

[z5300]

Aureal definitely. Even today simulating surround sound is so much more an elegant and practical solution rather than having to dump speakers around you and their requisite cables.

Recently caved in and bought an x-fi for cmss-3d which is probably where aureal's IP went...kinda regret supporting the company that killed off Aureal in rather dubious circumstances.

 

[Stardude82]

MicronPC... they were pretty much the first premium performance PC builder and now they are completely gone. Top quality components (they were a subsidiary of Micron Semi. (Crucial, Lexan)), they were pre-tweaked with ahead of the time features like bios boot from USB. They sort of just got squeezed out of the market in the end.

 

[bjornlo]

Definitely Commodore and that wonderful Amiga era.

 

[powerbaselx]

[citation]1. amd is Intels ONLY competition[/citation]
In the mass market only (except IBM Cell cpu). On the enterprise server market there are other proprietary CPU companies like IBM with POWER cpus and SUN with SPARC cpus (Motorola prod).

 

[Guest]

When I read the title of this article all I could think of was 3dfx.

 

[jitpublisher]

Abit Motherboards
Micron PC's
3dfx, Man I loved my VooDoo2.
Cyrix and the MII, RISC and CISC instruction specifications, and a superpiplined core were actually screaming fast, clock for clock blew away Intel and AMD both in their day. But the horribly slow floating point unit was eventually their undoing.

 

[Scooder]

Yes US Robotics is still around and still makes 56k modems - still best in class! http://www.usr.com/products/modem/modem-product.asp?sku=USR5686E

Not dead companies, but I'd have to say Lucas Arts and Sierra of the past. When studios could just brew up any idea and make the game with full support of the publisher, without having to get approval by some suited guy with only $$$ in mind. At least Interplay seems to have some flexibility still.

 

[hack__you]

ELSA!

I miss my ELSA Gladiac

 

[rodney_ws]

Lucas Arts. (yes, they ARE dead to me now)

 

[forsayken]

Iron Lore

 

[Pei-chen]

3dfx SUX. The idiotic concept of multi-GPU on a card is what makes today's video card so huge and inefficient. Next gen card couldn’t sell well because it couldn’t outperform last gen’s dual GPU card. Nvidia and ATI drag on their development cycle because releasing dual GPU card is cheaper than developing new chip.

3dfx died because it spent too much time marketing multi-GPU setup and let Nvidia overtook them in GPU design. GeForce 2 handy beat Voodoo 5500/6000 in games and can fit in most cases.

 

[Topcover]

Its a game studio but I miss my westwoods studios EA ruined command and conquer even though RA3 is pretty good it still doesn't feel quite the same

 

[jcknouse]

from the ancient days:

Datachief hard drives
SSI games
3rd party atari joysticks (too many to mention)

from more recent days:

3dfx of course (owned several cards)
paradise/western digital video cards ( had 2 and both were great)
Everex modems (as good as hayes, and about half the price)

 

[AdamB5000]

I miss Papyrus and their racing sims. Much of the team is now iRacing, and I thought I'd be deep into that, but dang that gets expensive. I know guys that spend >$300/yr. on subscriptions and content. It almost forces you to race so many races/week that it's easy to get burned out.

It'd be nice to have a supreme realistic racing sim with good net code that doesn't require a subscription and allows you to race when YOU want to race.

 

[hardwarekid9756]

Digital. I miss Digital. I remember dinking around on DEC-9's. That was fun, with those gigantic 8" floppies!

I also miss Matrox. I LOVED Matrox graphics cards. Remember the Parhelia? The triple-head monitor graphics card? I don't know if they're still around, but I know they pulled out of mainstream and that's depressing. I still have my Max-PC mag when they reviewed the Parhelia and said it would be the future of gaming. Bill Gates/kilobytes gaffe, anyone?

 

[powerbaselx]

[citation][nom]hardwarekid9756[/nom]I also miss Matrox. I LOVED Matrox graphics cards. Remember the Parhelia? The triple-head monitor graphics card? I don't know if they're still around, but I know they pulled out of mainstream and that's depressing.[/citation]

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/

I guess you still can buy Matrox graphic cards... they're promoting those triple-head to play with World of Warcraft so...

 

[havo]

The list is long, MicroProse is #1 for me (Master of Orion anyone) after that we have 3dfx, USR, Origin, and many others. I also miss companies like Creative when they did new and different things.

 

[buzznut]

I miss Atari, was sad to see them go. 3do, not so much for their machine as for the software. Like Heroes 1,2, and 3.

Kinda miss the old days when a game just had to be fun, didn't need to make sense or have a storyline. Why not just make a fighting game without the stupid backstory that no one pays attention to anyway?

Guess that's why I enjoyed Serious Sam so much, definitely an old school kind of game. I wish there were more games like that around.

Oh yeah, I really miss Game Player magazine. I miss Bill and the box. (sob)

 

[Soul_keeper]

I miss abit
and with epox gone, the enthusiast/overclocker non-asus choices are slim at best

 

[Soul_keeper]

Looking Glass Studios
Had the thief video games, those were pretty cool.
hopefully EA games don't go the same way

 

[vladtepes]

Iomega!!! It's not dead? Should be!! I wont miss it at all
As for the topic would be 3dfx and US robotics

 

[Guest]

Thank you! Finally someone who mentions LGS!
IMHO, System Shock and Thief series are by far the best games ever and to this day still my absolute favorites!!! I still play both sets of games these days!
Also miss MicroProse - F1GP was the most awesome F1 at the time;
Honeywell-Bull (unless they're still around) - brand of my dad's first computer(100MHz Pentium CPU!)
LucasArts Games Adventure series - Monkey Island and Indy were the most fun and best adventures ever made!

 

[jsloan]

atari ;-(

 

[salopar]

MediaVision , my old proaudio spectrum 16 sound card had best utility and excellent sound.