I had an R-Zone when I was younger. It was an absolute piece of shit. My mom found it at a garage sale. We had a racing game that I remember and then I remember like some K-mart ass style fighting game too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-Zone

Before it closed, the Brantford Computer museum here in Ontario had an amazing collection of machines. My wife took my friends and I there for my birthday one year and oh man what a trip. They had everything on display, from common systems like the c64 to really rare ones like the Unisys Icon. All up and booted, ready to be played with. But despite all these ultra rare systems the one that caught my eye was the Apple Pippin.

I grew up an insufferable mac fanboy (now reformed and agnostic), and as a kid I had heard tons about the pippin, but it was so obscure and terrible that I was sure I would never get to play one IRL.

But there I was, smile on my face, playing Super Marathon on that crappy pippin. I had the time of my life that day.

Thanks for everything Syd. RIP dude.

I’ve played Colossal Cave Adventure on an ICL 2900-series mainframe from the 1980s at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley.

I own a Virtual Boy. Not really super rare or anything but definitely obscure. Other than most people I love playing with it! Wish it had more games.

I played “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” on the Intellivision that my g/f had at the time. Most everyone else had Atari 2600s, so it felt rare (at the time) to play on it. It had a funky controller with weird keypads and a disc that was like a joystick, but hard to play with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Dungeons_%26_Dragons:_Cloudy_Mountain

I had a TI-99/4A! I coded a game for it, you ran around fighting robots and you could find a blaster and a jetpack.

The TI-99/4A had a lot of techical problems which killed its performance. They released a little module that you could insert into the game slot, then you insert the game into the module - this improved the performance drastically. Unfortunately I only heard about it many years later, I didn’t know about it at the time.

Somebody wrote an emulator which lets you run TI-99/4A games under windows or linux and I once tinkered with that and got my own game up and running again.

When I was growing up I discovered that my family had a Nuon DVD player. They didn’t even realize what it was for the first few months of ownership. Got to play tempest 3000 for years before eventually we got rid of it for a blue Ray player

My uncle convinced my parents to buy me a 3DO instead of a PlayStation.

The PC-9801 and Sharp X68000 had some pretty fun hidden gems. Is the PCEngine (TurboGrafx16) considered obscure?

I had a Game.com with Indy 500 (as a kid I thought the graphics were “awesome”, lmao), Mortal Kombat Trilogy (which I remember as being “great”) and Jeopardy! (I don’t think I ever played it, though).

Here’s a few handhelds I have that most people have never heard of: https://i.imgur.com/eYZ4yP9.jpeg

• Mega Duck
• Supervision
• Game Master
• Gamate

Oh yes, I most certainly have played video games on obscure systems. How’s the Gizmondo grab you? That was the handheld that looks like a Hostess fruit pie, created and supported by the Swedish mafia. It pales next to the PSP, but it really isn’t as crummy as the critics claimed. Sticky Balls has its moments… just don’t tell your friends you were playing a game called “Sticky Balls.”

I had a Casio FX-795P as a kid. Not really a game system, just a calculator with a one-line text display, but it had a BASIC interpreter built in so I made some games for it (a couple of text adventures and a side-view shooter.)

My friend growing up had a Socrates that we played games on until his mother found out and said we weren’t allowed to. She said it was only for when they went up to the Poconos for skiing in the winter.

I don’t think she liked me at all.

My cousins had a ColecoVision that I used to play mousetrap and donkey kong on. The controllers were wonky, but it was a ton of fun.