Tear Down: ZapIt Game Console

By Rich Nass

March 12, 2007

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With so much attention focused on the Playstation and Wii game systems these days, ZapIt was able to come under the radar with a game box that's suited more for the whole family than just the younger generation. The Game Wave is like Trivial Pursuit on steroids, with a DVD player thrown in for fun.

The concept behind the game was to have an interactive board-game type console that families could use to play classic games, like trivia, Blackjack, card games. Six remote controls can interact with that game. Using the embedded DVD playback capability, users could also watch a movie.

The target retail price for the system was $99. Hence, the target manufactured price (not the BOM) for manufacture in China had to be around $50. The engineering team at design house Nytric didn't achieve that figure, but they came close enough to maintain the $99 retail price. It's actually in stores now for around $80.

Conceptualization for the project started in March of 2003. Actual product development started in November 2003. Some engineers swear that any system design should start with the operating systems, while others claim that the host CPU is the starting point. The Nytric designers fall into the latter class.

"We originally started looking at all types of media processors," says Jon Clarke, head of Nytric's hardware design team. "Some of the challenges were that we needed a very low-cost media processor that could do MPEG playback, yet still had enough resources that would allow us to program the games. In addition, we wanted an integrated DVD navigator so we could process the DVD VOB files to handle playback of commercial movies."

Some of the processors that are specific to Windows CE were evaluated, but that brings in a new set of problems.

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