UMC's Super A'Can lost $6M — Taiwan's homegrown console that lasted six months

Funtech (敦煌科技), a Taiwanese electronics company and subsidiary of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), launched the Super A'Can home video game console on October 25, 1995, exclusively in Taiwan and China. The 16-bit console used a Motorola 68000 CPU — the same chip inside the Sega Genesis and Neo Geo — and was positioned to compete with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It was priced at NT$2,900 and supported by twelve games released between 1995 and 1996, all in Traditional Chinese with strong Taiwanese cultural flavour.

The timing was catastrophic. The Super A'Can launched the same month as the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn in the West, and the Nintendo 64 was just months away. The 16-bit console market was being swept aside by 32-bit and 64-bit machines with 3D graphics. Despite technically competent hardware — 32,768 colours, 640×480 resolution, four-layer parallax scrolling — the A'Can was a fourth-generation console entering a fifth-generation market. It was too little, too late, and too expensive.

The console was a commercial disaster. UMC, which had invested in Funtech to enter the consumer electronics market, wrote off the entire project. The company destroyed all development and manufacturing equipment and sold the remaining inventory to the United States as scrap. The total loss exceeded US$6 million, making it the most severe loss-making product at UMC before the year 2000. The console was discontinued in April 1996, barely six months after launch. Funtech itself was dissolved on November 5, 1998.