Sky Train was a great idea on paper but in practice it had a fatal flaw: it forced configurations into loops. Of course, one would not expect switched “track” in a cable car, but the sets didn’t even offer the one thing nearly all real-world cable cars have in common: terminating stations or buffer stops. Unless you wanted dangling track ends or jury-rigged stops you couldn’t even make a simple line. Every Sky Train configuration had to be a closed loop.
Despite the inflexibility, Sky Train has a considerable amount of charm. It was not really a bad product: it just cost too much for the limited play value.
BRIO has had a number of unusual themes over the years, but none was probably more perplexing than Network. Abandoning all ties to vehicles, trains, or familiar cultural icons, BRIO Network attempted to represent the world inside your computer, where tireless figures worked to deliver email while fending off the assault of computer viruses.
While the large playscapes used unusual materials that were both durable and tactile, at the end of the day the toys did very little and cost quite a lot. For the most part, they offered only blinking lights, repetitive sounds, and poor audio quality. Even the email messages, the central part of BRIO Network’s “story”, were completely garbled to the point where it was next to impossible to understand what was said.
Network was rolling out right as BRIO was pulling back from the north American markets so there was little to no distribution outside of Europe.