Video game console
:
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The Atari 2600, Sony PSOne, Nintendo Gamecube, and Xbox 360 |
A
video game console is an
interactive home entertainment computer. The term is used to distinguish a machine designed for consumers to buy and use solely for playing
video games from a
personal computer, which has many other functions, or
arcade games, which are designed for businesses to buy and then charge others to play.
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The Sears Telegames Arcade System manual (top) and an Imagic game catalog (bottom). |
The term "console" is used in the user manuals of several early video game systems. Its use, however, is not synonymous with "video game system" or the same as its modern usage. It refers to a specific part of the video game system. The Atari 2600, NES, and other consoles from those decades were called "video game systems" at the time.
["Atari 2600 Game Catalog Scans][Atari 2600 Manuals Scans]The first company to use the term "console" to officially refer to its video game system was Sony with the
PlayStation.
[Sony Manuals Scans] At that time,
dedicated consoles such as
Pong or the
Atari Flashback were not being commercially manufactured, and game consoles had less in common with computers than they do now or did in the 80's.
The PlayStation and its contemporaries were video game systems that you inserted games into and connected to a television. Because of this, some people don't consider dedicated video game systems or video game systems that contain their own screen (such as the
Vectrex) to be video game consoles.
Main article: History of video game consoles
First Generation
Main article: History of video game consoles (first generation)
Although the first
computer games appeared in the 50s
[Computer Games - Beginnings], it was not until 1972 that
Magnavox released the first home video game console, the
Magnavox Odyssey, designed by
Ralph Baer. The Odyssey was orginally only moderately successful. It was not until Atari's arcade game PONG popularized video games, that home consoles really took off. Soon the market was flooded by
dedicated consoles that played simple pong and tank games.
Second Generation
Main article: History of video game consoles (second generation)
Fairchild released the Fairchild Entertainment System (FES) in 1976. While there had been previous game consoles that used cartridges, either the cartridges had no information and served the same function as flipping switches (the Odyssey) or the console itself was empty and the cartridge contained all of the game components. The FES, however, contained a microprocessor so its cartrdiges only need a single ROM chip.
This allowed Fairchild to sell the FES for far cheaper than the dedicated consoles popular at the time. RCA and Atari soon released their own cartridge-based consoles.
1977 Video Game Crash
In 1977, manufacturers of older obsolete consoles sold their systems at a loss to clear stock and get out of the market, causing Fairchild and RCA to abandon their game consoles. Only Atari and Magnavox stayed in the home console market.
The VCS and Odyssey 2 continued to be sold at a profit, but it wasn't until Atari released a conversion of the arcade hit Space Invaders that the home console industry was completely revived. Space Invaders' unprecedented success started the trend of console manufacturers trying to get exclusive rights to arcade titles, and the trend of advertisements for game consoles claiming to bring the arcade experience home.
Attempts to Create a Next Gen Console
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An Atari 2600 game from the 1978 (top) and an Atari 2600 game from 1983 (bottom) |
Several second gen consoles such as the ColecoVision, Vectrex, and even Atari's own 5200, had superior hardware to the 2600 and were intended to replace it. However, the Atari VCS/2600 dominated the console market throughout the early 80's.
The 2600 already had a large user base when these new consoles came out. Because of this many third party developers chose to develop primarily for the 2600. This allowed them to get more and more comfortable with 2600's hardware and learn how to pull off more and more impressive tricks. Third party games for systems like the ColecoVision and Intellivision never significantly improved.
Video of Crash of 1983
Main article: Video game crash of 1983
In 1983, the video game business suffered a much more severe crash. A glut of low quality video games by smaller companies especially for the 2600, industry leader Atari hyping games such as E.T. that were poorly received, and a growing number of personal computer users caused consumers and retailers to lose faith and interest in video game consoles. Most video game companies filed for bankruptcy, or moved into other industries, abandoning their game consoles. Intellivision sold the rights to the Intellivision to INTV Corp, who continued to produce Intellivision consoles and develop new games for the Intellivision until 1991. All other North American game consoles were discontinued by 1984.
Third Generation
Main article: History of video game consoles (third generation)
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The Robotic Operating Buddy that came packaged with the NES |
In 1983, Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan. It supported high-res, full color, tiled backgrounds, and full color, high-res sprites. This allowed Famicom games to be longer, and have more detailed graphics. Nintendo brought their Famicom over to the US in the form of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. In the US, video games were seen as a fad that had already passed. To distinguish its product from older video game consoles Nintendo used a front loading cartridge port similar to a VCR on the NES, packaged the NES with a plastic "robot" and a light gun, and orginally advertised as it as a toy.
Nintendo also built a lock-out chip into the NES. This kept third parties from producing their own cartridges and forced all developers to go through Nintendo to get NES games published. This allowed Nintendo to do things like prevent developers from releasing low-quality games and limit developers to five titles a year.
Fourth Generation
Main article: History of video game consoles (fourth generation)
Sega's Master System was intended to compete with NES, but never gained any significant market share and was barely profitable. Sega regained market share by releasing their next-generation console, the
Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, in 1988, two years before Nintendo could release theirs, the
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES).
Fifth Generation
The first fifth generation consoles were the Atari Jaguar and the 3DO. Both of these systems were much more powerful than the SNES or Genesis; they were better at rendering polygons, could display more onscreen colors, and the 3DO used
CD's that contained far more information than cartridges and were cheaper to produce. Neither of these consoles were serious threats to
Sega or
Nintendo, though. The 3DO cost more than the SNES and Genesis combined, and the Jaguar was extremely difficult to program for, leading to a lack of games that used its extra power.
Instead of creating new consoles, Nintendo released games like
Donkey Kong Country that could display a wide range of tones (something common in fifth-gen games) by limiting the number of hues onscreen, and games like
Star Fox that used an extra "Super FX chip" inside of the cartridge to display polygon graphics. Sega followed suit, releasing
Vectorman and
Virtua Racing (the latter of which used the Sega Virtua Processor.)
It was not until Sony's
PlayStation and Sega's
Saturn were released that fifth generation consoles started to become popular. Both of them had advanced polygon capabilities, used CDs to store games, costed far less than the 3DO, and were easier to program for than the Jaguar. The Saturn also had 2D
sprite handling power on par with the Neo-Geo.
Sixth generation consoles
This generation is currently phasing out.
* Sega's
Dreamcast was Sega's last videogame console, and is discontinued.
* Sony's
PlayStation 2 was the sequel to their first console, PlayStation.
* Nintendo's
GameCube was Nintendo's fourth home videogame console.
* Microsoft's
Xbox was Microsoft's first videogame console.
Seventh generation consoles
This generation is currently phasing in.
* Microsoft's
Xbox 360 was released on
November 22,
2005.
* Sony's
PlayStation 3 was announced to be released in Japan on
November 11,
2006 and worldwide on
November 17,
2006.
* Nintendo's
Wii will be released no earlier than
October 1,
2006, and no later than
November 23,
2006.
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The Sega Megadrive was branded as a 16-bit console |
Each new generation of console hardware made use of the rapid development of processing technology. Newer machines could output a greater range of colours, more
sprites, and introduced graphical technologies such as
scaling, and
vector graphics. One way this increase in processing power was conveyed to consumers was through the measurement of "
bits". The
TurboGrafx 16, Genesis, and SNES were among the first consoles to advertise the fact that they contained 16-bit
processors. This fourth generation of console hardware was often referred to as the 16-bit era, and the previous generation as the 8-bit.
The
bit-value of a console referred to the
word length of a console's processor (although the value was sometimes misused, for example the TurboGrafx 16 had only an 8-bit
CPU, but a 16-bit dedicated graphics processor). As the graphical performance of console hardware is dependant on many factors, using bits was a crude way to gauge a console's overall ability, but served better to distinguish between generations.
*
List of video game consoles*
Console manufacturer*
History of computer and video games*
Handheld game consoles*
Dedicated console*
List of occurrences of game consoles in entertainment media [
1]
*
RF Generation, an Internet database of video games, includes a collection tool
*
MobyGames, an Internet database of video games, including console games
*
Video Game and Console Timeline, a Brief Video Game and Console Timeline
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The Link Cable of Time article and history of video game consoles and their makers
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Game-Machines.com Consoles a detailed history of video game consoles
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A Podcast on the history of video games called "Bits of History"
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The Console Conspiracy is a website devoted to reporting on all the news available about console gaming
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Dark Watcher's Console History A very detailed history of known and lesser-known video game consoles
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X-NPS360 Revolution 3 A humorous view on what the 'perfect console' would be like
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The Old Computer Dot Com Archive of retro gaming advertisements
