In , Mattel Electronics released their own console as a direct competitor to the Atari The Intellivision or intelligent television , never surpassed the Atari in popularity, but it did offer competitive audio effects and graphics. Coleco Industries released their competitor to the Atari and Intellivision consoles in The Coleco also offered expansion modules that allowed gamers to play popular games from Atari, racing games, and more.
Super Mario Bros. Japanese-based Sega was one of the top five arcade manufacturers operating in the U. As the market changed, Sega shifted away from arcade games and towards the home-gaming console market in Japan. After experimentation and development of other consoles, Sega launched the Mega Drive console in in Japan. In , it was released in the U. The Super Nintendo boasted upgraded bit graphics over the original NES and even survived as bit games became popular.
More than 49 million Super Nintendo consoles were sold worldwide! In , Sega released an updated console. The new console was smaller than the original, lighter weight, offered AV stereo sound output, and had a less expensive mainboard.
In , the Sony PlayStation took the video game market by storm, selling out k units in presale and over 7 million by The Nintendo 64 was one of the first game consoles to use a bit processor, which gave gamers better graphics than ever before from a Nintendo system.
In , Sony upped their game yet again with the PlayStation 2. The new console featured DVD playback abilities, which was a huge selling point at the time. It consisted of a white and, yes, brown box containing just 40 transistors and 40 diodes, with wires connecting to the TV and two blocky controllers. The games, basically variants of Pong, had no sound and colour was achieved by placing plastic overlays on the screen — but the profound concept of interacting with graphics on your TV began here.
Like Sega, SNK was a s arcade giant with a desire to infiltrate the home console market, but its approach was much more ambitious. It set out to build a machine using exactly the same technology as its coin-op hits. For a while, in the late s, Atari was video games. During Christmas , , machines hit US shelves and sold out almost instantly.
The look of the machine, with its black fascia and wood panelling, and its simple eight-directional joystick, set the design ethos of the industry, while its games, with their beautifully illustrated boxes, were design classics in both form and function. Infiltrating pop culture via movies as diverse as Airplane! Beset by difficulties and delays regarding its ambitious Cell processor and the inclusion of a Blu-ray drive, the PS3 was an intimidating project from the start.
Its online multiplayer service was generously subscription-free yet inferior to the Xbox offering and developers found it tough to work with the array of multiple synergistic processing units SPUs. Their lessons are still being taught and learned. Developed in conjunction with supercomputer specialist Silicon Graphics Inc and originally given the not-at-all hubristic codename Project Reality, the N64 was a contradictory beast — backwardly sticking with carts instead of embracing CD-roms but innovative in its use of an analogue joystick to allow accurate 3D movement.
Built more as a nicely boxed PC than a traditional console, the Xbox One boasts multicore AMD processors, HDR and 4K video compatibility, cloud storage, game streaming and a host of multimedia options. And just as the machine was beginning to age, its S and X iterations came along and boosted the specs. State of the art, in many ways. From those slightly Orwellian foundations came a robust, powerful and exciting machine, its back catalogue of more than games boasting one of the greatest console first-person shooters ever in Halo, as well as gritty brawler Ninja Gaiden, surreal adventure Psychonauts and Star Wars epic Knights of the Old Republic.
From the beginning, Xbox understood the rising importance of online play, with its integrated ethernet port and robust Xbox Live infrastructure. Suddenly, whole families could compete together, from the youngest to the oldest — and Nintendo sold more than m units as a result. A victory for utilitarian design over technological obsession. The machine saw an array of idiosyncratic titles — Jet Set Radio, Shenmue, Seaman, Rez, Phantasy Star Online — that either invented new genres or utterly revolutionised old ones.
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