Home video game console

As of 2025, there have been ten console generations, with the current leading manufacturers being Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, colloquially known as the "Big 3".

Past console manufacturers have included Atari, Fairchild, Mattel, Coleco, Sega, NEC, 3DO, Fujitsu and SNK.

Earlier home consoles were typically built from a selection of standard and highly customized integrated computer chips, packaged onto circuit boards and cases.

Consoles remain as fixed systems, lacking the customization options that personal computer components have, and most consoles include customized components to maximize space and reduce power consumption to provide the best performance for game playing, while lowering costs with reduced storage and memory configurations.

A number of clones of both systems rushed to fill the nascent home console market and the video game industry suffered a small recession in 1977 due to this.

During this time, Atari Inc. had been sold to Warner Communications, and several programmers left the company and founded Activision, becoming the first third-party developer.

The consumer adoption of optical discs with larger storage capacity in the mid-1995 led many console manufactures to move away from cartridges to CD-ROMs and later to DVDs and other formats, with Sony's PlayStation line introducing even more features that gave it an advantage in the market; the PlayStation 2, released in 2000, remains the best-selling console to date with over 155 million units sold.

Microsoft, fearing that the PlayStation 2 was threatening the competitive edge of the personal computer, entered the console space with its Xbox line in 2001.

Internet connectivity had become commonplace by the mid-2000s, and nearly all home consoles supported digital distribution and online service offerings by the 2010s.