History of video game consoles

While early generations were led by manufacturers like Atari and Sega, the modern home console industry is dominated by three companies: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.

[3] Separately, while at Sanders Associates in 1966, Ralph H. Baer conceived of the idea of an electronic device that could be connected to a standard television to play games.

These electronic devices can only play built-in games,[7] they fit in the palm of the hand or on a tabletop, and they may make use of a variety of video display technologies such as LED, VFD, or LCD.

[14][15] Soon, other manufacturers including Coleco, Parker Brothers, Entex, and Bandai began following up with their own tabletop and handheld electronic games.

[17][18] Nintendo's line of Game & Watch titles, first introduced in 1980, was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, who was inspired when he saw a man passing time on a train by playing with an LCD calculator.

[19][20] Taking advantage of the technology used in the credit-card-sized calculators that had appeared on the market, Yokoi designed the series of LCD-based games to include a digital time display in the corner of the screen, so that they could double as a watch.

[22] Like most consumer electronics, home video game consoles are developed based on improving the features offered by an earlier product with advances made by newer technology.

Other advertisers followed suit, creating a period known as the "bit wars" that lasted through the fifth generation, where console manufactures tried to outsell each other simply on the bit-count of their system.

[43] Originally built from discrete transistors, Magnavox transitioned to integrated circuit chips that were inexpensive, and developed a new line of consoles in the Odyssey series from 1975 to 1977.

[44]: 81–89  Atari and Coleco attempted to make dedicated consoles with wholly new games to remain competitive, including Atari's Video Pinball series and Coleco's Telstar Arcade, but by this point, the first steps of the market's transition to the second generation of consoles had begun, making these units obsolete near release.

[57] Similarly, Coleco had beaten Atari to a key licensing deal with Nintendo to bring Donkey Kong as a pack-in game for the Colecovision, helping to drive its sales.

[29] At the same time, Atari has been acquired by Warner Communications, and internal policies led to the departure of four key programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead, who went and formed Activision.

Early attempts at cartridge-based handheld systems included the Microvision by Milton-Bradley and the Epoch Game Pocket Computer, but neither gained significant traction.

[66] By that point Nintendo wanted to bring the console to North America but recognized the faults that the video game crash had caused.

[67][68] The company also wanted to avoid the loss of publishing control that had occurred both in North America as well as in Asia after the Famicom's release, and created a lockout system that required all game cartridges to be manufactured by Nintendo to include a special chip.

The video game console industry nonetheless continued to thrive alongside home computers, due to the advantages of much lower prices, easier portability, circuitry specifically dedicated towards video games, the ability to be played on a television set (which PCs of the time could not do in most cases), and intensive first party software support from manufacturers who were essentially banking their entire future on their consoles.

By the sixth generation, console technology began to catch up to performance of personal computers of the time, and the use of bits as their selling point fell by the wayside.

Microsoft considered the PlayStation 2's success as a threat to the personal computer in the living room space, and had developed the Xbox to compete.

As such, the Xbox was designed based more on Microsoft's experience from personal computers, using an operating system built out from its Microsoft Windows and DirectX features, utilizing a hard disk for save game store, built-in Ethernet functionality, and created the first console online service, Xbox Live to support multiplayer games.

Consoles in this generation started using custom CPUs based on the PowerPC instruction set, and were increasingly sharing similarities with the personal computer in game development, although with challenges due to the more complex nature of porting between the differences in architectures.

Through its lifetime, the Xbox 360 was troubled by a consistent hardware fault known as "the Red Ring of Death" (RROD), and Microsoft spent over $1 billion correcting the problem.

While the system would initially have a slow start in the market in part, due to its high price, complex game development environment and initial lack of quality games, the PlayStation 3 eventually became more well received over time following gradual price cuts, improved marketing campaigns, new hardware revisions particularly the Slim models, and key critically acclaimed exclusives.

This "blue ocean strategy", releasing a product where there was no competition, was considered part of the unit's success,[122] and which drove Microsoft and Sony to develop their own motion control accessors to compete.

[135] Digital distribution increased in popularity, while the addition and improvements to remote play capabilities became standard, and second screen experiences via companion apps added more interactivity to games.

Both were similar improvements over the previous generation's respective consoles, providing more computational power to support up to 60 frames per second at 1080p resolutions for some games.

It can be placed into a special docking unit that is hooked to a television and a permanent power supply, allowing faster clock frequencies to be used to be played at higher resolutions and frame rates, and thus more comparable to a home console.

Microconsoles, cheaper stand-alone devices designed to play games from previously established platforms, also increased options for consumers.

[146][147][148][149] Sony introduced its PlayStation Vita in 2011, a revised version of the PSP but eliminating the use of external media and focusing on digital acquisition of games, as well as incorporating a touchscreen.

Consoles in this generation also launched with lower-cost models lacking optical disc drives, targeting those who would prefer to purchase games exclusively through digital downloads.

Both console families target 4K and 8K resolution televisions at high frame rates, support for real-time ray tracing rendering, 3D spatial audio, variable refresh rates, the use of high-performance solid-state drives (SSD) as internal high-speed memory to make delivering game content much faster than reading from optical disc or standard hard drives, which can eliminate loading times and support in-game streaming.