When I was very little, the NES still reigned supreme. However, in '91, when I turned five years old, the Super Nintendo was released in the United States. My first video game experiences were on the Mac (my dad, a professor of computer science at MIT, always admired the inherent strengths of the Apple computer design, so we were a straight-up Mac household. As someone who always had to defend my beige box from mockery from PC people, it is very strange that Apple is now the success it has become - oh, and before we get into a whole discussion of the inhumane manufacturing practices Apple is guilty of, I should point out that the very same factories in China produce nearly all major PC brands as well. But this post isn't about the politics of labor or even about home computers, so /end tangent.)
Anyway, back to the point: my first gaming experiences were on the Mac, playing Cosmic Osmo - an objectiveless exploration game by Robyn and Rand Miller, who would go on to make Myst (which has been a huge influence on me as an artist.) While I had friends who played various systems, I only got my Super Nintendo five years after it came out, in 1996. At this time, the N64 was the new big thing.
I got a used N64 about a year later, and I've been a Nintendo loyalist through thick and thin. Granted, now that I'm in my 20s and living with roommates, I have constant access to their XBox.
It strikes me that every generation has its own kind of revolutionary step forward. Starting with the NES (Atari etc. predates me a bit, so I won't go into those earlier systems,) we had the rebirth of home arcade games. Zelda brought us the very first save files in a game. It is a bit odd to think that one was expected to finish all of Super Mario Bros. in a single sitting, but apparently that was the case.
The Super Nintendo, to me, is the true gaming era of my childhood. Even before I had a console myself, the SNES was a golden age. It was also the heyday of the old Nintendo/Sega rivalry. Nintendo's goofy, earnest plumber Mario was set against Sega's totally radical, extreme hedgehog with an attitude Sonic (as much as I wax nostalgic about the 90s, the "totally radical" "edgy" children's cartoon characters have not aged well.) At the time, the Console wars were just as heated as the Mac vs. PC war.
Ultimately, Nintendo prevailed (probably due to just better games. I mean, compare Mario, with its tightly-tuned platforming challenges, with Sonic, which seemed to value the sensation of speed over clever level design,) but in this era, these were the two titans.
Interestingly, the only real qualitative difference I can think of between the 8-bit generation and the 16-bit generation is the number of buttons on the controller. The NES literally had just a D-pad and the A and B buttons (well, plus Start and Select.) The SNES added X and Y, as well as the shoulder buttons (that no modern shooter would work without.) The Sega Genesis actually gave us six main buttons (A, B, C, X, Y, Z,) which I have to imagine was just them trying to one-up Nintendo.
There are many incredible classics from the 16-bit era, and I think I should take a moment to point out how awesome Squaresoft used to be, with its Final Fantasy VI (III for the philistines,) Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and the excellent Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (where you got to have Bowser throw Mario at your enemies as an attack!)
The 32-bit era (64? I thought the whole point of the N64 was that it was 64 bits, but the PS1 was 32, and they had comparable graphics, I think... anyway...) was another very serious revolution. While the 16-bit era had toyed with it (Starfox, for example,) the next generation really brought us 3d games for real. Mario 64 taught the industry how to handle the camera perspective in a 3d environment, and very quickly, the old top-down or side-scrolling games became the exception, rather than the rule.
This was also the beginning the downfall for Sega, as the Saturn was not a terrible system, but Sony's new Playstation arose, leveraging a very large library (not to mention the backing of a much larger company) to become Nintendo's true competition.
Sega, in an ambitious, but ultimately ill-fated attempt to get a leg up, released the Dreamcast in 1998. Truthfully, this was the dawn of the next generation (128-bit, I think, though at this point I don't really know how accurately these bit counts represent the actual power of the systems.) The Dreamcast burst onto the scene with next-gen graphics, yes, and was not an entirely bad system, but I think there was a combination of people not yet being ready to move onto the next console and Sega's diminishing brand-power that led to it pretty much falling apart before the other companies even caught up.
In 2000, Sony came out with the Playstation 2, and Nintendo followed a year later with the Gamecube, while Microsoft entered the ring with their XBox. The 128-bit era, like the 16-bit era, did not really bring the most sweeping changes in the console generations, mainly improving graphics and the scope of its worlds. We did start to see voice acting much more in this era, and demand for production value went up (the Metal Gear Solid series - including the Gamecube remake of the original PS1 title, for example, plays out like a - mostly - interactive movie.)
The strange thing about this generation is that Nintendo, who had revitalized the industry and been pretty much top dog through three generations, found itself in an odd place. Perhaps because of the wild success of the Pokemon games, Gamecube was regarded widely as a "kid's console," and many of the old, more mature (and "mature") titles passed it over. Nintendo also had to face up to the fact that technologically, they were outmatched by Sony and Mircosoft. While Nintendo and Sega had been the two major rivals, both were pure game companies. Now, Nintendo's two competitors are much larger companies, with a wider range of resources to push technical limitations. The Gamecube was kind of a dark era for Nintendo, but it led to a very big development in the subsequent generation.
It should be noted, too, that much of what defined the current generation had its groundwork laid by the 128-bit era. Consoles were getting hooked up online, and while memory cards were still a big thing, we also started to see hard drives coming with the consoles.
The current generation (256 bit? Are we still counting bits?) began with the Xbox 360 in 2005. Microsoft seemed to learn from Sony's success in the previous generation that launching early and getting some major titles in there would be very good for them. (Of course, Sega had tried this with Dreamcast, but...) At least at launch, the three consoles hit very different marks.
The 360 included an HDDVD player (the format that lost out to Blu-ray,) but was not that much more expensive because of it. The major innovation of the 360 was that more and more, Microsoft was making their console act like a PC. While you could technically buy a cheaper 360 without a hard drive, the ability to store large amounts of data allowed for the beginning of the DLC-era. You can download entire games to your console, and existing games can be updated or expanded with digital downloads. If this generation has a legacy, I'd say that's it.
The PS3 was not quite as successful, due in large part to the enormous price it launched with. At $600, Sony must have been really banking on people wanting both a console and a hot new Blu-ray player. Coming out nearly a year after the 360 and at a much higher price has made Microsoft's console look a lot more attractive. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but I can tell you this: in the six years that the PS3 has been out, I have literally only touched one once, and played about 3 mintues of MGS4 (damn do I wish that were on the Xbox.)
And then there's Nintendo's sneaky little bugger, the Wii. Nintendo came to a realization during the Gamecube era: they would not be able to compete with the other consoles on a pure horsepower level. So, instead of making just the next generation, with a controller that had five prongs (look at the Gamecube controller - it might be more ergonomic than the N64 one, but it does have four prongs) they decided to change what a video game controller could look like. Thus the Wii-mote.
Now, the Wii was not the greatest console for an oldschooler such as myself (I play Smash Bros. Brawl with a Gamecube controller) but damn if they didn't find a way to innovate. As the Wii, with its far lower price and intentional "blue ocean" marketing, managed to out-sell the other consoles, Sony and Microsoft perked up.
Sony came out with a blatant copy, with its own glowing lollipop version of the Wii-mote. Microsoft came up with the actually quite revolutionary (even if they're still trying to work out the kinks to make it more than just a gimmick) Kinect.
Actually, the Wii also had another very cool selling point - the Virtual Console. If Nintendo has a strength, it's its history of great games. The Virtual Console makes many of those games (that are quite hard to find now) readily available.
What I find interesting is that the would-be selling points of the current generation (HD Graphics, Hi-def DVD support) have really taken a back seat (Blu-ray came out only a couple years before we kind of gave up on physical media anyway) to the real big innovations, like the virtual console and the rise of DLC.
So what does the future hold for the next generation? The Wii U (please change the name,) the Xbox 720 (um... so we turn twice?) and the PS4 (originality is Sony's great strength. Hence all the memorable Sony characters!) Well, that's tough to predict.
The only one we've really heard much about is the Wii U. Nintendo wants back into the Hardcore market, and while the Wii-mote controllers can be used for some of the games, the new controller paradigm they're looking at is the tablet - with the grand success of the iPad, Nintendo basically wants to work such a thing into their console. Interestingly, when it was announced that they were going to have a Revolutionary controller for the Wii (then code-named Revolution,) I had assumed they were going to go with a touch-screen. One generation later, my prediction holds.
The Wii U will also feature a normal controller that looks almost exactly like the 360 one (this is not a bad thing - while the original Xbox controller was a blocky piece of shit, the 360's is possible the most ergonomically pleasing one yet.)
The strange thing, though, is that a lot of the high-profile Wii U titles are already out or are launching on older systems - Assassin's Creed 3, for example. Actually, even more bizarre is Mass Effect 3 - the final entry in a series that really, really benefits from having save files from the previous games. The thing that's worrying is that we haven't seen any real "next-gen" games announced for the Wii U (should we just call it the U, like the 360?) Now, I'm sure we'll have the next awesome Mario, Smash Bros., and Zelda (am I the only one who liked Twilight Princess more than Skyward Sword?) but I hope that this generation, Nintendo will truly climb back into the top dog spot, and have developers chomping at the bit to get their games on the Wii U.
So, here are my predictions to make myself look super dated in five or so years: I think we're going to see a bigger growth in digital copies of games. While I personally prefer having a physical copy (for back-up purposes if nothing else,) I think we're going to see digital distribution overtaking physical sales.
The awesome side of this is that it will make it far easier for indie developers to get their games out, which is a very important step in the elevation of the Video Game art form. Additionally, we can probably start demanding lower prices for games, and the publishers can do everything for cheaper, and thus still make a sizable profit even if they sell at lower prices (not that they will.) Plus, as we've seen with this generation, we will be able to have constantly expanding games, growing larger with new DLC that can make our favorite games go on that much longer.
The dark side of this is kind of a mirror image. The big danger, of course, is the "greedy DLC," the stuff that clearly should have been in the original game, but was cut out so they could charge you an extra $15. While I'm sure that does not account for all DLC (sometimes it really does feel like an addition or expansion,) I would not put it past the big publishers to push for this new revenue source. The other danger of the online, digital distribution era is the overbearing DRM issues. Diablo 3, for instance, was a bit of a lightning rod for this issue, where a single-player game that could certainly just run entirely on your own computer needed to be connected to the internet via a server (that was overloaded and crashed in the early days, and has to go down for maintenance every week.) As Consoles become more like PCs, many of these issues will become more commonplace.
Of course, most of these issues are present today. I doubt I would be able to predict the really major, memorable changes that will define the upcoming generation. Doing so would make me seem like the guy who's certain the HDDVD/Blu-Ray war is crucial while everyone else is watching stuff on Netflix and Hulu.
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