Video Game Innovations
Video games have gotten extremely popular over the last few years. It
seems to be one of the truly recession proof industries as far as
consumer purchasing. The actual developers are a different matter
altogether. They seem to have external costs and circumstances that
require some downsizing for some companies. Hopefully it doesn’t affect
the quality of the new games on the horizon. There are many new games
releasing in the near future and these include some big named franchises
like God of War three. This is going to be another one of those system
selling games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Halo 3. There have been so
many innovations over the last couple of year in video games and this
generation of game consoles is fighting heavily for each of our dollars.
If the recent history of games released is an omen of what’s to come,
then video game fans have got a lot to look forward too. There are three
main companies fighting for video game superiority. They are Nintendo,
with their innovative everybody is invited to play Wii console; Sony
with its super powered PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox360 which has really made
a run for the title of next gen winner. There is a constant in the world
of gaming, which is the PC. These machines are a favorite of gamers and
allow players experiences that just aren’t available on the home
consoles yet. The PC is the preference for MMO and FPS players and has
been for a long time. There have been so many great consoles over the
past 25 years; it’s hard to narrow it down to the absolute best, but
there seem to be three big names standing and they have built their
current success on well established consoles and a fan loyalty that
sometimes borders on fanaticism.
Brief history of consoles
Video game consoles have been part of our home entertainment since the 1970’s. These early system from the late 70’s and early eighties were very expensive and quite primitive by today’s standards. After a peak in the early eighties, the home console and the arcades began to become less popular and video games became old news. It wasn’t until the mid-eighties, around 1985, that an unknown company here in the US decided to release a home video game system. It was the Nintendo Entertainment System, AKA the NES. It had already become a huge hit in Japan and took the US by storm. The rest is, as they say, history. It was soon followed by a Sega console and a few years later the Sony products hit the market.
Sony
Sony’s first home console was a smash hit all over the world. It was a disc based console that could generate 3D graphics and was actually affordable by most people’s standards. There were a couple of other systems out there, Phillips CDi for example and even Sega’s ill-fated Saturn, but Sony captured the masses attention and in doing so wrestled the reigns of a video game empire away from the juggernauts that were Nintendo and Sega. It would only get better for Sony when they released the second generation of their Playstation console in 2001. They had become the big boys on the block and it was time for another player to try and take them down as well as an old competitor to try and make a comeback.
Microsoft
It was long after Sony’s huge success with the PS2 that Microsoft released its popular XBOX console. It was a big hit in the US with its online play and its more powerful processor. It never quite caught up to the Playstation machine in terms of sales, but it surpassed Nintendo as a machine for serious gamers. It set the framework for their next console for the next generation in their Xbox360 machine. It was much more powerful and beat Playstation and Nintendo to market by over a year. It had a well established base by the time the other consoles hit the market.
Nintendo
Nintendo has proven once again, with its Wii consol that it knows what people want in a video game console more than the people that play them. They always seem to buck convention and go in the different direction than what the industry as a whole might be doing. They did it with the original NES, when everybody said video games were dead, they defied the odds. When everybody said you had to put games on discs, Nintendo decided to go with the cartridges on the N64 and created some of the most beloved games of all time with the Zelda and Mario series. They went for it again and took power away from the new system and went with innovation and accessibility. It looks as if they have picked a winner again.