The Complete History of the Console Wars

the age old console Wars is finally coming to an end Sega is dead Nintendo is all mobile games and soon Xbox will be on every platform the end is nigh it has been a long fought and arduous battle there have been many casualties and now after generations of fighting these game companies can finally go back home and Bo the next generation of games hopefully this is how the story ends and maybe we can all finally play together without having to worry about which other platforms our friends are on but there are still other greater enemies out there posing a threat to the peace and prosperity of games as we once knew them and it won't be until we set aside our differences and finally come together that we can truly stand against the final frontier of unethical monetization in games another golden age in video games is soon upon us but history repeats itself and so now I will tell you the tale of the age old console Wars it all began with the Magnavox Odyssey and this first generation of Home consoles had their small selection of Games built right into them with all of those games often just being slight variations of the same one and so many of these games are more like board games where the game console is only a small part of the action this is baseball on the Magnavox Odyssey and you got all this extra tactile stuff that isn't the video game itself we got dice chips cards a playmat a scoreboard and then you also got these graphical overlays that you place over your TV these first generation of Home consoles were very primitive and they were all very similar and without all the extra stuff they're really just variations of pong there's a whole handful of different systems in this first generation of consoles and we got some major players enter the game right up front we see Atari and kico's first console but more notably Nintendo actually made one of these pong boys too the color TV game 6 it's nice and orange to let you know that it's going to have color and all the games are still more variations of pong just like the rest of these from this era they also made some more of these there's this racing one that's kind of cool I played this game on one of those 200 Games in One deals that were as seen on TV in the '90s hey what do you got there the video game has over 200 games cool 200 games that's right over 200 games can be yours with Pro 200 the greatest bargain in computer game history 256 action-packed games all in this one compact unit and with 15 skill levels for each game there are more than 2,000 ways to play through this special TV offer you can get the Pro 200 for just $1 1998 that's less than 10 cents per game play games like space War ping pong race car shooting attack and much more this new computer chip technology replaces older cartridge games forever never ever buy those expensive cartridges again you'll get the Pro 200 with over 200 games for only 1998 a fraction of what you pay for those older systems but that's not all the Pro 200 is also a full function calculator and is not available in stores if you've ever played games on a calculator before then you know what games from this era are really like okay so the second generation of Home consoles is where we see the first systems that have interchangeable games now these games still look like ass but we also have a lot of strong contenders entering the market here and despite the embarrassing differences between arcade and home consoles at this time and the sheer novelty of having video games in your own home allowed these systems to sell for just under $200 now in late '70s money that's absolutely insane that's like $900 in today's money and then the Intel Vision launched at a price of $22759 which is well over $11,000 in today's money it is unbelievable to think that people were paying top dollar for these primitive games and that's the real reason that people were so angry about ET this game isn't really all that bad but I wouldn't drop a whole stack on it now the first console of the second generation was neither of these it was actually this boy called the Fairchild channel f in' 76 the fair child was really the pioneer of the second generation and it was not very well received it only had a small library of games and that also really hurt it but also all of these games were still looking a lot like all of those pwn clones from before and then it had a bunch of educational type games I mean are you really going to drop a fat stack to play math quiz and hangman we do got a couple of real games on here though this is the most hyped game on the Fairchild channel f [Music] lit and then there's also space War holy Jesus Ezekiel Christ this is my favorite game on the fair child we getting it twisted tonight okay so the Atari 2600 comes out next in 77 originally called the Atari video computer system or the Atari VCS now the Atari was like a whole new world compared to anything that had ever existed before it 2600 games generally looked like this I mean we got sounds colors and Graphics but also the 2600 had games with actual gameplay even if most of them was just repeating the one stage over and over again now these games are nothing at all like their arcade counterparts but I mean you can play it on your TV in color oh my God this definitely would have been the coolest thing to have in its day all right in 78 we got the Bal AST Cade now it was officially released in' 77 and it was available only by mail order but delays in production prevented any of its units from Shipping out until 78 the Bal AST Cade is also known as the Bal home library computer that's what you call it when you got a date over try to sound sophisticated look it's not a video game it's not a Nintendo it's a family Computer Entertainment System so this thing was designed by Midway and that's pretty cool actually they made all sorts of cool stuff that we like Midway presents war God no not that one that one that's what I'm talking about golet Legends now the balet home library computer was only available for short limited time before they decided to pull out of the market so it wasn't around long enough to really be considered a competitor for the 2600 the rights were however picked up later by another company that released it and sold it until around 84 now the AST Cade was a beast at launch these Graphics are absolutely Peak for 78 these games look pretty good and it would have been the closest thing to an arcade experience at home for the time and the sounds are so much better than the 2600 this is what Pac-Man looks like on the [Music] 2600 and this is muncher on the AST Cade the differences are like night and day the Astro Cade is really cool and these games are really impressive for their time and even got Conan the Barbarian on here but because of its limited release there were only 28 games that were officially released for it so it didn't really have any staying power and a lot of people didn't even know about it okay so the Magnavox Odyssey 2 also came out in 78 and let me just say I really appreciate how all these old consoles look like fax machines it really helps to keep them professional looking so you can pretend that it's not a toy now Magnavox designed the very first Home console and they had made a number of different models that were each a little bit better than the last but after they became a subsidiary of North American Phillips they decided to release a whole new Magnavox Odyssey 2 and one of the coolest things about this one is that the Odyssey 2 had a speech synthesis unit hello amazing all right so we got some Choice games on the Odyssey 2 there's this one where the old man catches the Plinko ball and the mousing cat oh jeez goodness he actually eats the whole Mouse this racing one has a really cool pseudo 3D perspective and this one here this can goes hard all clear amazing this one I don't know I have no idea what I'm supposed to do or even what's going on is that a helicopter or is that like the sun trying to fight me there's about 60 or so total games that got released on the Odyssey so it's got a pretty good Library that's still nothing near the Atari 2600 though that ended up with over 500 but the greatest game on the Odyssey 2 is the Quest for the Rings I never knew that I needed this in my life until just now the speech thing is really cool but the Odyssey 2 has a lot fewer colors and weaker Graphics than the other consoles out at the time and then in television also came out right behind it and just blew it out of the water so the intell vision was released in a short test Market in 79 and then it was officially released in 1980 now the way that these test markets work back then is that they would pick a number of major cities or even just a single major city in some cases and then only advertise and sell the product in that particular City and often only with a particular store so the name in television is what they call a port monteu which is a fancy way to say it's a blended word and if you have port monteu in your vocabulary then you're probably that guy who calls his astrocade a b home library computer anyway it's a mashup of the two words intelligent television it was developed by Mattel and they started working on it when the Atari 2600 came out so they spent 2 years developing it and it was designed to have better graphics and longer lasting gam playay because most 2600 games were just that same one level over and over again they were really trying to go above and beyond and create the honestly best product that they could you've really got to respect that long and gone are those days because big developers today honestly don't care like that the intell vision was the first new console to give the Atari a run for its money now we had a whole handful of different systems in the first generation but there wasn't any bad blood yet I mean they're all honestly more or less the same so you can't really hate on any of them but Atari versus in television got heated and this would be the first real battle fought in the console Wars there were a series of advertisements that compared back-to-back footage of 2600 games against the hot new and television games and they even would say stuff like it's the closest thing to the real thing meaning that in television was the best and closest Home experience to the arcade and this was shots fired this was the very first direct attack against another game developer in any kind of marketing here's an easy question for you which of these games is the closest thing to the real thing a in television Major League Baseball B Atari baseball here they are again close up a in television B Atari if you thought a in television you're absolutely correct you see how I told you this question was easy so the intell vision also cooked up some bad blood with its own customer base almost right from the go so they wanted to market the Intel Vision as more of a computer for adults and not so much as a toy so the first games were all things based on real world things like sports and casino games and they also promised a keyboard attachment to come out later that would turn the intevision into some sort of computer and then it would run software off of Game cartridges that you plug into it but they took way too long to develop the keybo board attachment people were getting anxious and complaining a lot but the devs designing the keyboard kept asking for delays because they couldn't get it down to the manufacturer cost that they wanted but after enough complaints and enough time people started to wonder if this keyboard attachment was even coming at all Jay Leno even made a joke on this at Mattel's 1981 Christmas party you know what the big three lies are don't you the check is in the mail I'll still respect you in the morning and the keyboard will be out in Spring after enough delays the Federal Trade Commission even got involved because there were a lot of customers buying the intelvision on the promise of a sooncoming keyboard attachment that would convert the intelvision into a personal computer so the FTC investigated Mattel for fraud and also for false advertising and then ordered Mattel to pay a monthly fine of $10,000 until they released their so promised keyboard attachment for the Intel Vision so they did eventually release their keyboard for the Intel Vision but then immediately called it back and cancelled it shortly after the keyboard component was officially cancelled in August of 82 and the entertainment computer system module was offered in its place and part of Mattel's settlement with the FTC involved offering to buy back all of the pre-existing keyboard components from its customers Mattel provided a full refund but custom customers without a receipt were still able to receive $550 for their keyboard components $60 for the basic cartridge and $30 for each cassette software any customer who opted to keep the products were required to sign a waiver with the understanding that no more software would be written for the system which absolved Mattel of any future responsibility for technical support customers were also compensated with a fat $1,000 worth of Mattel Electronics products that's a whole jackpot for back then approximately 4,000 of the keyboard attachments got made and we'll never know how many of them actually got sold so these are very rare and a lot of them got dismantled and recycled for parts so in television was stirring waves right out of the gate something really cool about the entertainment computer system module though is that it added two more controllers and allowed you to play four player games on it like playing 2v2 soccer this might might be the earliest four player Home console it's at least the earliest one that I know about in television also had this other attachment that came out called The intella Voice which allowed games to have those cursed voices that make you want to turn the lights back on and here's new space pars for The intell Voice module hello Commander attack the Battle Is Over new intello now that intevision talk you can tell the difference with your eyes closed but people didn't really go for it as attachments for consoles seemed to always fair and only a small handful of Gaines were even made for it there were only four and then they made a fifth one that used both the intell voice and the computer system together this game is sick but why did it have to be baseball though offline drive this is without a doubt the most impressive game for its time it's legit TR first go it's not my quest for the Rings though I would buy all those attachments to Quest some rings in all this 16 kilobyte Glory so when television games were generally better than the 2600 but Atari had all of those popular titles like Pac-Man and Space Invaders and it came with that iconic joy stick the intelvision also had much better graphics but it came with this abominable controller Which is far more akin to a television remote which is also what they were going for and this might be the creature responsible for confusing the unknowing into calling game controllers remotes and in television was also just taking a lot of straight swings at Atari another new console that took a straight swing at the Atari 2600 was this flash in the pan called the Arcadia 2001 made by Emerson radio which was released in ' 82 so it was released for only $99 which was a lot cheaper than what video games were typically selling for and the games looked comparable to 2600 games the Arcadia would have been pretty good for its price in the Market at that time but where it crossed the line was when they released this attachment for it called the Atari 2600 serf supercharger which allowed you to run 2600 games off of your Arcadia obviously they got sued for that and they also discontinued the Arcadia after a short 18 months with only a mere 35 games in the library but that's hilarious that they were pulling this bootleg stuff and trying to undercut Atari by allowing 2600 games to be played on their [Music] console so next we got the kico vision which also came out in ' 82 and the kico vision blows everything out before it these games are so much closer to their arcade counter Parts homing missile got him and it had a lot of popular titles as well Nintendo's Donkey Kong was the game that it came with and Sega zackon got a kico port too all of these games look great it's really smooth and console games of this time tend to have this flickering effect and the Cleo Vision doesn't do that and I've played a lot of games from this era and let's just say not all retro games are created equal the kico vision games are pretty much all great all across the board and compared to the Atari games where every one of them is here or there there's a lot of Misses when it came to Atari games but kico games are just consistently good whereas 2600 games are always below expectations it's just a matter of by how much and kico vision was also firing some direct attacks on Atari making claims that they were the only game console in town while Atari keeps trying to sell you new systems like the 5200 with kico vision you only need one system because kco Vision expands to give you a super action controller set with super action baseball a driving module with turbo an expansion module to play all the tari 2600 games and only kico Vision plugs into the atom module to become the complete atom computer system so if you don't want to keep buying new systems there's only one system to buy cico Vision sorry Atari now kico Vision just kept on keeping on with the attachments developers always think that the attachments thing is going to be a hit but attachments for consoles miss the market like basically every time and all these peripherals one of these attachments though was another Atari 2600 converter allowing you to play Atari games on your kico vision it was really easy to make these because the Atari 2600 was made with off the shelf Parts satar's video game Defender I play it on kico Vision Activision I play it on kico Vision Mattel's M Network and imagine we play them on Vision introducing kco vision's first expansion module that lets you play all Atari 2600 compatible cartridges and with all of kigo vision's cartridges that means you can play more games than any other video game system it's simple you can play Atari 2600 cartridges on kico Vision but you can't play kico Vision on Atari kico Vision the expandable video game home computer system so it was really easy to replicate and reverse engineer and then kigo also released their own Atari 2600 bootleg console called The Gemini it certainly seemed like everyone was firing shots at Atari and obviously this prompted legal action from the tari they ended up settling out of court with some sort of royalty based license but this wasn't the only trouble for kico another neat module for the kico vision is this one that turns it into a computer it even comes with a printer and a cassette Drive kico's computer attachment atom was a huge flop as attachments and extra peripherals tend to be and they had a huge investment in it so they decided to withdraw from the video game Market completely plus they had made Cabbage Patch Kids and those things went crazy so they completely shifted their focus to that buy a kico vision cartridge from kico and get a free Cabbage Patch St from the manufacturers wow but it did have a 100 of its own now because of the bootleg Atari converter the cico vision would have had the largest library of consoles in the second generation that's pretty good because many of these systems that aren't Atari are only bringing like 30 the Cleo Vision hit hard but it was shortlived only staying around for about 2 and 1/2 [Music] Years also in 82 the atar 5200 was developed to be a direct competitor to both the brand new kico vision and Mattel's and television Atari was just getting beat on for the longest time and they said enough was enough the 5200 brought with it the first Automatic TV switch box allowing it to automatically switch from regular TV to the game video signal when the system was activated previous RF adapters required the user to slide a switch on the adapter by hand and it also had just a single cable coming out of it that plugged into the switch box which carried both electric and the television signal the 5200 mostly was just repurposing 2600 games to make them look a little better but not better enough really the 5200 was mostly a disappointment I mean the games do look better but not by that much more in my opinion I think the kico vision clears it the controllers were known to fail a lot and it was hard to convince people to replace the atar that they already had and also to Reby games that they already owned I mean those controllers would typically only last for about 2 days or so they did not hold up and children are hard on game controllers so this was the worst thing for a game console also the controller itself is really uncomfortable because you have to hold it upright the whole time with your thumb on top of it they really shot themselves in the foot with this one in the modern world because all of these controllers are mostly dead by now it's really rare to find a working one and they're often more expensive than the whole system itself and it's also such a gamble to buy one because you don't know for how long it's going to last this controller really killed the console and instead of having a six pin connector for controllers it's got a really inconvenient 15 pin one which means that it's not going to have any common third party controllers like all of those other consoles do from this era and fun in fact a plain old regular Sega Genesis controller will plug into an Atari 2600 and you can also play games with it just fine the pad functions as a joystick and all of the buttons just function as the one button that the Atari games use the 5200 just sucks as a console but it does have some cool games they don't really beat out any of the competition from this time but we've still got some gems in there I really like this one ballblazer the perspective is cool beam Rider also looks pretty cool but it also showcases how average the system is this Buck Rogers game looks really cool but the controls make it really hard to play you just move way more than you would like to and it takes a long time to Pivot to the other direction and there's also a lot of lag this game slows down a lot as it can't really handle all the enemies that it puts on screen but hilariously enough the best looking game on the 5200 is this Gremlins game I mean look at it your character looks like an actual human being now this is what Mario Bros looks like on the 5200 and this is a fan-made Homebrew game that was made in8 but it is actually a kico vision card that plays on a real kico vision I mean just look at the difference the 5200 was just not in the zone and it was just a straight flop the poor reception of the 5200 did a lot of damage to Atari they were already getting picked on by everyone else in the market and then their big step up to the plate was just a huge Miss also again in 82 we see the last console from the second generation with the vectrex now this thing is really cool first it doesn't connect to a TV it has its own display that it comes with and its Graphics are entirely drawn with these vectors hence the name if you've ever seen vector graphics before they look like these 3D wireframe sort of Graphics there was a really popular Star Wars arcade game that used vector graphics now the vectrex doesn't even come close to the vector graphics of the arcade but it would have been really cool as a Home console it also has that haunted voice thing going for it help oh no Mom that really got him going back in the day none of the other Home consoles could compete with this but also the vectrex doesn't compete with any of the other Home consoles it's just different and unique it's wholly its own thing and it really is just set apart in its own way also the vectrex doesn't have color it's just in black and white but it does look really sharp and camera footage just doesn't do it justice if you've ever seen one in person they're rather impressive especially for the time I really like this racing game on it and Pole Position looks good pretty much on every console that it's on but it also looks great here too I just really appreciate pseudo 3D perspectives there's not really a lot of games for the vectrex but there is this thing in the modern day called The V fever it plugs into the vectrex like a game cart and then it's got a US B on the other end that allows you to connect your vectrex to Modern Hardware and it acts as sort of a development kit so fans are still making new games for the vectrix I love it when people make new games for old consoles it's really cool now shortly following the end of the second generation we have what they call the video game Crash also known as the Atari shock of 83 all the excitement in new video games was falling off and people just weren't really buying new video games anymore and this was due to a number of things first the market was way way overly saturated I mean there were too many consoles too many attachments and too many generic versions of the same games and this stuff was not cheap and a lot of these games really sucked I mean like a lot and we can look back now and cherry-pick the good ones that stand out but back then you didn't know what was good your entire knowledge of video games was limited to what you had seen on TV or maybe a game that a friend had or popular titles that you'd recognize from the arcade but even a lot of those arcade ports were so underwhelming even the good ones are still nothing like the arcade experience and it feels really bad to drop a whole stack and then be immediately met with this new games typically went for around $30 or $40 and80s money which is like 80 to $100 in today's money and if you ever took the gamble on a new game all you really had to go off of was the art on the box and these would look hella cool you'd see something like this and get all excited just to get home and play this [Music] that'll be a whole bill [Music] please so a lot of the games were bad but also a lot of these games only worked if you had this extra thing or that other attachment and then that brand new Atari console just failed on everyone the hype was dying and the quality of this stuff wasn't really a priority and at the same same time the personal computer was the new hype and that's also why there was so much effort into trying to Market these second gen consoles as personal computers just to put it into perspective yearly home video game Revenue peaked somewhere around 3.2 billion in 83 then that fell to only 100 million by 85 that is almost a 97% drop that is insane this also marked the end of the golden age for arcade games as well there were a lot of casualties many developers and Publishers went bankrupt during this time and there were a lot of venture capitalists looking to invest in basically in any new third party developer hoping to copy the success of Activision and then they basically all sucked and didn't have the experience to make good games but they had all the investment money and the marketing behind them so there were a whole whole lot of really bad or poor quality games that got heavily marketed and in a time where you only know what you know I mean you see the ad for what looks like the cool new game so you're going to get that one instead of the good games with these whatever sounding names like are you really going to get Mr do over warlock or sorcerer well you should have because those games are trash [Music] or like maybe you discovered that there was a King Kong game for your Atari and thought Oh hell yeah I saw that movie Let's Go and surprise it's the worst most bootleg version of Donkey Kong that you've ever seen or like maybe you're into the space thing because that's what video games were about back then and you see this this looks sick let's get it [ __ ] what even is this you could be playing literally anything else right now you could be playing quest for the Rings you could be playing at the arcade right now you could have had like a 100 quarters to take to the arcade but you bought this instead and you're not going to fall for it again that might just be the last time that you even buy a new video game and the market was just flooded developers and publishers just kept pushing out more and more games as fast as they could and stores weren't even selling this stuff nearly as fast as they needed to stores were getting stuck with a lot of Overstock that they couldn't return so naturally stores were also cutting back on how much and also what specifically they would carry I mean they were just pumping the stuff out ad nauseum and there were a lot of unsold games they had so many unsold and unwanted games that they were starting to bury them in landfills like that Atari ET landfill that became the talk of so many urban legends and then also because the market was trending down everything was on sale and so those bad games would look like some real Bargains and they were drawing even more potential sales away from the good games because they were just willing to sell the bad stuff at floor low prices it got really bad and then as a consumer it's really hard to pay top dollar for something when your price point has already been anchored so low I mean you roll up at the store and King Kong is5 or $10 are you really going to pay 30 for Mr de I don't even know who or what a do is and I know about King Kong I saw that movie and the Home console thing was still new there would have been lots and lots of people that were just buying their first games and if they got snagged by these Bargain Bin games then they're going to think that video games are lame right from the start and then at the same time all of the big players were starting to pull out so there were fewer and fewer good games coming out it was a dark age for video games and a lot of developers had started to think that video games were just a fad and that there wasn't much left for long-term investment in video games what's really interesting is that the video game Crash didn't really affect Japan like it had happened in America the video game Market in Japan remained lucrative and attractive to Japanese developers and the video game Crash of the West sort of came as a surprise to Japan but it did create some Rippling effects that was changing the industry as a whole and the surprise of it all is why they called it the Atari shock as the crash was happening in the west Japan was also shifting their focus from arcades to home consoles as well in 83 and within just a month of each other both the first Sega console the sg1000 and the Nintendo family computer also known as the famicom came out and fron tiered the third generation of Home consoles Japan's video game Market was still in a bubble and the new Japanese game consoles went uncontested in their own Market as many Western developers were out of the game and Atari was mostly only looking to recover its losses in the West also Nintendo was actually working a deal with Atari to have Atari publish and distribute the famicom in the west but that deal fell through in the wake of the crash so Nintendo did it themselves just a few years later now with interested video game consoles on the decline in the west video games were fairing a bit better on personal computers and it was a lot easier to sell someone on a game for a machine they already owned rather than trying to sell them a whole new one that only played games game developers that had before been primarily or even solely focused on making console games shifted their focus to making computer games to stay alive overall video game interest still declined substantially but computers were getting better and more affordable at the same time although this growing interest in personal computers would also soon Peak and start to decline but one of those Martyrs that stood against the crash was the Comm commodor 64 so the Commodore 64 was released in 82 either just before or right at the start of the crash and it was really meant to be a personal computer but it could also play video games of course it's an 8bit home computer and it gets its name from the 64 Koby of ram that it has it actually has a tad more than that they could have called it the commodor 65 but that doesn't rhyme it supported multicolor Sprites and a custom chip for waveform Generation it was very impressive and it had far superior visuals and audio compared to systems that didn't have these things now the c64 wasn't the strongest or the most powerful computer of its day but it was the best bang for your buck computers have always been expensive and in its day the Commodore was the best of the low end it would have been very attractive to new computer buyers and they marketed it very aggressively they mostly bullied their competition out of the market it was priced low enough that no one could really compete with it and its aggressive price also was so attractive that it was largely responsible for interest in home consoles shifting over to home computers it launched at 5.95 which would have been about double the price of any Home console but it also came with a $100 rebate if you trade it in another video game console or computer to take advantage of this deal some retailers were offering this Timex Sinclair computer the ts1000 for as little as $10 together with the purchase of a Commodore 64 so people were just getting a straight deal on this thing and at the time good computers were usually over $11,000 so if you were already about to buy a game console you might as well just go ahead and get the com instead and they had this thing everywhere all the department stores all the toy stores and all the college book stores had it and it had a built-in RF modulator so it could be plugged into any old television and you didn't have to buy special monitor for it and that would have been a really big deal this thing is just ready to go it's hella cheaper it's still really good quality and you don't even have to buy a monitor but you could also still plug it into a speci specialized monitor to get a sharper picture if you really wanted to the Commodore 64's price was so hard to compete with and a lot of early computer makers exited the market because of it and as time went on they kept slashing the price of it as they were able to produce it for cheaper and Cheaper by early '85 they had got the manufactur price of this thing to less than $50 and they were able to sell it for as low as $149 for a personal computer computer of this quality in that time this is absolutely insane so a lot of people had it it's now called the most sold single computer model of all time and with game consoles on the decline the Commodore 64 would have been a very important platform for video games and of course people were still buying video games and the sales of computer games most notably for the Commodore 64 were carrying home video game sales in the west when all other home video game markets were falling off of a cliff the Commodore 64 has a lot of games and it's got a lot of good ones too and generally computer games would have been a lot better at this time too because you weren't going to get straight swindled by Bargain Bin titles like you did with atar games and yet still of course not all retro games are created equal meanwhile the famcom was looking to release in the west it released in Japan side by side the Sega sg18 83 but it wasn't tested in Western markets until '85 and by that time they already had a nice library of games to launch it with now the famicom controller was of course derivative of Nintendo's own gaming watch handhelds but this controller is so good compared to the standard of its time all of the game controllers of the previous generation are entire Contraptions and they were generally very uncomfortable to hold as well the famicom controller would have been a fresh glass for sure it's very inviting you look at these old controllers and if you're new to video games you'd think that this thing is overly complicated it's got like a whole 9 number keypad and a telephone wire coming out of it but you look at the famicom controller and you know right away that you're supposed to hold it the famicom was meant to be affordable and ergonomic original plans for the famicom had a full 16bit computer system with a floppy drive and a keyboard but the Nintendo president Hiroshi yuchi rejected all of that in favor of a more conventional cartridge based console feeling that all the high-tech computer stuff would be intimidating to the average consumer and he was looking to create something that could fit into every home the smooth Graphics of the cico vision had also made an impression on Nintendo and they set that as the bar for the famicom they actually had considered using joysticks and had dismantled some American game controllers to see how they worked with their console but ultimately came to the conclusion that they were not as durable and that children also wouldn't take care of them also the famicom did not have connectors for controllers the controllers are hardwired right into the console so those boys needed to be built to last and it launched with only three games which were all ports of Nintendo's own arcade titles we got Donkey [Music] Kong Donkey Kong Jr and Popeye when the famcom launched the first model was having a lot of problems notably some faulty circuitry and they had to recall it and refund everybody so the Sega game was outperforming and outselling the famicom initially but Nintendo got their famicom back together and it very quickly outp face the Sega game and the popularity of the famicom exploded as the Undisputed top selling console in Japan and all of those new and improved models of the Sega Game were all attempts at trying to one up the famcom but the Sega game just wasn't hitting it or turning the Japanese market now the famcom was only intended to have Nintendo's own first-party games but that changed after they were approached by both Namco and Hudson the tamom very quickly became the most popular and best-selling Home console in Japan and so it was time to expand in the west so Nintendo had originally set a deal with Atari for Atari to release the famcom in the West for them using atari's name and redesigning it as the Nintendo Advanced video system the deal was set to be finalized at the Consumer Electronics Show in June of 83 and Atari saw kico illegally demonstrating their computer attachment as together with Nintendo's Donkey Kong game now Atari had exclusive rights to publish Nintendo's titles in the west of this time and they were pretty upset about this this delayed their deal but then also Atari CEO Ray casar was fired next month and then Nintendo's console deal with Atari just fell through so Nintendo decided to market the famcom in the West on their own first the console was redesigned to differentiate itself from the other Western consoles of the time now called the Nintendo Entertainment System the enes featured a front-loading cartridge slot making it look more similar to a cassette player which was growing in popularity at the time the first test Market started in New York in October of ' 85 and then they followed that up with another one in Los Angeles and it did well enough to justify a nationwide release in September of ' 86 the NES was trying to reframe the severely damaged video game Market in the west consumers had largely lost confidence in video games and there was a lot of misrepresentation in the video game Market games of this time featured a really bombastic art on the cover which didn't represent the games of the actual Graphics in any kind of way and then also popular titles would be on basically every console with varying levels of quality so it was hard to know what to expect when you were buying a game a Nintendo strategy was aimed at regaining customer and retailer confidence by delivering a single platform whose Graphics could be represented truthfully and whose qualities could be clearly defined another thing that they did to really set themselves apart was to establish a strict product approval and third-party licensing approval also calling itself an entertainment system instead of a video game system also further helped to differentiate itself from other consoles of the time but also to finesse retailers into stocking it over the less popular and failing video game toys as they saw them the NES also featured a lockout chip which helped to cut down on piracy and deter unlicensed games from circulating around for it and then also to further reduce customer confusion games were clearly marked on their packaging as to which genre of game that they were so that you could better know what you were looking at and also the cover art for the games were meant to be clear representations of the in-game graphics like how Mario Bros features the Mario Sprite right on the cover and the Nintendo seal of approval was put on all officially licensed Nintendo games so you could know that if a game didn't have that then it was going to be some sort of bootleg bargain Swindle unlike the famicom the NES was marketed primarily at children so they came up with a policy for censoring profanity and religious content and then the robotic operating buddy or Rob was also a huge part of Nintendo's marketing plan in an attempt to show the novel and sophisticated technology of the NES compared to the previous game consoles the console itself wasn't all that exciting at first but the light gun and Rob both really got a lot of attention that stuff blew up they tried a whole bunch of different bundle packs for the NES but by far the most popular bundle was that one with the zapper that came with Mario Bros and duck hunt the NES was blowing up and Sega was coming right around the corner now Sega released their first console the sg1000 right around the release of Nintendo's famic common 83 now Sega was also in the business of making arcade games at the time and the market was declining in the wake of the home video game market so Sega de developed the sg1000 essentially as a platform for their own games it was released in several forms including the sc3000 and the redesigned sg12 now the 3000 was really meant to just be a full computer with a whole keyboard but learning about Nintendo's plans to release a games only console Sega went and developed the sg1000 alongside it SC stands for Sega computer and S G stands for Sega Game the sg1000 is also known as The Mark 1 to keep the cost down and to better ensure longevity Sega opted to use popular right off-the-shelf components and this is why you can use your Genesis controller with an Atari 2600 because the Atari was also just built with common parts the Sega computer and the Sega Game were both released on the same day as Nintendo's own famicom in Japan sales of the sg1000 far exceeded sega's expectations so they were looking to expand into other markets the sg1000 and the Sega computer didn't get a US release but they did get several launches in various other countries and with various models and redesigns it originally had this hardwired joystick but it was also later redesigned to have detachable game pads by 84 the famcom success was outpacing sega's game console it had more advanced Hardware which allowed it to have smoother screen scrolling and better graphics and Nintendo was also boosting its Library by licensing third-party developers and Sega was far less eager to collaborate with those same companies that were competing against them in the arcades and feeling behind in the race Sega developed the Sega Mark II in '85 which would be later known as the Sega Master System worldwide now the Master System was released in America right behind the NES in 86 and it too came with a light gun the original Master System had both cartridges and these Sega game cards that were a sort of memory card format used by the sc3000 and the sg1000 and you could reuse the same card to play different games but the later Master System 2 removed the card slot and it became a cartridge only system the cards were far cheaper to produce but cartridge-based games had a lot more room on them and they were trying to hit the market with Superior Tech the famcom also had a dis system that allowed you to overwrite games on cards and reuse them notably the first Legend of Zelda was an exclusive to the famicom disc system until it was later released on the NES with the very first cartridge game that had a battery backed memory built right in into it you see before Zelda not a single cartridge based game had save files and you would have to start all over from the beginning every time you turn the game on some games used a sort of password system that allowed you to pick up at certain points but being able to save your game progress in the cartridge itself was a whole new thing now the Master System was superior to the NES but it had far fewer games because Sega preferred to only publish their own games on it it is worth noting though that the smaller library on the Master System is pretty much all bangers they were really trying to put their best foot forward first we got master of Darkness this is like a Castlevania looking game and it looks way better than anything on the NES and then we also got Golden Axe the warrior this one is like a Zelda clone but set in the world of Golden Axe I love this game highly recommend and we even got the first Fantasy Star on here the graphics of the Master System look a lot more akin to the Next Generation and it seems to be a repeating pattern that Sega is always on The Cutting Edge and is more releasing their consoles in between Generations the Master System was a fantastic console but it just did not sell well and another notable thing about Nintendo's licensing agreement with their third parties was that they required console exclusivity so third parties that had signed their games to the NES couldn't also publish their games on another platform and now that Sega was finally looking to work with third parties it was far too late in the game The Master System had newer and better Hardware than the famicom and the NES but Nintendo just had such a massive hold over the market already and Sega was having a lot of trouble gaining traction with their new console the Master System did become a success in Europe and also later in Brazil but in the Japanese and the American markets they just couldn't compete with Nintendo's pre-existing market share and just to put it into perspective the NES had a 93 to 6% split on the market in North America versus The Master System and poor Atari only held on to the last 1% of the market which brings me to atari's thirdd generation console the Atari 7800 which was released in '8 6 which is a year after the NES hit America and just a few months before the master systems release in America and for the 7800 coming out so late in the game it really doesn't show it's very lackluster for the generation the 5200 sucked real bad and they were heavily criticized for it and Atari was still pushing for a more arcade similar experience by some measures the Atari is more powerful than the NES and by others it's a lot less the system was designed with a graphics architecture similar to arcade games but the games that they were trying to design for the console were already old news some of them even 5 years old already so even though it's got a lot of great new hardware they weren't publishing any new games that really showed it all I will say that the graphics of the 7800 look a lot closer to the arcade games that they were trying to port to it but not in a good way and the sound on it also comes across as Jank the 7800 has a lesser sound chip than everything of the era and it even sounds worse than the 5200 and that's because the 7800 has the same sound quality as the first Atari 2600 system now most of the 7800 games just have this black screen for a background and they look really behind the times but to be fair that is also what these games look like in the arcade which is is what the console was built for but some of these games actually do look really good like this one here motorcycle looks really good compared to NES games but the sound [Music] is threatening I will say that the 7800 is smoother and faster than the NES and has a higher resolution but these games really could have benefited from some better Sprites artists the hardware certainly has some cool graphical capabilities but that's about all the 7800 has going for it you do however get the most true to Arcade experience when it comes to the arcade titles but none of these games really have that wow factor like some NES and Master System games do but the 7800 was however backwards compatible with Atari 2600 games and this would have been really cool this is actually the first implementation of any kind of backwards compatibility in home consoles that didn't require additional hardware and not the 5200 games by the way just 2600 ones and the new controller was definitely a lot better than the previous 5200 one but it doesn't really compete with the modern Gamepad of the time and in response to the criticism of their awfully Antiquated controller they did actually make a game pad for it later with the release of their European model the new Atari also had a light gun just like the NES and the Master System did also there was a loophole in Nintendo's licensing agreement for their third parties you see Nintendo didn't allow their third parties to publish their games on other consoles but that didn't restrict companies that had licensed rights to said third party developers so there were a handful of titles that ended up on both the NES and the 7800 so let's take a look at a few of them this is Double Dragon on the NES [Music] and then here's the one on the 7800 the Atari version just [Music] sucks it's not even close and the NES version is just way better and the music takes it to a whole another [Music] level and the music on the 7800 sounds like this [Music] okay so next we got xenophobe here it is on the NES we got three selectable characters now they all have the same abilities in this game but it's still cool to choose your own flavor it looks pretty good and then here we are on the 7800 and we only have one playable character the colors are a lot sharper and the game is quite a bit smoother but I think the best way to describe 7800 games is as unoptimized it looks and feels better on the 7800 but the NES version feels like it has a lot more precise controls even though the graphics of the NES aren't as good as the 7800 the NES has more creative use of its Sprites and backgrounds and there's also a larger variety of backgrounds also neither of these really captures the essence of the arcade the xen Hobe arcade is really cool and both of these ports are honestly just passable all right one more let's see Rampage the NES version looks way better it's just better in every way it even feels better the 7800 actually does have better resolution and more colors but you wouldn't think so because all of the 7800 Sprites just look like ass it's like they didn't even try 7800 games are just not utilizing the capabilities of the hardware they all just come across as lazy and lackluster it's no wonder why this only barely captured 1% of the market I played a lot of NES games growing up and the third Atari console just sucks in comparison and it certainly seemed like Atari just kept taking L after L they pioneered the home video games Market but it's like they hardly did much else after that next up Hudson soft and NEC collaborated to develop the PC engine which launched in Japan on October of 87 which was called the turbo Graphics 16 a year later in America the turbo Graphics marks the dawn of the fourth generation of consoles also known as the 16-bit era initially it was very successful in Japan the games came on these Sleek looking cards and then later it it had an attachment to use the brand new cdrom format it right away was outselling the famicom and the Master System in Japan but it just couldn't make a name for itself in the west Nintendo just had such a strong brand loyalty at this time I mean Nintendo had just started to win customer confidence back in video games right after the crash and Americans were still not too quick to put their trust in new game developers so it was really hard for new companies to enter the market even well-known Atari was still throwing a lot of Misses in the west even though the turbo Graphics was an excellent console the Western Market just wasn't interested because it wasn't Nintendo I mean back in the day the brand name Nintendo also became the common word for video game like how people call a tissue a Kleenex or a bandage AB band-aid and at 96% market share that's like the whole pie and so it was late in the 20th century that a pop fell upon the land a plague of home videos that were limited in intelligence there was brain drain and terminal borom swept the countryside the maker looked down and was not SE by what and so it was he brought forth Genesis a system with twice the power twice the intelligence Twice The Challenge twice the [Music] F only a chosen F call for to experience this new dimension of high def and ser s and the na all that he had done and now that that's not bad it's geneses and your world will never be the same a year later the Sega Mega Drive gets released in Japan on October of ' 88 and then it was launched in America as the Second Genesis in August of the following year now the Genesis was endorsing itself with American celebrities like Joe Montana football or Michael Jackson's Moonwalker they were really going hard and laying it on thick but all this was still largely going unnoticed by Nintendo because the NES was still dominating the market so Sega rebuilt their entire marketing campaign around their new mascot character Sonic the Hedgehog pushing the Genesis as the cool kids console coining the term blast processing which means nothing actually but they were trying to imply that the Genesis was faster and stronger than the competition the Sega Genesis has blast processing Super Nintendo doesn't so what what's blast processing [Music] do and uh what if you don't have blast processing and then the vast majority of genesis's marketing ads was also directly add for serial to Nintendo saying that Sega does what nintend don't 16bit arcade Graphics can't do this on Nintendo gen 16bit Sports Action can't do this on [Music] nisis get Montana free Pat Riley free Buster Douglas free super mono GP free or columns free and don't the Mega Drive was not really all that popular in Japan it was outsold by the turbo Graphics also known as the PC engine over there but the Genesis made a huge Splash in the west and it was very successful in America using the it's cooler than you marketing strategy also Sega kept slashing the price of the Genesis and then they bundled it with Sonic and then the Genesis with its competitive price and better Hardware were starting to gain ground but it was actually its growing library of games that was really propelling It Forward Sega was happy to bring the grittier and edgier more mature titles that Nintendo was shying away from the Genesis really was way cooler than the NES and they were advertising that like crazy Nintendo was under attack and their hold over the market was slipping away with so many shots fired directly at Nintendo tensions were building now Nintendo Executives were initially reluctant to design a new system but the NES was getting old and Nintendo was starting to lose the overwhelming market share that they had and thus the super famicom was born released in 1990 for Japan and in 91 for America as the Super Nintendo it sold out immediately and despite the popularity of the new genesis in America Nintendo right away took back their top position in market share the King has returned with both Superior video and sound to the Genesis and this was the beginning of the hardest F console war in history the Mega Drive was not kicking it in Japan so this battle was fought only in the west and largely in America as a gamer in the '90s you were either for Sega or Nintendo as if they were sports teams sega's marketing was so aggressive and that together with the fact that video games are so expensive most people and especially children only probably had one console so whichever one you had is also the team that you represent and it's always fun to throw stones at the other side but also the bias of wanting your decision and your console to be better nobody wants to be a loser and the one that I have is better because I'm better and I'm a winner so the Super Nintendo actually was a better system but Sega just kept undercutting Nintendo slashing prices and offering super cheap bundle packs Nintendo reluctantly had to cut their prices down to try to compete with the Genesis but the Super Nintendo was a lot more expensive to produce it was really getting hard to ignore the affordable price of the Genesis and then Sega cut the Genesis price yet again just despite Nintendo further got to go hey guy you're the first serious gamer I've SE all morning check this out brand new 16 bits Super Nintendo is Super Mario World wow what's this one oh this is a Sonic the Hedgehog from Sega Genesis he look at these radical colors huh wow Sonic's fast too no over here I like genesis and it cost a lot less we kid that game I'll take Sonic and Genesis I knew that Sonic the Hedgehog more action more speed Sega Genesis it's a whole lot more for Less a lot of people were getting the later models of the Genesis just because of how cheap they were I had a Super Nintendo to start with but even I got the model 2 Genesis that came with Vector man with how cheap the Genesis was getting you could just about get a whole new system for the cost of a single game and then it also came with a game and retailers also had their own deals going on the particular toys rrest that I got mine at would give you another game for free with the purchase of your new system and then they also had some sort of other kind of sale going on I ended up getting a model 2 Genesis that came with Vector man plus the Genesis sixpack for like $79 sega's hyper aggressive marketing got them on the board it cannot be understated how difficult it was at this time for any new consoles to break into the American Market sega's Genesis had just won them nearly half of the video game market share in the west Sega was also offering these really tantalite ing deals to third party developers causing many of them to break away from their contracts with Nintendo the genesis's library was stacking up quick now the Super Nintendo was still offering some of the most technologically impressive games for its time and they were letting you know right up front that these games weren't on any other console but honestly a lot of these games couldn't have been on any other console even if they wanted to like just look at this Star Fox was mindblowing when it dropped this game was so far ahead of its time it was very impressive also Nintendo's marketing was mostly aimed at how impressive their own games were it's like almost every single Sega ad was a direct attack at Nintendo but Nintendo didn't really play like that they did have this one ad though and I don't know if this ad is being entirely honest okay class Pop Quiz question number one you want to buy a video game system Super NES gives you four free games Sega gives you no free games which do you choose uh number two Farmer Brown is four chickens to trade for a video game system Super NES gives him four free games Sega no free games which should Farmer Brown choose number three buy any Super NES system and for 350 postage we'll send you Super Mario Allstars that's four games free now who would miss an offer like that could you repeat the question because that's a model 2 Genesis he going in the ad and the Genesis kid is even wearing a Sonic shirt and by that time basically every Genesis on the Shelf would have been some kind of bundle pack that came with a game and the very first Genesis model came with Altered Beast as its pack in game so this ad is straight up misleading I guess the pack in game isn't actually free as you technically paid for it by buying the bundle Nintendo's first party games were the only reason that you needed needed to be on board with the Super Nintendo now both consoles had exclusives of course but Sega just wasn't making first party games at the same rate as Nintendo in most of the first party Nintendo games were taking full advantage of their Hardware there were however a few really good first-party games on the Genesis all of the Sonic games are pretty good but Sonic 3 was looking like a game from another console and even though the Genesis was a bit older than the Super Sonic 3 was looking like a modern game and then Vector man was really hyped too Vector man was sega's attempt to be like what Donkey Kong was for the Super Nintendo by using rendered Sprites of 3D computer models this one is really cool Vector man is one of the top games on the Genesis for sure now when it comes to any games that were on both platforms the super clears the Genesis pretty much every time the only time that it doesn't is when the games are just completely different but with the same name which would happen a lot actually like Ninja Turtles tournament Fighters has a game with that exact title on the Super [Music] Nintendo the Sega Genesis and even the NES and all three of them are completely different games but in all instances where it's exactly the same game like Primal Rage for example the Super Nintendo has better Sprites and it's a lot smoother Super Games also control a lot better or characters even sometimes just have more abilities now the Genesis controller originally only had three buttons compared to the hot new super controller that had six so Genesis later developed its own six button controller but only a handful of games really even used it mostly just those fighting games like Street Fighter that were on both platforms and a workaround for the three button controller was to use the start button as a function key so you could effectively turn your three button controller into a six button Pad but it's awful trying to use it like that you're not honestly going to do all of those precise inputs in combination with having to manage a function key to do special moves in Street Fighter you're just going to get a six button controller instead but a lot of people didn't even know about the start button thing and a lot of other people didn't even know that there was a six button Genesis controller the six button Genesis controller is all right I would much rather have the two extra buttons on the shoulders like the way the super controller does but the six button Genesis controller is also a bit smaller and it's a lot more comfortable in the hand I pretty much always use it instead of a three button controller to play games even if they don't need the six buttons just because it's a lot more comfortable to hold and the directional pad is a lot better but something to note about d-pad design in this time is that Nintendo had a patent on the d-pad design and other directional pads had to be different the most notable difference between a game on these platforms is Ghouls and ghosts so these are completely different games but this is Ghouls and ghosts for the Genesis and this is super Ghouls and ghosts on the Super Nintendo you can really see the difference in this one super Ghouls and ghosts also takes advantage of the technology unique to the Super Nintendo like its ability to stretch and zoom Sprites and its ability to turn and rotate Sprites or more specifically just a single layer now the Genesis had some tricks up its sleeve to achieve similar effects but not quite to the same degree megat Turin shows us some rotating Sprites but I'm pretty sure that this magic is actually happening within the cart of the game and not with the Genesis itself but there was a rotation effect that the Genesis had you can see it in this helicopter game and in the special stages of Sonic 1 but what this was doing was not actually rotating the Sprites it was rotating the tile map and then the Sprites were constantly redrawn as the tile map would rotate and like in this helicopter game the resolution is turned way down and rather than rotating a full screen it's got a rather zoomed in and very limited tile map that's a lot closer to 30x30 and the colors chosen are really dark to hide how zoomed in it really is so the Genesis has a little bit of a rotation effect but it's very limited nothing at all like we see in super Ghouls and ghosts the super version of this game is Just flexing all the way through also the super Ghouls and ghosts ad is pretty sick [Music] and the mode 7 effect that you can see in games like Mario Kart and FZ can't really be achieved on the Genesis but one game that did out the Super Nintendo on the Genesis was Mortal Kombat it played a lot faster and the controls were way more responsive on the Genesis version and also Nintendo's censorship removed the blood and all of the fatalities were heavily censored as well but the Genesis version had all the blood in it although you had to use a cheat code to access it and all the fatalities are still gruesome and the brutality of the game was its whole selling point so the Genesis version out sold the Super Nintendo version by a landslide meanwhile also in 91 the Phillips CDI made its debut as the first multimedia machine now Phillips almost produced the CD add-on for the Super Nintendo Nintendo had already signed a partnership with Phillips even though the super dis was eventually cancelled but because of their already agreed upon partnership with Nintendo Phillips was able to make a handful of Nintendo titles for their very own Philips CDI now it all started from Nintendo getting the Super Sound chip from Sony Sony was uninterested in making video games at the time and developing the Super Nintendo soundship was just sort of a special project for them but the guy in charge of making the sound chip was inspired by the new CD ROM format and had made a pitch Nintendo Nintendo at the time believed that discs were too slow and then the Sony guy told them that they could just make an attachment for the super that could do everything else besides play games and make it sort of like a multimedia machine and Nintendo agreed to that the result of the deal was that Sony would make a CD ROM attachment for the Super Nintendo and a separate Sony branded console called the PlayStation that could play both Super Nintendo games as well as the super disc games Sony was growing really fast at this time and they were moving away from only making Electronics to also publishing music and movies and more recently software also under their agreement Sony would develop and retain full control over the super disk format with Nintendo also giving them a large amount of control over their software licensing to Sony and then Sony would also be the sole benefactor of Licensing related to music music and movies which it had been aggressively pursuing as its secondary application and with Sony having so much leverage in the deal and the larger end of the stick Nintendo started to get wet feet and Sony was also still The Sole Provider of the Super Nintendo soundship and they required developers to buy its expensive proprietary audio dev kit Nintendo was starting to feel like Sony was just using them for their own Ambitions and at the same time Nintendo started to see Phillips as a more favorable partner as Phillips also was a competitor of Sony at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show Sony announced its SNES compatible CD system the PlayStation and the very next day Nintendo revealed its new partnership with Phillips at the same show which surprised everyone including Sony while Sony and Nintendo were trying to resolve their differences Sony had produced a few 200 prototypes of their Super Nintendo compatible PlayStation and they were also already developing software for it they did eventually come to a more favorable deal with Nintendo and at the time Sony thought that partnering with a more experienced game company like Nintendo would be better for them but in the following year Sony completely dropped Nintendo and decided to just go and do their own thing so Nintendo had sort of gone back and forth between Sony and Phillips and Phillips also had made some sort of deal with Nintendo even though the super dis never came to be thus Phillips was able to make a handful of Nintendo titles on their new [Music] CDI nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic hey Luigi I hope she made lots of spaghetti they all kind of suck and some more than others but the CDI is sort of a novelty in the modern world and the CDI went for $500 it did however actually have a game pad so you didn't have to play your games on some awful television remote but all of these games are mildly amusing at best you ever play games on a DVD player before I did I had snow dogs on DVD and that's about what these games are like they're a little bit better than that but not really but it is really sad that in the top 10 CDI games of all time we got arcade Classics like Pac-Man and Tetris I guess this version of Tetris would have had the best backgrounds I mean look at that waterfall it's nice and with that music it feels like I'm playing a commercial [Music] this one is pretty cool but I just like beat him UPS wait did that guy just pull down his pants and fart at me burn cycle is probably the coolest one it takes the most advantage of the platform it combines movie scenes with gameplay but like it actually does that in a meaningful way it's not like just a Choose Your Own Adventure although it looks so goofy most of the time it's hard to get immersed these calculator numbers look really good they don't mean anything though there's just some arbitrary numbers up here on a rotation this overlay is designed to look like a HUD without actually doing or representing anything at all and the Nintendo games on here are absolutely hilarious if you got this and didn't have a link to the past I'm sorry but the Zelda CDI games are all so comically bad that they've created a YouTube poop Legacy my favorite one is where you can watch this guy read the entire Bible this video is for Real days long they also knew that their games were bad so they aimed it at old people as an all-in-one high-tech family machine you really tell who these ads are for right away this may look like an ordinary compact disc but actually it's a futuristic cinematic Adventure game an interactive encyclopedia or even Blockbuster Hollywood movies this is CDI a new world standard in multimedia home entertainment from Phillips Electronics the makers of Phillips and Magnavox CDI you might expect to pay over $1,000 for an entertainment system that does this much but now you can own a Magnavox or Philips CDI player starting as low as $299 select for more than 200 titles beginning at only $15 if you buy the basic Magnavox CDI now will include Compton's interactive encyclopedia valued at $150 plus a $50 bonus title and if you act before December 31st we'll also throw in Burn cycle the hot new cinematic Adventure game for a total value of $250 free during this limited time offer you already knew that the CDI was going to be a commercial failure I didn't have to tell you that and even if you've never heard this story before you could have guessed it did so bad that they even had multiple different developers producing different versions of it now the last notable console from this era actually came out in 1990 the Neo Geo would have been without a doubt the strongest and most powerful console of this era it was developed by SNK as a home platform for their arcade games and the Neo Geo is legit but it might as well have not existed at all because it was just so expensive that basically no one had it or even knew about it the system was 649 at launch and it didn't even come with a game and individual games were often as much as $250 or more but if you were a special boy you would have been very happy [Music] indeed okay so the super dis fell through but there were a whole bunch of other attachments that came out to make our 16 boys extra spicy first we got the super Game Boy which allowed you to play your Game Boy games on the big screen it also would have allowed you to play those games without having a Game Boy so the super Game Boy was a lot more affordable and it was really cool the Super Nintendo also brought its new gun the super scope definitely the coolest gun controller that had come out so far and this game is hilarious Yoshi Safari is a first person shooter where you blast Mario enemies everyone always makes those fan games about Mario with a gun but Nintendo did it first and you can even use it to shoot Lemmings as a hidden feature Sega also brought their own gun controller called the menacer it's pretty cool and it does the job but none of the games are really as good as the super ones the t2 Terminator arcade game has a Genesis port and it's really cool but it's also better on the super the Sega power based converter attached to your Genesis and allowed you to play Master System games as well as the old Sega cards also still in ' 91 Sega partnered with JVC to release the Sega CD an attachment for the Sega Genesis that allowed you to play Sega CD ROM games the Sega CD also brought with it the ability for its Hardware to scale and rotate Sprites so that the cartridges no longer had to cost extra to do that and even though the system now had this cool Tech it was hardly used and mostly only seen in bonus stages of Genesis ports some of the Sega CD games are really cool though the driving sections of the Batman game on the Sega CD is absolutely epic it's one of the few that takes advantage of the CD's ability to scale Sprites this game goes hard but the platforming sections really hold it back if it was just the driving bits then it would be a whole lot better this Mickey Mouse game kills it though it's sick it's also got some really hype anime jrpgs I love seeing 16-bit animations like this it's really cool Soul star is a really standout game on the Sega CD it really looks like a game that pushed the tech and it looks like a modern arcade Tire of its day although this one didn't come out until '94 so it came out way too late to sell people on the Sega CD and another one that came out in '93 that's really impressive is Sil feed this game uses a combination of pre-rendered video and realtime polygons and the cinematics are really cool if you thought that Star Fox was lit then this game will really get you going so the Sega CD was really cool but it didn't sell well it was too expensive and if you didn't already have a Genesis then there was no way because the Sega CD launched at almost $300 and it also had a really small library and a lot of them were just pre-existing Genesis games like Braum Stoker's Dracula except it's also a completely different game than the Genesis version It's both sick as hell and hilariously flawed at the same time this is what I'm playing on the Sega CD the Sega CD is awesome but nobody had it because it was just way too expensive and you would have thought that developers would have learned this lesson by now but then yet another overpriced CD ROM console stepped up to the plate if you're not playing on a 3DO system what are you playing with presenting 3DO the most advanced home gaming system in the universe it's time to put away your toys 3DO from Panasonic gold star and creative Labs a new low price and free games in 1993 the 3dio was released in America with an insane $700 price tag with only one available game at launch there was a lot of hype about it before the launch though and there was also a lot of third party support but it was hard to develop for and there were a lot of delays games were on the way but slowly and it's really cool it was also trying to combine full motion video together with gameplay but the 3dio was more like an actual game console that had actual games it wasn't just baiting you like the CDI did like in this firstperson shooter called killing time it's awesome it's like an adventure story sort of game and then you see ghosts it all Blends together nicely star blade is also pretty sick it's also another Star Fox sort of game and this game actually looks way better than its arcade counterpart and that's because it has full motion video backgrounds instead of shaded polygons and the first gex is on here too we all already know that this is probably the best game on the 3dio but I wouldn't know it was too expensive the 3dio was generally considered a failure but it did sell 2 million units so it didn't exactly flop but it also didn't really have any notable amount of market share either and the 3dio had a shaky business plan from the start anyway they didn't want to manufacture their own console but instead were looking to license it to other companies to make it for for them they went at Sony first but Sony was already working on the PlayStation and then they also went to Sega and Sega was considering them but having just learned their lesson with the Sega CD they weren't interested in marketing another expensive machine 3dio had managed to hook Panasonic into making the first model but then they also had got some other electronics manufacturers to get in on it later and Licensing the console to Independent manufacturers made it very expensive because then those companies would have to profit off of the hardware alone whereas at the time most game developers were selling their systems at a loss in order to get new customers on their platform it was very ambitious and they were trying to Market it at companies that had developed TV appliances like VHS players and they thought that these companies would want to integrate their games console into other standard appliances and future ones that could take advantage of its digital technology it even was HD TV capable and the 3DO had pioneered the technology for TV broadcasts to be accompanied by digital information and it also led to the development of the earliest video on demand Services the Atari Jaguar comes out right behind the 3dio only a short month after it in November of 93 it was marketed as the first 64-bit console but nobody believed them because it was still primarily a 2d console some of you believe your system is the most advanced in the universe let's review the numbers Sega Genesis is 16 bits 3dio is 32 bits the atar Jaguar is 64 bits which is more advanced Clifford H with 64 bits 3D Graphics real world animation and lightning speed that you can only get with Jaguar which is more advanced can you repeat the question Jaguar Jaguar Jaguar but it was actually designed to compete against the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis and when you look at it that way it's a 2d Powerhouse but they were way too late to the party and 3D games were already on the horizon and just as this was coming out everyone else was already working on their nextg systems and it also came with another abominable controller why do the Golden Age game developers like this number pad thing so much the executives at Atari were still old enough to remember the invention of the telephone and were still trying to put that [ __ ] on everything awful controller aside from a full number pad you also got six face buttons and a pair of shoulders as well the 2D games are really good on it actually it's pretty cool all of the 3D games on it are embarrassing though a lot of them don't look much better than the supers mode 7 but other ones are just just 3D environments with 2D Sprites like this Alien versus Predator game I think this one looks really cool but this isn't what I think of when I hear 64bit Sprites on the jaguar look really cool and they're definitely way better than what the super and Genesis were capable of they also tried to Market it at an older audience not like edgy teenagers smells like teenagers but like at actual [Music] adults Atari Jaguar suddenly nothing else seems fun anymore but people at this time weren't looking to buy another 2D console it hit the market at a bad time and it didn't do very well and also it didn't get near the third party support that it was looking for because the market was starting to get saturated again and the big players were snatching up all of the third party Developers for themselves now all of these early nextg systems were showing up but Sega and Nintendo were still trucking with nearly half of the market each still on their 16-bit consoles and in December of 94 Sega released the Sega channel for the Sega Genesis now Sega channel was a subscription service provided by local television Services through a co- axle cable it allowed customers to access Genesis games online without needing physical cartridges it was really cool but it was also quite expensive at $15 a month plus a $25 activation fee which came with a special adapter to hook it all up but what's cool about it is that it always had about 50 or so games on there that you could play and they would rotate monthly it was very Innovative now it's true that this was expensive and you would have also had probably had to have a regular cable C Service on top of it because you were getting it through your local cable provider but if you look at just the Sega Channel fee $15 a month isn't that bad because new games at the time were still hanging around 50 and 60 bucks plus people commonly rented games and that was usually about $5 to rent one game for like 2 days there were also 14 Sega Channel exclusive games like Golden Axe 3 which had a physical release in Japan but it was only playable in America through the Sega Channel Nintendo did something similar in April of 995 with the satella view which was an attachment for the Super Nintendo that allowed you to download games and other media over satellite broadcast it was only available in Japan but it was still very cool one of its biggest problems was that you could only get it through mail order and at the same time all the fifth gen conso were starting to come out so if you had the money to buy this thing you were probably just going to wait and get a 3D console instead it would have costed around $300 for this attachment I mean that really is the price of a whole new console but it was really cool but because it essentially functioned off of radio signals you could only play whatever games were currently being broadcasted at the time so it wasn't like the Sega Channel where you had this huge selection all the time but you could however download magazines and news and they made a lot of cool stuff for it they revamped a lot of old games with extra content and even made some whole new games for it the most notable one is this a link to the P game that would have had a new episode for you to play When the signal was changed this game has been remade by fans so you can sort of play through it all in one go if you like now the satella view was really cool and our boys just kept pimping out their 16bit consoles in the face of the next gen and the market was still dominated by Sega and Nintendo the brand loyalty was just so strong and even though a lot of time had passed since the video game Crash of the 80s Americans largely felt like Sega and Nintendo were the only Brands worthwhile while other companies were either too expensive or too little too late but the the next generation of consoles was upon us and Sega had their Saturn planned to release in Japan of '94 and they put together this 32x attachment for the Sega Genesis as a sort of stop gap between generations and it was also sort of a quick response to the Atari jaguar and served the market with a far less expensive entry into the 32-bit era but they also kind of shot themselves in the foot with it because before the 32x was released they had already announced their up and cominging Sega Saturn in Japan which meant that the 32x and the Saturn would be releasing side by side each other in the American market so they marketed it as a more affordable transitional device for those who could not afford the new Saturn and it actually sold pretty well and they were still swinging at Nintendo with their marketing 40 times more than Super NES hey yo there is no 32 bit Super NES are we going to see the games or what the demand was high and they couldn't make them fast enough even though the 32x was killing it on the market Sega had a lot of trouble convincing developers to make games for it Sega had made promises that the 32x was going to be supported alongside the Saturn but it just didn't work out that way and Sega eventually conceded that they had promised way too much out of the 32x and stopped producing in the system in order to focus on the Saturn with only about 40 games made for it in total and 32x games are fine if they had continued to support it I bet we would have seen some much cooler stuff for it and just like the Sega CD a lot of 32x games are just ports of pre-existing Genesis titles dark side looks really cool if you're into Star Fox kind of games and the Star Wars arcade game got a port on here too there's a lot of these full motion video kind of games they look and feel really silly I'm glad that the full motion video thing didn't become the future but Knuckles chaotics gave us a solid Sonic title on the platform it looks really good and the 32x is pretty cool I probably would have ended up with one too if it had stayed around for longer I was always slow to get new hardware because I usually couldn't afford new stuff at launch prices but if you had had all of those attachments for the Sega Genesis all at once it was like combining the [Applause] megazone and they all got their own power supply too you need a whole power strip to run it all together and there actually were a few games that used the Sega CD and the 32x at the same time surgical strike looks really cool but but then it also looks like [Music] this and corpse killer was also featured by The Angry Video Game Nerd so that tells you about how good this one is now of course the Saturn launched right alongside the 32x in May of '95 in America although it was released in November of '94 in Japan the Saturn went hard over there and became sega's best-selling console in Japan but not in America the Saturn had sort of a surprise launch in America the PlayStation was also coming to America right beside them and it was less than 6 months away so Sega decided to push the console out sooner and beat PlayStation to the market first at sega's presentation of the very first E3 the Electronic Entertainment Expo they revealed that because of high demand they had already shipped some Saturns to certain stores like Toys R Us for an immediate release but this did more harm than good it upset a lot of other retailers who weren't in on the early deal and a lot of those dealers just refused to carry the Saturn because of that and then Sony got up and announced that the PlayStation was only $299 and just walked off the stage to Applause 299 and keep in mind that this Expo wasn't really for consumers it was like all company reps and investor types that would go to these things back then and with Sega having just offended all of the left out retailers Sony had won a lot of favoritism right off the bat and then the Saturn's marketing was not very strong either first off European retailers and press just didn't have the time to promote it also third-party developers didn't know about the surprise early launch either so the only six games that were available at launch were all sega's own first party titles so Sega really didn't even take advantage of its own early timing and then Sony was marketing their new PlayStation very aggressively as the cool kids console just like the Genesis once had and Sega wasn't picking on Nintendo anymore like they used to they weren't cool and edgy anymore and then they were also aiming at adults instead of edgy teens shifting their Target demographic was a huge mistake in my opinion and at launch the PlayStation sold within 2 days more systems than Saturn had in the whole 5 months leading up to it coming up in October Sega slashed the price of the s to match the PlayStation at $299 but it was too late PlayStation was already leading by such a large margin and many retailers were still refusing to even carry the Saturn and PlayStation's success was too hard to ignore for third parties so developers were moving away from Sega to develop for the PlayStation and the PlayStation's Library grew really fast within its first year PlayStation had secured over 20% % of the entire American Market things were starting to look really bad for Sega and then the Nintendo 64 was the last of these to come out it wasn't released until '96 but it also launched at the most affordable price of only $1.99 and around this time Sony and Sega had also already dropped their consoles to 199 but this really was hurting Sega the most as the Saturn was way more expensive to produce now the N64 had this iconic controller that was both really cool and really off at the same time you got three handles on it and you're supposed to hold one hand on the right and then switch your left hand depending on whether you're using the stick or the d-pad but I've seen a lot of people just hold it by the edges and try to reach the stick without even holding the handle in the middle and that works I guess but to make it even more confusing you have separate trigger buttons for each handle so the left handle has the L shoulder button and the middle handle has the ZT trigger button and if you're holding the controller in some weird position like that for a game that uses the stick then you're also probably missing some important functionality with the Z button also there was this one game that I had Castlevania Legacy of Darkness so I beat this game and I got all the way to the last boss where it forces you to fight the last boss in your werewolf form and you collect these crystals throughout the game and I had no idea what these were used for they didn't seem to be used for anything but when I noticed them counting down after I had transformed into the werewolf it dawned on me that I had not been using a vital feature of the game this whole time and it was because you push the L button to transform it's a stick based game and the Z button does something completely else and after you beat the game it unlocks a new game plus where it's like a harder second playthrough but like why would I do that I basically already played through the entire game with an unknowingly self-imposed difficulty all because of this controller design but that's also not entirely the controller's fault why would you map such an important button in a place that no one's going to notice overall I think the 64 controller is nice it do got a lot of buttons though but at least it doesn't look like a telephone and the C buttons essentially function as a second stick so it's not really as complicated as it looks and you can also comfortably hit any button without having to look down at it the original Sega Saturn controller is nice it looks a lot like the six button Genesis controller but the one with the stick that they made for the 3D games is so awful it's not super uncomfortable but it does look really stupid stupid and the original PlayStation controller looks pretty standard it's simple it looks nice it's inviting it doesn't look stupid and you know exactly how to hold it but I will say that because the directional is four separate buttons and not a pad it calluses your thumb really fast and if you're not used to it then it can really irritate your thumb especially if you're doing quarter Circle motions for a fighting game because these buttons are also a lot harder to press in and sliding around on the directions of this controller can really get you but the second PlayStation controller with the two sticks the dual shock as it's called is really nice these are without a doubt the best sticks on a controller for its time and they're positioned nicely this controller design is so good that they're still using it today if it ain't broke right now aside from its unique controller the 64 also wanted to be different by continuing to use the old and more more expensive cartridges as opposed to the newer and cheaper CD ROMs and a lot of developers just didn't make Gaines on the 64 for this reason it was just easier to keep making games for the PlayStation but Nintendo still had a lot of third party support and Nintendo's thirdparty licensing practices still had them a handful of loyal developers that only developed games for Nintendo like rare for example and then of course Nintendo was still making banger first party games of their own I feel like Nintendo was making a lot more first party games on the 64 than they had in previous generations and they kind of had to because the third party games were only here and there by the end of the n64's life it only barely had about 300 games on it in total and that's also counting all of the Japanese exclusive games compared to the super or the NES which both had about 700 games each but Nintendo's marketing was consistent and they made the 64 look cool and they continued to Market at their younger demographic whereas both Sony and Sega were after an older one so if you were a child in this time this would have been perfect for you there were so many Mario games and they all have such a strong broad appeal video games were starting to get a lot more complicated and for people that hadn't grown up with them all these new consoles looked intimidating but the 64 was approachable and most of the heavily marketed titles were all Mario games like Mario Kart Mario party or Mario Tennis all the easy to sell stuff and the launch title Super Mario 64 set the bar for 3D Platformers it's not the first 3D platformer but it was the first one to be this smooth Mario has so many different moves that he can do and it's all based on when and where you use the same couple of buttons the Polish of this game is excellent it cannot be understated and this would have also been your first game on the 64 as it was also the pack in title the 64 is stronger in some areas and weaker in others using carts instead of the new CDs meant that the 64 didn't have any loading times and that's pretty cool but also CDs could have a lot more room for memory so they could house a lot bigger games and some games were even taking advantage of the ability to swap discs without turning the system off so games could be multiple discs long you would just put in the next disc when you got so far in also the Saturn and the PlayStation could both play music CDs which was really cool CD players weren't exactly cheap yet and playing the sound through your TV allowed you to enjoy that experience without needing a sound system however cd-based games required an alternative way to save games unlike older carts which would have had a battery built into them for save data the PlayStation had memory cards that were required for any kind of save data but the Saturn actually had a built-in amount of memory to save games so you didn't have to get memory cards for the Saturn if you only saved a handful of games the N64 also had memory cards although they weren't needed by a lot of games but some games did require them because developers just didn't want to include a save battery but the memory card is nice for games that you might want to share or bring to a friend's house like custom characters and wrestling games but the 64 memory cards are the worst of the worst first they plug into the controller and not the console and because you're playing on the controller it's likely that these things are going to slip out of position and become corrupt and every time any amount of data on these goes corrupt you lose all of your data it's really annoying the N64 memory cards were very delicate but the attachment slot for the controllers was still pretty cool overall we got the rumble pack which made the controller vibrate just like modern controllers do and the original PlayStation controller didn't have Rumble but the dual shock one did and that is actually where it gets its name from it's the two rumbling Motors one on each side none of the Saturn controls had any kind of Rumble not even that enormous Circle controller the N64 also has this game boy attachment it was pretty much just for swapping Pokémon to Stadium but you could also play Mario Land on it with Stadium a handful of other games used it like Mario Golf or even Perfect Dark surprisingly to unlock some cheats the N64 also had this expansion pack that really was more like a missing piece I mean it's the only thing that goes in this slot and what's waiting in its place is just empty plastic it's also just extra RAM and almost none of the games even used it and a few that did came bundled with it like Donkey Kong or Majora's Mask and Perfect Dark all came with it the N64 had a lot of accessories but the PS1 also had the pocket station which was a little handheld thing that you could plug your memory card into and play Little mobile games on and then the place station IM mode allowed you to connect your mobile phone to the system basically all it was used for was to download DLC items like costumes from the network off of your cell phone but there was this game here that used both the pocket station and the IM mode and then the Saturn and the PS1 both had a web browser now that's really cool these boys are actually starting to look like true multimedia machines unlike those overpriced movie players from the previous generation oh okay so let's talk about the games the Saturn certainly brings a handsome amount of gems like Panzer draon and knights into dreams there's also a bunch of great jrpgs and some totally sick fighting games and Saturn bomber man is lit but because Sega struggled to to retain third- Party Support it doesn't have an extensive list of games but pretty much all of the games on the Saturn are pretty good and the Saturn also brings the most arcade feeling games of its day and this would also be the last generation of Home consoles really trying to look like this the Saturn was actually a really great system but Sega really dropped the ball on handling it just like the Saturn the N64 also has a limited Library as Nintendo was Rel to move to the new CD format but also just like the Saturn most all N64 games are really good pretty much all bangers across the board the Saturn and the PlayStation were still housing those totally sick 2D arcade games but there's hardly any 2D games on the 64 at all and the ones that are in a 2d perspective are still graphically 3D games and the n64's library is predominantly Nintendo's own first party games and those are all pretty much good of course we got a lot of Classics come out of the N64 like Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time the PlayStation has the largest library of this generation but not all games are created equal as it was the most attractive platform for third parties the PlayStation got all of the cheap low effort games like licensed movie tie-ins and Hooter's road trip but also just like the other two consoles PlayStation also released some of the greatest games of all time like Final Fantasy 7 or Symphony of the Night Nintendo also started to loosen a bit up on their censorship we had some classic firstperson Shooters drop on the 64 like golden eye and perfect dark and then the PS1 also had Metal Gear Solid now 64 games didn't have enough space to store full motion video so any of the games that were on both systems the 64 vers verion was always missing the cutcenes and sometimes other content as well another more mature game was Resident Evil 2 the 64 version is a port of the PS1 game but the 64 version actually has better graphics and it's not because the 64 is a stronger system but it's because the developers took advantage of the opportunity to remake the game and they also added surround sound to it so that's epic meanwhile the jagar wire was still not selling well and they slashed the price to $49 but you're honestly not going to get this when you could get a 64 or Playstation the Jaguar was quickly forgotten about just as soon as the good 3D consoles had arrived and the once edgy and aggressive Sega was cooling off as they were humbled by all the retailers they had just defended and all the third party developers that they had lost and they were losing customer confidence even though the Saturn was was a strong console it wasn't supported for nearly as much as fans had hoped for Atari was also not able to recover from its consecutive losses they just kept taking L after L and then at its lowest point Atari was purchased by Hasbro an actual W from Atari though is that on their way out they declared the Jaguar as public domain so that anyone who wanted to could freely make and publish their own games for it and so f of the system have made a number of aftermarket games for it and it now has sort of a cult following PlayStation ended up with the largest market share representing nearly half of all video game sales in America they were the new cool kid in town they were the hungry edgy and aggressive shark that Sega used to be with Nintendo holding on to only a third of the market and Sega with their Saturn were down to about 23% of video game sales in America and the last 2% or so of the market is all those other boys like the jaguar and the 3DO all put together which really puts it into perspective of how hard they missed the market with these now Sega had lost a lot of ground and they were coming back for more they were broken and beaten and they wanted to restore their diminishing reputation and just like before Sega would beat everyone to the market first with its next Generation console the Sega Dreamcast and they were innovating yet again as the Dreamcast had a built-in modem for internet access and online play and they were trying to make it as affordable as possible sticking to off-the-shelf Parts wherever they could Sega also opted to use their own newly developed GD ROM format to avoid the expenses of Cutting Edge DVD technology also customizing the CD ROM format would help to cut down on piracy as well as costs but also using their gdrom format allowed developers to include a custom Windows operating software on game discs which made porting PC games really easy in sega's current arcade system board the Naomi allowed for nearly identical ports of sega's own modern arcade titles the Dreamcast was hot upon its release in Japan in '98 and in America the following year at 19 9 but they couldn't Supply them fast enough the Dreamcast also rolled out a huge marketing campaign and people wanted it but within being sold out no one could get it and to make matters worse Sony was already promoting their upcoming Playstation 2 if only they could have gotten more Dreamcast out there sooner so now for all of the people that weren't lucky enough to get a Dreamcast they could just wait and see what PlayStation was going to do so with the Japanese launch they had massive pre-orders for the Dreamcast but then there was a shortage of chipsets that was caused by a high failure rate in the manufacturer process and then they had gotten to where half of their total stock was already pre-ordered so they stopped accepting pre-orders and then on launch day they were completely sold out well that would have been great but they only launched it with four games and only one of them was even selling well it was a port of the arcade virtual Fighter 3 which was the most successful arcade game in Japan at the time to quell this Sega had announced that Sonic Adventure was soon coming and they promoted it with a large scale public demonstration together with Sega Rally Championship 2 but both of these games got delayed people were starting to wonder about Sega and with Sony soon to start teasing the PS2 it was a race against the clock to get as many dream casts out there as possible before the arriv of their competitors and then the supply was picking back up but just as people were losing interest and then Sony revealed that the PlayStation 2 was both backwards compatible and that it could play DVDs and the ps2's launch price of $2.99 made it cheaper than most Standalone DVD players at the time Sega was in trouble and now many of those people that didn't have a Dreamcast yet were just waiting for the new PlayStation instead and then to make matters even worse Microsoft was announcing that they too were working on a new console right beside the launch of the PS2 the PlayStation 2 sold out immediately and it was also facing similar manufacturer delays shelves were constantly empty and people were buying them on the early eBay for over $11,000 Sony also created new development kits for third parties and having already been the leader in the current market third parties were far more excited to develop for Sony and then there were some others that were waiting to see who would come out on top before exclusively signing one way or the other Sego was way too slow to increase their library and then there were also a lot of really disappointed Japanese customers who had already bought a Dreamcast that were now tired of waiting for more games to come out and many of them were returning their dream casts to get PlayStation games Sony had just come up and stuffed Sega real hard now shortly following the launch of the PlayStation Nintendo was also unveiling its nextg console in the American reveal they showed off the melee Intro and some early Luigi's Manion footage there was a lot of excitement and Nintendo was looking serious it released in Japan on September of 2001 and later for America in November of the same year the GameCube brought a a lot of heavily anticipated first party games as well as arguably the best controller designed for any console thus far but the GameCube was also heavily criticized for its lack of multimedia features and for only being exclusively to play games but also in 2001 Panasonic released this fine piece that could also play DVDs as well as GameCube games and Sony also made a designer piece of their own the PSX was a Sony digital video recorder with a fully integrated PS2 but nonetheless GameCube was off to a good start and 3 days before the GameCube launched in America Microsoft entered the console market for the first time launching their XBox alongside their new flagship title Halo now the Xbox was built around standard personal computer parts using variations of Microsoft Windows and direct X as its operating system to support games and media playback and the Xbox also had builtin internet functionality as well as being the first console to feature a built-in hard disk the Dreamcast was on life support in the wake of the GameCube and the Xbox and it was discontinued in 2001 but not without bringing some of the most Innovative and ambitious games of its time like Shen Muay or Jet Set Radio or Skies of of Arcadia and the Sonic Adventure games but the most ambitious game for the Dreamcast was by far Fantasy Star online developed by the Sonic team and published by Sega in 2000 it was the first online RPG for home consoles although they called it something really weird we're talking about the world's first Network multiplayer consumer RPG in console and it was in realtime action combat B this game was so sick but the Dreamcast was falling off and Sega couldn't support it anymore they were just taking too many losses and then Sega stepped out of the console Market entirely and instead decided to publish their games on everyone else's consoles so even though Sega would stop supporting the Dreamcast online Fantasy Star got released on all the remaining consoles even on the GameCube and this contraption takes the prize for most buttons on a single controller but it is generally accepted as a legal controller for Smash and it'll be nice for when blizzard finally ports wow of the switch or they could just bring back the number pad designed for those keybinds now the Xbox has online capability built right into it but the PS2 and the GameCube required an additional modum attachment to do so however the PS2 Slims that came out later had a network adapter embedded right in there the GameCube pretty much only used its online capabilities to play Fantasy Star but the PS2 had a great number of them even though it wasn't common Star Wars Battlefront and Monster Hunter are the most notable and there was some Final Fantasy stuff that was online and just like the Xbox both of these consoles could also use this feature to land consoles together Landing Xboxes was common for a lot of games but on the GameCube you can surprisingly land together systems to play a larger Double Dash or Kirby air ride match the PS2 also had some really cool land capable games like Time Crisis and the PS2 also had a really neat feature where you could land three systems together to get a panoramic view like in this racing game the GameCube also stepped away from developing its online stuff to focus on the gamecube's Game Boy Advance connectivity being able to connect your Game Boy Advance to the GameCube and use it as a controller was quite novel and it would also offer extra features in games or even offer entire bonus games and then they also made a Game Boy Player for the GameCube which would allow you to play all generations of Game Boy games off of your GameCube so now you can play Donkey Kong 5 the Journey of over space and time on the big screen amazing Sega also re-released other Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure 2 battle and continued to develop new games like gun Sonic for other consoles damn we've been detected now the PS2 has become known as the greatest selling video game console of all time Sony absolutely dominated the market and it wasn't even close and they were willing to pay for very expensive ad campaigns and take big losses by slashing the PS2 price down to $199 to get that market share PlayStation was still hungry and they were still the cool kids Xbox was pretty much always doing better than GameCube but not by much and there were some spurts here and there where GameCube would even out sell the PlayStation for a period of time and there were a lot of great games for each of these there was a boom for the video game industry at this time and even though Sony was dominating the market all three platforms were very successful Nintendo was still largely Marketing in a younger demographic which really wasn't being served by the other two in the same way but they also had all of these really weird ads that were targeted at a teenage [Music] audience GameCube ads were weird very experimental it certainly gave the system a bit of an identity crisis and we also know that Sony was also after that teen demographic teenagers the Xbox however seemed to be aiming itself at primarily adults and college students especially with its online service Xbox Live went fully operational a year after the console initially released which much like it is today was a monthly subscription service that allowed you to play all of your multiplayer Xbox games online Xbox Live set the new industry standard and online play for future consoles and it was also offering downloadable content for pre-existing games like Mecha Sal starting in 2002 and it even had this very impressive looking webcam in 2003 Sony had developed a cooler webcam for the PS2 called the ey toy which was also designed to play games as well with its ability to recognize gestures detect sounds and process particular images it allowed players to interact with games through the camera itself it was very ahead of its time the Xbox was just getting started and being backed by Microsoft it wasn't limited to or being pressured by finances in any way and they were able to invest in a very large marketing campaign and all of this infrastructure for Xbox live without having to worry about how long that it would take to be profitable they were setting up for the Long Haul and that's good because they needed some time to redesign their Circle controller it's not really so much an issue that it has so many buttons as it is the placement of them and the black and white buttons were hardly necessary I always called them the flashlight buttons because that's pretty much all they were ever used for and a lot of people were forming brand loyalties around their favorite consoles again and even though the companies themselves weren't marketing adversarially at each other many of the fans and local retailers did like this ad here and being in a time where the internet was becoming more and more accessible it was really easy to project your own emotional and poorly informed opinions about which console was Superior and also see what everybody else was throwing out there and of course throwing stones is a lot of fun and it was the talk of the day like you're picking up a pizza from Little Caesars and talking to the cashier would go like what's up it's really nice out today also GameCube is better than Xbox there was a lot of this sort of content in all the coverage about video games G4 even did a comical durability test by abusing the consoles to see how much damage they could take and still be functional the GameCube clears in the durability test it was just built to last you could like run over this thing with your car and it would still play the PS2 failed after the very first test they were fairly delicate they were prone to wear wear out all on their own they would turn into one of those situations where you got to like prop up the video cable and get it just in the right spot to get a picture or like the laser readers were prone to wear out of course that stuff would happen with all of the consoles but I noticed it more in ps2's the GameCube even survived a second story drop the Xbox comes up in this big hulking case so naturally it can take some abuse but it did not survive the fall this was the sort of content that was all the rage back then brand loyalty was back as the new fad and the next generation of consoles was on the horizon the Xbox 360 had gained an early lead by launching a whole year earlier from its competition in 2005 it was unveiled in May at the E3 of 2005 and then it was officially released in November of the same year leaving Nintendo and Sony with little time to respond it went almost completely unnoticed in Japan as the 360 didn't really have much for games aimed at the Japanese market and the pre-existing XBox Live service really boosted the popularity of the new Xbox 360 it was doing really well in America and it was always in short supply people wanted it it had a nice new modern controller design and they were Wireless by default PlayStation had also developed their own kind of Wireless boys and the GameCube had these wave bird controllers but they were special and you had to buy those separate the 360 was packing wireless controllers in as the new standard together with a native HD TV resolution and online play ready to go out of the box they were selling fast but the instant success was shortlived you see the first model 360s had an incredibly High failure rate and the most infamous red ring of death but there were other problems like how discs were getting heavily scratched in the drive and others were getting bricked by dashboard updates that would make them completely unusable three of the largest 360 retailers at the time EB Games Gamestop and Best Buy were saying that 360s were coming back with somewhere around a 30% failure rate there were a lot of theories about what exactly was causing the red ring of death but micros moft eventually came out themselves and said that it was caused by the cracking of solder joints as a result of thermal stress from heating up and then cooling back down when the system was power cycled there were also a lot of home remedies coming out about how to try to fix your red rings people were trying everything even wrapping it in a blanket hoping that if it got hot enough then it would melt in the cracks of the solder Microsoft were on damage control they had to go go a whole country mile to save their brand first they had to extend warranties all across the board and at the same time discs were coming out all scratched up apparently technical Engineers already knew about the problem before its release and they had also already given Microsoft a list of solutions according to Microsoft decreasing the disc rotation speed would have caused games to much longer loading times and adding a bumper in the disc tray would have costed a whopping 25 cents extra per console it was so bad that they had to start shipping future models with this sticker that said moving the console while powered on poses risks effectively removing legal responsibility from Microsoft they were trying to quell the complaints and at the same time they couldn't keep up with the amount of people calling in their warranties they were storing them in a warehouse that they called The Bone pile it got to the point where they had had over 600,000 bust consoles so if you had one that died they would send you this box to return it in and people were calling it the cardboard coffin Microsoft spent something around a whole billion dollars in trying their best to retain customer loyalty and keep confidence in their brand it was a very Rocky start for the 360 but Microsoft was all in now the PS3 was released a whole year after the 3 60 in November of 2006 and Sony was confident very confident too confident I mean they were the big dogs and the cool kids of the last two generations they revealed their new console as a high-end luxury console with a big $599 launch price or $4.99 for the 20 GB model Sony said that people can look forward to working some extra hours so they can afford it they thought everyone was going to buy their new more expensive machine just out of brand loyalty alone it was fancy and the high price tag came with the ability to read Blu-rays and it did also come with built-in online capabilities as this was the new industry standard but the high-end launch price of the PS3 slowed it down a lot even though the 360 was coming out with so many issues it was still outpacing the PS3 by a substantial margin PC World even listed the PS3 as number eight in their top 21 Tech screw-ups of 2006 and then only days after the PS3 launched Nintendo released their Nintendo Wii and contrary to Sony they were trying to offer a far more affordable console rather than focusing on cuttingedge Graphics or expensive Technologies they were showcasing Innovative controls hoping that motion controls would become the future and Nintendo had designed a console that was affordable enough to manufacture that they actually profited off of the sales of the system alone unlike its competitors and Nintendo hit Gold by marketing the Wii at a broader audience the video game Market as a whole had grown to where they were just about in every home they were attacking the Casual demographic both old and young alike and their campaign was very successful people who didn't even really play video games were buying a Wii and then all of their highly anticipated first party games would retain their pre-existing loyal fan base and in many cases you could still use a regular GameCube controller for games where the motion controls weren't necessary on a month-to-month basis the Wii regularly outsold both the PS3 and the 360 the Wii very quickly became the next hottest console and it was consistently sold out all throughout its first year by the end of 2007 it had completely surpassed the total number of 360 sales even though the new Xbox had an entire year-long Head Start the Wii was headstrong but major thirdparty developers were starting to get frustrated with it because only first-party Nintendo titles were really selling well full featurelength games like No More Heroes were selling well enough to be successful but not nearly as well as major third party games tend to do and then developers started to lean more favorably into making games that could land on both the 360 and the PS3 simultaneously but the Wii's massive platform was still looking very lucrative as they had wrapped in all the malls and Peeps and it was very cheap to develop for Dawning a new age of cheap garbage games like you've never seen before shovelware was the new third party approach for the Wii since the platform was so large and the barrier to entry was so low and so easy to develop for this only deterred major third parties even further from developing big titles on it and just like the other major players of this generation the Wii also brought its own built-in online connectivity and unlike Sony and Microsoft Nintendo's online play was completely free but it was also not very good either there were a lot of nicknames for it like Nintendo lagi it was so bad that smash even had a completely different meta in online play now Xbox was still working around the clock to resolve system failures but they were also still releasing new features at the same time in 2008 Microsoft added what they called nxe the new Xbox experience the first thing is that it completely overhauled the dashboard with a new modern design that that made you feel like you were always connected next it allowed the console to install entire game discs allowing games to have faster loading times but that's not all because it would also simultaneously increase the lifespan of the disc readers as they would not have to read the discs as often and then in the same year Microsoft reached out and got Netflix to stream their service digitally for the first time and they also got some other big players to stream on their console like HBO so now you could also watch TV shows on it the 360 was becoming everything that the PS3 wanted to be the PS3 was still suffering from its high price and lack of highquality games a lot of people were criticizing it for its untapped potential its only real strength was in its ability to play Blu-rays and in 2009 Sony developed the new PS3 Slim a far more affordable version of the system also in 2009 Sony had acquired a deal with Netflix and streaming now was available for the PlayStation the Nintendo Wii would also eventually host Netflix and enter the age of streaming but it was the last to do so in 2010 on March 1st of 2010 the original PS3 models were experiencing worldwide errors related to their internal clock system it had rolled over and all PS3 internal clocks had gone back to December December 31st of 1999 it was like the real Y2K due to the system improperly accounting for leap years users of the original models were unable to sign in or even play offline games the issue was resolved by the next day on March 2nd and the world was saved the apocalypse was averted also in 2010 both PlayStation and Xbox wanted in on Nintendo's casual Market hoping to emulate the SU success and Broad appeal of the wi's motion controls the Xbox connect with its motion capture camera technology became the fastest selling consumer electronic device in history and its pack and game Connect Adventures hilariously enough would go down as the most sold game for the 360 Sony opted to merge the styles of the connect together with the Wiimote for their new PlayStation Move the PlayStation Move did well enough to be considered a commercial success but it didn't meet Sony's expectations and did not achieve their goals of acquiring any of the Casual Market in the same way that Nintendo or Microsoft had and in 2009 Nintendo was upping the game with their Wii Motion Plus which allowed for the weote to interpret even more complex motion something that both fans and developers had been asking for in 2010 Microsoft had finally defeated the evil red ring of death with their new 360 slim model at the same time PS3's own more affordable slim models were rebuilding its customer base and they had got their manufacturer cost down by a whopping 70% PlayStation was coming back but they were facing a new enemy in 2011 Sony had to shut down the PlayStation Network for a period of time because someone had hacked into their system and the personal information of nearly 77 million users might have been compromised oh no they couldn't know for sure but they also couldn't take that risk either Sony was making public announcements advising people to contact their Banks because their credit cards might be at risk after re securing their networks Sony campaigned a welcome back program that gave a free 30 days to all of its affected users along with two freely downloadable games and hilariously enough they also gave out a free one-year enrollment in some Identity Theft Protection Program in 2012 Sony released the super slim model an even more affordable version of the PS3 Nintendo had also released a cheaper version of the Wii by removing its backwards compatibility and controller ports wi's got to be so cheap that you would even see them in discount family stores in 2009 the Wii had uncontestably the largest ious market share But as time went on and as Microsoft and Sony ironed themselves out the Wii fell further and further behind also the Wii had a very low customer retention rate all of these malls and PS that had bought the system also weren't buying any new games for it also Sony and Microsoft both spent the majority of this generation just digging themselves out of a hole and by the end of it all they were all relatively close to to each other with the PS3 only slightly ahead Sony was no longer the edgy cool kid that it used to be as video games as a whole were being marketed at an older audience as well as a broader one and Microsoft was able to stake itself in as a main stay to the console Market Xbox and Playstation both recovered their image just in time for the next generation and this time it was Nintendo who came out first releasing their Wii U in November of 2012 and it brought with it an allnew touchscreen gam pad that could also function as a screen so it was a controller but you could also use it to play games without hooking it up to a television but it still wasn't necessarily a portable device as you still had the power on the console the Wii U retained backwards compatibility with original Wii games and continued to support the wiimotes wireless controls the basic model launched at $300 and the Deluxe premium model at 3.49 a much heftier price than the original Wii the Wii U sold out initially but it didn't grow like Nintendo had hoped and its success didn't even come close to the Wii and every next quarter Nintendo was further and further below their projections all the malls and peeps still had their original Wii and all they play is bowling anyway so it was pretty much only the loyal fans and Nintendo's younger demographic buying it and a lot of people felt like it didn't count as a nextg console as it was hardly comparable to the modern technology of the time in 2013 only a year after its release third parties like EA were reducing their already diminishing support for Nintendo by choosing to focus on developing for the new Xbox and PlayStation that were both right around the corner both of which released side by side in November of 2013 just before this though while Microsoft oft was unveiling the new Xbox one of their future goals was for their new console to begin transitioning as a digital only platform first they announced that the new Xbox was going to be an always online game console which meant that you could not play any games or use it at all without an internet connection and then the connect sensor needed to be plugged in at all times in order for the new Xbox to function this was immediately controversial and what if they the connect gets used to aggregate data for targeted ads and what if it performs unauthorized surveillance on its users and then they said that physical games would register to the consoles that they were installed on thus preventing games from being borrowed or resold and that maybe perhaps they would also include a reactivation fee for games on the secondhand Market Sony was quick to point out that the new PlayStation would have none of that business and the PS4 was starting to looked like the only console anybody wanted as we approached their release dates just in time for the holiday season in spite of all the criticism Microsoft walked back all of what they said but it was too late to apologize a lot of Gamers were already very weary of Microsoft's Ambitions and in response to Microsoft reversing course on all of these practices journalists began giving the new Xbox a variety of nicknames calling it things like the Xbox 180 as the current console was the 360 and in degrees that's a full circle and a 18 180 is to just turn around backwards or also calling it The xbone suggesting that Xbox was throwing a bone to its customers by making these changes and the release dates were already here so the PS4 came out a week earlier than the new Xbox releasing at $3.99 the high price for the PS3 held them back in the last generation ation but the new Xbox one was launching at $4.99 the next generation was all about top Tech they were both trying to bring everything that modern technology could pack into a gaming console and the Wii U was not getting any both the Xbox One and the PS4 brought slight redesigns of their controllers with the new PlayStation controller sporting a touchpad and a new handy share button that would allow the player to easily snap screenshots and Save videos on the Fly the PS4 featured an AMD accelerated Processing Unit AMD stated that this was the most powerful Apu that it had developed to date the Xbox One also brought its own slightly different Apu that also came from AMD and from here on game consoles would only continue to grow more and more similar to PCS both consoles now had a builtin and convenient way to share clips of your gameplay and the new Xbox could now also play Blu-rays just like the PS4 the Xbox one was generally criticized for running games at a technically lower level than the PS4 developers described the performance differences between the PS4 and the Xbox one as significant and obvious for the first year or so PS4 was outselling the Xbox by almost 2 to one and in 2016 Sony released the PlayStation VR a virtual reality headset for the PS4 the Xbox One never got an officially released VR headset but there are a variety of third-party headsets that do the job just fine and also in 2016 Microsoft stopped releasing their console sales figures and instead opted to only measure their success with the Xbox Live numbers Sony was dominating but Xbox was still making a lot of money unlike the Wii U which at this time had been considered a commercial failure the Wii U was expected to sell somewhere around 100 million units following the success of the Wii but it only sold about 13 million units by 2017 and in 2017 Nintendo discontinued the Wii U in favor of yet another new console opting yet again not to compete against Sony and Microsoft for modern tech and home consoles but choosing to revitalize the mobile market the 3DS was all already facing plenty of competition and mobile gaming and Nintendo wanted to develop new hardware that would be attractive to a wider variety of demographics which is what reigned in the massive success of the original Wii the switch was released in 2017 following the death of the Wii U it featured a touchscreen just like the Wii U gamad and this time the system itself was the screen so you could truly play it anywhere and then it also came with a charging station that served as a dock which allowed you to connect it to your TV and pretend that it was a Home console the joycon controllers also detach and can detect motion similar to the Wii mode it also has a newly designed standard controller and some games also allow players to separate the joycons and allow for two players to share them Nintendo heavily focused on creating multiple ways to play and this time they built their new console with standard indry Parts as opposed to their usual proprietary HOA which allows developers to easily Port games and use popular game engines this allowed them to bring back a lot of third-party support and help attract independent game developers giving the switch a nice boosted library at launch despite the switch's hardware being significantly outdated it has been met with critical praise and Commercial Success Nintendo projected to sell 10 million units in the first year but it well exceeded that by selling over 17 million and by 2018 it was selling faster than even both the Xbox One and PS4 switch games also come coded in this bitter tasting chemical as a measure to prevent small children from swallowing them it had become a bit of a meme to lick your switch games and try out all the new flavors also starting with the switch Nintendo began charging a subscription for its online play and while its online service is a lot better than it was it's still not great better but not good enough nonetheless the new Switch was going the distance and Nintendo was once again killing it and by 2020 the switch had sold a total of 56 million units although no one can really know for sure since Microsoft stopped providing exact numbers but market research from Amper analysis estimated the Xbox One having sold approximately 51 million units while Sony's PS4 was pushing over 100 million the Xbox one was beaten by a landslide and even the switch was quickly passing it up it was time for new hardware both within days of each other in November of 2020 the new Xbox series X and the PS5 launched with the newest generation of consoles compared to the previous generation these new consoles both added far faster Graphics processors and support for real-time Ray tracing with rendering speeds targeting 60 frames per second or better internally both systems produced new internal Solid State Drivers to significantly reduce or entirely eliminate load times in some cases the previous eighth generation was the longest lived console generation in history also both of the new systems are also bringing an AMD zen2 CPU and an rdna 2 GPU with some slight differences and game consoles are getting yet ever closer to just being a PC the Xbox series s offered the most affordable option into the newest generation with a launch price of only $2.99 while the series X and the standard PS4 both launched at $4.99 with the PS5 digital Edition coming in between with $3.99 and the more affordable Series S and the PS5 digital Edition are digital only systems with their dis drives entirely removed to cut costs the new Xbox controller is only a slight redesign of the Xbox One controller but it brings a new handy share button that allows players to easily snap screenshots or begin DVR recording on the Fly just as the PS4 previously had but the new PlayStation controller was looking extra sleep and it brought adaptive resistance to the triggers so now the triggers can have changing levels of resistance as you push them in to reflect for instance the feeling of drawing back a bow and it also brings a built-in microphone so now there's no headset required to talk online in 2023 Sony also released another controller for the PS5 the Dual sense Edge which brings even more features the sticks have replaceable modules it's got multiple control profiles and you can even remap inputs through the controller itself also in 2023 Sony released an updated PlayStation VR headset now both the PS5 and the new Xboxes were in very limited Supply at their launch due to a global semiconductor shortage both consoles were always sold out and being scalped on eBay for insane prices but the PS5 was always is going for way higher and you could tell that from right off the bat people wanted the PS5 way more also a lot of people were criticizing the new Xboxes as not really counting as nextg consoles as they didn't have any new games to showcase the technology and PS5 was bringing a lot of hot new exclusives also the series s was holding Xbox back as the features for games on the Xbox platform would be limited to what the ser Series S could do and it was holding back the Xbox's own first party releases like Forza where the series s cannot handle split screen for high-end games and this is why the new Forza game does not have split screen multiplayer balers Gate 3 did get launched on the new Xbox but it wasn't originally announced on the platform due to the technical limitations of split screen multiplayer currently the Xbox series X and S have sold a combined 27 million units and the PS5 has pretty much got doubled that hitting 54 million and the switch has sold over 137 million units so far but it has also been out for much longer than these two also with game consoles becoming ever more similar to PCS in 2022 steam has even released their own handheld gaming computer that can also connect to a TV and allows users to play a vast amount of PC games with a console experience and there's even talk about a steam deck 2 that could be coming soon Microsoft is also Bridging the Gap between platforms even more by bringing some of their exclusive games to other consoles and at the same time we're seeing more and more crossplatform play and honestly the only thing separating platforms anymore is their branding there's absolutely no reason for a game to not be cross platform anymore aside from the reason that they just don't want it to be and there are lots of rumors floating around about Microsoft not making consoles anymore but for now those are only rumors the age old console Wars is finally winding down into a new golden age of gaming where we can all finally play together is this how the story ends who knows only time will tell hell maybe Microsoft will turn 180 again or maybe an Old King will once again take up the sword there have been many great casualties with many empires now fallen many brutal lessons have been learned over the course of the console Wars but history repeats itself [Music] all [Music]

Channel: calic

Views: 69,309

Keywords: Console Wars, Atari 2600, atari 5200, atari 7800, nintendo game cube, nintendo switch, NES, nintendo entertainment system, snes, super nintendo, sega genesis, sg-1000, sc-3000, colecovision, intellivision, magnavox odyssey, xbox, xbox360, xbox one, playstation, ps2, ps3, ps4, ps5, nintendo 64, n64, sega saturn, 32x, sega cd, history of video games, retro video games, 3DO, CDi, sega dreamcast, bally astrocade, golden age of video games, famicom

Id: Ikp-RHiUC18

Length: 164min 38sec (9878 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024