User:Masem/drafts/History of video game consoles

The history of video game consoles originated in 1972 with the introduction of the dedicated-game Magnavox Odyssey, developed by Ralph H. Baer. The Odyssey later competed against Atari's home Pong consoles, first released in 1975, which brought a large number of clones to market that oversaturated the market. With the introduction of inexpensive microprocessors in the mid-1970s, the first programmable consoles using swappable ROM cartridges were introduced, with the Atari VCS released in 1977 as the most successful system. As before, market saturation from numerous competitors along with poor decisions made by Atari that eroded consumer confidence led to the 1983 video game crash that devastated the United States market. The crash had minimal effects in Japan, and Nintendo released the Famicom the same year in Japan, and later brought it into Western regions in 1985 as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), establishing a number of practices to try to avoid similar market saturation that caused the prior crash.

The NES helped to revitalize the video game industry after the crash and made Japan the leader within it, but also drove it into maturation, with fewer companies involved in the risky area of hardware manufacturing. Alongside Nintendo, existing arcade video game and personal computer manufacturers entered into the console market, including NEC, SNK, and Sega, the latter which entered into a console war with Nintendo for dominance of the console market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first handheld video game consoles were also introduced, with Nintendo's Game Boy as one of the best-selling units. The introduction of optical media like CD-ROMs created a new paradigm shift in console technology, and the introduction of Sony's PlayStation drove several competitors like Sega out of the market. At the same time, Microsoft, fearing that the PlayStation would come to dominate the living room, entered the console market with the Xbox. By the 2000s, only Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have been the principle players in video game consoles. Entering the 2000s with the onset of widespread availability of the Internet, console hardware began incorporating network communications, online services, and digital distribution. Nintendo's Wii also popularized the use of motion controls.

Video game hardware development has tended to follow the Moore's law progression, and consoles are often classified into console generations, with a new generation coming forth approximately every five years.

1972–1982: Origins and the video game crash of 1983
Ralph H. Baer, while working as an engineer at Sanders Associates in 1966, came up with the idea of using computer technology to play a simple table tennis game on a monitor. Sanders allowed him to continue to develop and patent the technology, and then later partnered with Magnavox to commercialize the "Brown Box" prototype that Baer had created. Magnavox released the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in September 1972. The console was based on discrete electronic componentry and could only play a limited number of games, which were selected by inserting game cards - effectively a set of jumpers - to alter the internal circuitry for different logic functions. Players used paddle-based controllers and were provided plastic overlays to place on their monitor to provide some of the gameplay features.

Concurrent to the development of the Odyssey, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had founded Atari, Inc. and with the help of Allan Alcorn developed its first arcade video game Pong in November 1972 which was a financial success. Atari began to expand to develop several more arcade games in the next few years, but were already facing the problem of numerous competitors releasing their own arcade games, many that cloned the same gameplay Atari had previously developed. After recovering from a bad financial year in 1974, Atari considered the possibly of expanding to the home market as it has become cheap enough to produce consumer-grade versions of their arcade games. Atari introduced the first of its home Pong consoles, marketed through Sears under the Tele-Games branding, by the end of 1975. Atari followed up in later years with similar dedicated-home console systems based on its arcade hits, including systems like Video Pinball. By the mid-1970s, the United States industry began partnering with Japanese companies to introduce video game technology there. One of the first such products was toy manufacturer Epoch Co.''s TV Tennis Electrotennis, a licensed modification of the Magnavox Odyssey released in 1975. Several Japanese television manufacturers developed their own dedicated-game consoles, which came to be known as TV geemu (TV game). Nintendo, then also a traditional and electronic toy manufacturer, also developed their own dedicated game systems, the Color TV-Game series, starting in 1977.

As with Atari's arcade games, the home Pong consoles brought a number of competitors to the attractive market, including Coleco through its Telstar series of consoles. General Instruments had developed the AY-3-8500 integrated circuit chip that was specifically designed for "ball and paddle" game logic, making it easy for other manufacturers to replicate the type of gameplay that Magnavox and Atari had developed. By 1977, the home console market was oversaturated with dedicated game consoles, leading to a brief contraction in the market.

However, the industry was already transitioning towards a major technology shift by this point. Among others, engineers at Atari had already foreseen in 1973 that development of dedicated game consoles was not likely to be sustainable with high costs of development for very short shelf-life of only a few months. Programmable microprocessors had been introduced in the early 1970s but their costs had been too high for consumer use. By 1975, microprocessor costs had dropped low enough for practical use in home electronics. Two concurrent projects led to the first programmable home consoles. The first was the Fairchild Channel F, released by Fairchild Camera and Instrument in November 1976, based on preliminary designs by engineers from Alpex Computer Corporation. The Channel F introduced the use of ROM cartridges to store the game's program on fragile read-only memory enclosed in a hard plastic casing which can be inserted into and read by the console without damage or discharge from static electricity. The Channel F was quickly overshadowed by the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS, or later known as the Atari 2600), released in September 1977, which used similar ROM game cartridge design as Fairchild. Whereas Channel F's games were more educational and intellectual, the Atari VCS games were arcade conversions of their more successful releases, and proved more popular. The Atari VCS's success drove the Channel F out of the market by 1979 as well as ended the market for dedicated game consoles.

The Atari VCS had minimal competition entering 1980, including the Magnavox Odyssey 2 and Mattel's Intellivision. However, the console had only see modest sales to that point. Its killer application came via the conversion of the highly-popular 1978 arcade game Space Invaders that Atari had licensed from Atari and was first released in March 1980. Sales of the VCS quadrupled in 1980 and led Atari to seek further licensed games to bring to the system.

New competition entered the market over the early 1980s, notably the ColecoVision in August 1982; Coleco had been able to secure exclusive rights to Nintendo's Donkey Kong and included the game as a pack-in title with the system. Further, VCS games from third-party developers led by Activision challenged Atari's own selection of titles and began to saturate the market. To try to stay competitive, Atari required retailers to place orders for all of 1982 by October 1981, with many retailers purposely overestimating expected sales. Atari also spent millions of dollars on licensing fees for arcade and movie tie-in games which they expected to sell well. Notably, the VCS conversion of Pac-Man, while the VCS's best-selling title overall, was found to be technically flawed and had problems with flickering graphics that caused consumers to be wary of buying Atari games without reviewing critical assessments. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, programmed in under six weeks as to make the 1982 holiday buying period, had lacklucker gameplay, and of four million cartridges produced, only 1.5 million were sold.

Atari had its first major quarterly loss at the end of 1982 and which continued through 1983, with the company losing over US$560 million that year compared to the prior year's US$1.7 billion in profits. The waning consumer confidence in Atari and video game market as a whole, coupled with oversaturation of poor-quality games from third-party developers and the growing popularity of home computers, led to the 1983 industry crash of the industry in the United States.

1983–1994: The industry revival, and the bit/console wars
The crash has small shocks in Japan, but as many of the companies involved in video games were well-established, they were able to withstand the short-term effects. Nintendo at this point primarily were developing arcade games but were working on their own cartridge-based programmable home console, inspired by the capabilities of the ColecoVision over the Atari VCS. Among their design principles, Nintendo wanted to use the razorblade business model, where they would sell the console near or below cost of production and gain profit from the sale of games. Their system, the Famicom, was first released in Japan in July 1993. Originally, Nintendo planned to be the only game developer for the systems, but after being approached by other arcade game developers like Namco and Hudson Soft, agreed to allow third-party developers to create games for the system. However, Nintendo set restrictions on the number of games a developer could make and that Nintendo needed to approve all games, as the Famicom was aimed for families. Further, Nintendo required the developer to pay a 10% licensing fee and 20% cartridge manufacturing fee on each unit sold. These practices have remained nearly consist throughout other video game consoles today.

After negotiations with Atari to license the Famicom's release in the United States fell through in 1983 due to the ongoing effects of the crash, Nintendo decided to distribute the console on their own in Western regions. The company recognized that in 1985, video games were still disfavored by retailers from the crash, so redesigned the Famicom to appear less as a toy and more like a video cassette recorder, rebranding the system as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Nintendo also created the Checking Integrated Circuit (CIC) lockout system for the NES, which prevented unauthorized cartridges from being played on the NES and which helped Nintendo to further regulate the number and quality of games released on the platform. The NES was released in North America in October 1985, with Super Mario Bros. released shortly afterwards that same year. The NES and Super Mario Bros. were best-selling systems and helped to revitalized the video game industry after the crash. However, this also caused the market's dominant players to shift from the United States to Japan; Mattel and Coleco had gotten out of the market, and Atari, which had been sold to Jack Tramiel, released the Atari 7800 in May 1986 before the company was realigned to focus mostly on home computers and game development.

At the same time, Sega, another arcade game maker, also tried to enter the console market around the same time as Nintendo. Its first two offerings, the SG-1000 and SG-1000 II, released in 1983 and 1984 respectively, did not fair well against the Famicom in Japan, and while their third console, the Sega Mark III or marketed as the Sega Master System in Western regions, did well in Europe and Brazil, could not compete against the strength of the NES, in part that Nintendo had locked in key developers to remain exclusive to the NES.

NEC, a Japanese computer manufacturer, partnered with Hudson Soft to develop their first console, the PC Engine, in Japan in October 1987. The PC Engine was still based on a 8-bit CPU but used a 16-bit graphics, and when it was released in Western regions in August 1989, NEC has branded it the TurboGrafx-16 and heavily focused on its claimed 16-bit processing power. Sega at the same time was developing the Sega Mega Drive as its next console after the Master System, which was a full 16-bit system. After the Mega Drive's release in Japan in October 1988, Sega went after a more proactive marketing campaign in its United States release in August 1989, rebranded as the Sega Genesis, to try to challenge Nintendo's lead, focusing on the extra power of the 16-bit console over the 8-bit NES, starting the "bit wars". The Genesis failed to make significant traction on its initial launch, though still had a respectable launch.

1994–2000: Optical media and 3D rendering technology
Around the early 1990s, two new computing technologies had been developed far enough to find their way into consumer use, including video game consoles. The first was optical media, in particular the CD-ROM format. While this had been used for music CDs earlier, their use for delivering software for personal computers drew attention, particularly after the release of the game Myst which incorporated full-motion video among pre-rendered scenes.

The other advancement was sufficiently fast and capable computer processors to be able to perform 3D computer graphics rendering in real time using floating-point arithmetic, which became readily possible with chip technology of the 1990s. While console games used limited or simulated 3D effects prior to this point, Star Fox for the SNES is one of the first games to use a dedicated 3D co-processor, the Super FX embedded in the cartridge, to render polygonal 3D models on screen. Consoles going forward typically incorporated a separate graphics processor unit (GPU) alongside the CPU to handle the 3D rendering effects.

2000–2008: Media integration and Internet-enabled systems
Sony released the successor to the PlayStation, the PlayStation 2, in 2000. Among other improvements, the PlayStation 2 focused on game distribution on DVD-ROM-based optical media, allowing for more content to be included in games, as well as playback of DVD-Video movies and CD audio. It also supported direct backward compatibility with most original PlayStation titles. The PlayStation 2 platform ended up as one of the best-selling home consoles of all time with over 155 million units shipped in its lifetime. Its new features brought a number of influential games to the market, particularly Grand Theft Auto III. Nintendo released its next console, the GameCube, in 2001. The GameCube was the first Nintendo console to support optical media, though used a customized miniDVD-based format and was not capable of playback of conventional DVD or CD media. Neither the PlayStation 2 nor GameCube included network connectivity in units as shipped, though optional network adapters were available, and a handful of games for both platforms were made to use online features.

Sega's Dreamcast did not fare well against either the PlayStation 2 or GameCube, with Sega only having about 15% of the market compared to Sony's 50% and Nintendo's 35% by 2000. Long urged by executive management, Sega left the hardware market by the end of 2000 though remained committed to its software properties. This left only Sony and Nintendo as the primarily home console manufacturers.

However, just as Sega was leaving, Microsoft had begun looking into the console market. By this point, Microsoft had established itself as providing Microsoft Windows as the primary operating systems for home computers, and in the late 1990s, had developed the DirectX set of libraries to help game developers easily access the computer's hardware, and they had worked with Sega already to help support the Dreamcast's system software with a version of Windows CE. On Sony's announcement of the PlayStation 2, Microsoft saw the new console as a potential thread to the personal computer in the living room space. Microsoft proceeded to develop the Xbox, a console based around the design of a personal computer running Windows and DirectX, and which was released in 2001. Among key inclusion was an internal hard drive, direct support for an Ethernet connection and the release of Xbox Live services the year after release to support matchmaking for networked games, particularly Halo 2, the console's best-selling game. While Microsoft did not impede Sony's PlayStation 2 sales, with only 24 million units sold by 2006, and having lost an estimated US$4 billion over the lifetime of the Xbox, Microsoft believed the Xbox proved they could compete in the console space and continued on with their next revision as soon as possible.

As Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft geared up for their next consoles, high-definition video formats were being developed to support new digital televisions and display devices. A format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray emerged between 2000 and 2005, and Blu-ray won out by 2007.

Microsoft released its next console, the Xbox 360, in 2005, incorporating a number of improvements atop the first Xbox. It furthered integration of Xbox Live into the Xbox system software and included the ability to buy games and downloadable content through digital distribution to the console's hard drive. Microsoft had backed the HD DVD format, and in 2006 released an HD DVD add-on, but discontinued the product in 2008 after Blu-ray had secured the format war. Early Xbox 360 production was plagued by a manufacturing defect that led to the "Red Ring of Death".

Sony released the PlayStation 3 in 2006. Like Microsoft, Sony included a hard drive and direct Internet connectivity on the console, and developed its own online service and storefront for digital distribution.

Nintendo also released its next console, the Wii, in 2006. At this point, Nintendo recognized it likely was unable to compete in terms of raw console computational power with Sony and Microsoft's offerings without sacrificing their innovations in gameplay. Under Satoru Iwata's leadership, Nintendo took a blue ocean strategy in designing the Wii, developing a console with less processing power to reduce its cost while focusing on features for novel gameplay. Among these was the use of motion sensing through the Wii Remote as the console's primary controller rather than traditional controllers. The Wii Remote was envisioned to allow more casual gamers to be able to play video games alongside the traditional demographics, with games like Wii Sports that used the controller in hand to mimic real-life actions like bowling. The Wii became the best-selling console against the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, selling over 101 million units by the time of its discontinuation. The impact of the Wii Remote led Microsoft to bring its own motion sensing technology research forward, releasing the Kinect for the Xbox 360 in 2010, and Sony to develop the PlayStation Move in 2010 as well.

2012–present: Convergence with personal computers and games-as-a-service
The last major iteration of handheld game consoles were released in 2011. Nintendo released the Nintendo 3DS in February 2011. As an enhanced version of the Nintendo DS, it replaced the top screen of the device with a autostereoscopic screen that allowed one to see 3D effects without the use of glasses.

Sony released the PlayStation Vita in December 2011.

Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all released their next iteration of home consoles within the same year, from 2012 to 2013.

Nintendo released the successor to the Wii, the Wii U in 2012. While the Wii had been a solid success for the company, they felt they had lost some of their core gamers with its limited features, and the Wii U was designed toward the core gamer audience. Building upon the Wii (and compatible with Wii games), the Wii U included the Wii U Gamepad, a tablet-like controller that provided a separate touchscreen in addition to the television to enhance the way some games could be played. However, Nintendo's marketing of the Wii U failed to differentiate the function of the Gamepad from a tablet computer, creating confusion within the market. Coupled with a lack of third-party support, the Wii U was a commercial failure for Nintendo, selling about 13.5 million units in its lifetime.

Sony released the PlayStation 4 in November 2013. The PlayStation 4 was the first of the line to use more standard processing hardware based on the x86 instruction set rather than custom processors it had designed itself.

Microsoft released the Xbox One in November 2013 as well. In announcing the Xbox One, Microsoft had positioned the unit more as a home entertainment device, focusing on integration with cable TV devices, as well as several features that would be supported through a persistent Internet connection and use of an updated Kinect device. The public reception to these approaches was mostly negative, requiring Microsoft to remove the features tied to the always-on functionality as well as make the use of Kinect optional. About a year after launch, Microsoft began releasing new models of the Xbox One that did not include the Kinect, and by 2017 discontinued the product. Kinect still remains a viable product in Microsoft for use in business and academic applications with integration with its Azure framework.

Both Sony and Microsoft released hardware revisions of their current consoles that introduced a high-end model with faster computational and graphics capabilities; these were considered half-generation steps by both companies as they had no immediate plans for new consoles for some years. The PlayStation 4 Pro was released in November 2016, improving the base system's performance for 4K resolution and support for PlayStation VR with about three times the performance improvement. The Xbox One X was released in November 2017, which introduced 4k rendering with speeds about four times faster than the base Xbox One, now named the Xbox One S to distinguish it from the Xbox One X. Both Sony and Microsoft developed systems for developers and publishers to release enhancement patches for existing games that could take advantage of the PlayStation 4 Pro or Xbox One X, such as more detailed texture resolutions or higher framerates.

After about a year into the Wii U's released in 2013, Nintendo had already made the determination that the product was not going to sell well, and began development of its next console that next year. The company looked back to what had made the Wii successful, and came up with the idea of a hybrid console, one that could play both as a home console, and easily switch to a handheld mode. Such a console, they believed, would appeal not only to a wide cross-section of game players but as well as to different demographics across the globe. The new hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch, was released in March 2017. While still not as high-powered as the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, it features a main unit that can be played like a handheld device or tablet computer, using two Joy Con controllers that include motion-sensing controls, or the unit can be placed in a dock to connect to a television. Nintendo also engaged with third-party developers ahead of the system's launch to avoid the lack of titles that the Wii U had. Later, in September 2019, Nintendo released the lower-cost Nintendo Switch Lite, a Switch with the same computing processing but eliminating the separate Joy Con or television docking ability, making it effectively handheld system otherwise fully compatible with the Switch library. The Switch has been a financial success for Nintendo, with nearly 80 million units sold by December 2020.

Both Sony and Microsoft announced their next iteration of consoles in late 2019 and early 2020 for release in November 2020, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X and Series S. Both consoles were aimed for furthering support in high-resolution displays with higher framerates, generally targeting 4k resolutions at a minimum of 60 frames per second and going as high as 8k resolutions or framerates of 120 frames per second. Both consoles also incorporated real-time ray tracing in their graphics hardware, as well as adding specialized solid-state drives with high-speed bandwidth paths to the graphics processor to help improve in-game streaming to reduce loading times, and high-definition texture mapping. Both consoles launched with a lower-cost optical drive-less version (the Digital edition of the PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series S model) that still allows users to obtain software via digital distribution.