As I sit here pondering how I am going to score myself the Mac daddy of gaming consoles the ps3, I find my mind drifting back to a simpler way of gaming, before there were things like skill points, achievement points and unlockables. A time when there was only one console to rule the mountain top, and a time in which there was no such things as console wars. In order to understand where we are in the gaming world, we need to understand our gaming roots. Let us take a look back to where it all started.
The year was 1977 in the month of October when the seeds of gaming were planted with the Atari 2600. This console was named after the part#cx2600 and was also referred to as the video computer system. There was nothing like this ever seen before, the cpu speed was a mere 1.19 MHz with game cartridges that held 4 kb of information with a variety of 128 colors that the console could handle. I was the talk of my neighborhood because I was considered very lucky to have one of the very first Atari 2600 ever sold. My friends and I would play games such as Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Space invaders and combat the game that was supplied with the console.
The only thing that was similar to the achievement points of today was nothing more than the satisfaction and pride of "turning over the game" which is another way of saying we had beaten the game. Twelve years had past and there was a new console to hit the market and compared to the 2600 it looked very impressive. The Sega Genesis had been born. The console debuted in January 9th in the year 1989. This was the 16 bit console that had a cpu speed of 7.61MHz with 512colors. This all but killed the Atari 2600 because this console was so amazing and the console offered games like Altered Beast and Phantasy star.
This console was quickly over powered by the new console which began to redefine what video games were like and what direction video games were going. The year was June 23, 1996 the dawn of a new era was about to take people by storm and it was the storm of the gaming console known as the Nintendo 64. This console turned the world on its head with the graphics, memory, and the quality of games. Games like Super Mario 64 and James Bond golden eye gave gamers a glimpse into the future. The things that made this console so unique were things like a 64 bit processor and a cpu speed of 93.75mHz. These things made games come to life in ways that the previous systems could not.
The world was so amazed by the quality of game play and realism that they did not think it could get any better than this. Little did they know what was about to happen and people were not ready to handle what was coming next.
The year is September 9, 1995 when the rules and the gaming industry were about to go where no one has ever been. This is the day of the ps one. Little did any one know how this new contender of the video gaming industry was going to redefine what we thought we knew about games and gives all a sneak peak into the future. When the ps one came out people who loved video games stopped going to the corner arcade because they invested in this little console and some bragged that the games were even better than the old arcade games. This 32 bit system revolutionized the gaming industry in terms of power, speed, graphics, and they added a new dimension to the console and the memory card was born. Games like grand theft auto 2, final fantasy 7, and metal gear solid simply blew people away and gave rise to what we now refer to as the console wars. Because the bar was set so high that game developers needed to at least match or surpass the ps one's capabilities, if this was not achieved then it was a mute point.
The concept for video games has gone through many changes of designs and concepts but if we did not have these a gaming ancestors we would not and could not enjoy the consoles of today.
