The history of video game consoles, both home and handheld, began in the 1970s. The first console that played games on a television set was the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, first conceived by Ralph H. Baer in 1966. Handheld consoles originated from electro-mechanical games that used mechanical controls and light-emitting diodes (LED) as visual indicators. Handheld electronic games had replaced the mechanical controls with electronic and digital components, and with the introduction of liquid-crystal display (LCD) to create video-like screens with programmable pixels, systems like the 1979 Microvision and the 1980 Game & Watch became the first handheld video game consoles.
Since then, home game consoles have progressed through technology cycles typically referred to as generations. Each generation has lasted approximately five years, during which the major console manufacturers have released consoles with broadly similar specifications. Handheld consoles have seen similar advances, and are usually grouped into the same generations as home consoles.
While early generations were led by former manufacturers like Atari and Sega, the modern home console industry is dominated by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, colloquially known as the "big three". The handheld market has waned since the introduction of mobile gaming in the late 2000s, and today, the only major manufacturer in handheld gaming is Nintendo.
Origins Home consoles
The first video games were created on mainframe computers in the 1950s, typically with text-only displays or computer printouts, and limited to simple games like Tic Tac Toe or Nim. Eventually displays with rudimentary vector displays for graphics were available, leading to titles like Spacewar! in 1962. Spacewar! directly influenced Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney to create Computer Space in 1971, the first arcade video game.
Separately, while at Sanders Associates in 1966, Ralph H. Baer conceived of the idea of an electronic device that could be connected to a standard television to play games. With Sanders' permission, he created the prototype "Brown Box" which was able to play a limited number of games, including a version of table tennis and a simple light gun game. Sanders patented the unit and licensed the patents to Magnavox, where it was manufactured as the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972. Bushnell, after seeing the Odyssey and its table tennis game, believed he could make something better. He and Dabney formed Atari, Inc., and with Allan Alcorn, created their second arcade game, Pong. Pong first released in 1972 and was more successful than Computer Space. Atari released a Pong home console through Sears in 1975.
Handheld consoles
The origins of handheld game consoles are found in handheld and tabletop electronic game devices of the 1970s and early 1980s. These electronic devices can only play built-in games, they fit in the palm of the hand or on a tabletop, and they may make use of a variety of video display technologies such as LED, VFD, or LCD. These games derived from the emerging optoelectronic-display-driven calculator market of the early 1970s.
The first such handheld electronic game was released by Mattel in 1977, where Michael Katz, Mattel's new product category marketing director, told the engineers in the electronics group to design a game the size of a calculator, using LED technology." This effort led to the 1977 games Auto Race and Football. The two games were so successful that according to Katz, "these simple electronic handheld games turned into a '$400 million category.'" Another Ralph Baer invention, Simon, published by Milton Bradley in 1978, followed, which further popularized such electronic games and remained an enduring property by Milton Bradley (later Hasbro) that brought a number of copycats to the market. Soon, other manufacturers including Coleco, Parker Brothers, Entex, and Bandai began following up with their own tabletop and handheld electronic games.
The transition from handheld "electronic" games to handheld "video" games came with the introduction of LCD screens. These screens gave handheld games the flexibility to play a wide range of games. Milton Bradley's Microvision, released in 1979, used a 16x16 pixel LCD screen and was the first handheld to use interchangeable game cartridges.
Nintendo's line of Game & Watch titles, first introduced in 1980, was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, who was inspired when he saw a man passing time on a train by playing with an LCD calculator. Taking advantage of the technology used in the credit-card-sized calculators that had appeared on the market, Yokoi designed the series of LCD-based games to include a digital time display in the corner of the screen, so that they could double as a watch. While the Game & Watch series were considered handheld electronic games rather than handheld video game consoles, their success led Nintendo, through Yokoi's design lead, to produce the Game Boy in 1989.
Console generations
Like most consumer electronics, home video game consoles are developed based on improving the features offered by an earlier product with advances made by newer technology. For video game consoles, these improvements typically occur every five years, following a Moore's law progression where a rough aggregate measure of processing power doubles every 18 months or increases ten-fold after five years. This cyclic market has resulted in an industry-wide adoption of the razor-and-blades model in selling consoles at minimal profit margin while making revenue from the sale of games produced for that console, and then transitioning users to the next console model at the fifth year as the successor console enters the market. This approach incorporates planned obsolescence into the products to continue to bring consumers towards purchasing the newer models.
Because of the industry dynamics, many console manufacturers release their new consoles in roughly the same time period, with their consoles typically offering similar processing power and capabilities as their competitors. This systematic market has created the nature of console generations, categorizing the primary consoles into these segmented time periods that represent consoles with similar capabilities and which shared the same competitive space. Like consoles, these generations typically start five years after its prior one, though may have long tails as popular consoles remain viable well beyond five years.
The use of the generation label came after the start of the 21st century as console technology started to mature, with the terminology applied retroactively to earlier consoles. However, no exact definition and delineation of console generations was consistently developed in the industry or academic literature since that point. Some schemes have been based on direct market data (including a seminal work published in an IEEE journal in 2002), while others are based on technology shifts. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been noted for creating its own version of console generation definitions that differ from some academic sources; the definitions from Wikipedia have been adopted by other sources but without having any true rationale behind them. The discrepancies between how consoles are grouped into generations and how these generations are named have caused confusion when trying to compare shifts in the video game marketplace compared to other consumer markets. Kemerer et al. (2017) provide a comparative analysis of these different generations through systems released up to 2010 as shown below.
Timeline For purposes of organization, the generations described here and subsequent pages maintain the Wikipedia breakdown of generation, generally breaking consoles apart by technology features whenever possible and with other consoles released in that same period incorporated within that same generation, and starting with the Odyssey and Pong-style home consoles as the first generation, an approach that has generally been adopted and extended by video game journalism. In this approach the generation "starts" with the release of the first console considered to have those features, and considered to end with the known last discontinuation of a console in that generation. For example, the third generation is considered to end in 2003 with the formal discontinuation of the Nintendo Entertainment System that year. This can create years with overlaps between multiple generations, as shown.
This approach uses the concepts of "bits", or the size of individual word length handled by the processors on the console, for the earlier console generations. Longer word lengths generally led to improved gameplay concepts, graphics, and audio capabilities than shorter ones. The use of bits to market consoles to consumers started with the TurboGrafx 16, a console that used an 8-bit central processing unit similar to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), but included a 16-bit graphical processing unit. NEC, the console's manufacturer, took to market the console as a "16-bit" system over the NES' "8-bit" to establish it as a superior system. Other advertisers followed suit, creating a period known as the "bit wars" that lasted through the fifth generation, where console manufactures tried to outsell each other simply on the bit-count of their system. Aside from some "128 Bit" advertising slogans at the beginning of the sixth generation, marketing with bits largely stopped after the fifth generation. Though the bit terminology was no longer used in newer generations, the use of bit-count helped to establish the idea of console generations, and the earlier generations gained alternate names based on the dominant bit-count of the major systems of that era, such as the third generation being the 8-bit era or generation.
Later console generations are based on groupings of release dates rather than common hardware as base hardware configurations between consoles have greatly diverged, generally following trends in generation definition given by video game and mainstream journalism. Handheld consoles and other gaming systems and innovations are frequently grouped within the release years associated with the home console generations; for example the growth of digital distribution is associated with the seventh generation.
Home console history timeline by generation The development of video game consoles primarily follows the history of video gaming in the North American and Japanese markets. Few other markets saw any significant console development on their own, such as in Europe where personal computers tended to be favored alongside imports of video game consoles. The video game clone in less-developed markets like China and Russia were not considered here.
The following table provides an overview of the major hardware technical specifications of the consoles of each major generations by central processor unit (CPU), graphics processor unit (GPU), memory, game media, and other features.
Generation Time period Primary consoles CPU GPU Memory Game media Other common features First 1972–1983 Custom printed circuit boards Second 1976–1992 8-bit, 1–2 MHz, (Intellivision 16-bit) 64–1024 bytes Game cartridges Third("8-bit generation") 1983–2003 8-bit, 2–4 MHz 2–8 KB Fourth("16-bit generation") 1987–2004 8-bit and 16-bit, 4–8 MHz 8–128 KB CD-ROM add-ons Fifth("32-bit generation") 1993–2006 32 and 64-bit, 12–94 MHz 26–63 MHz 2–4 MB Game cartridges, Optical media Sixth 1998–2013 32 and 64-bit, 200–733 MHz 100–233 MHz 16–64 MB Optical media Online connectivity,Confluence with common personal computer hardware,