Game consoles

Game consoles are computer devices dedicated to (or pri-marily used for) playing video games. The earliest such devices appeared in the 1970s from Magnavox and then Atari, and could only play simple games like Pong (a crude simulation of ping-pong). Slightly later systems began to feature cartridges that allowed them to play a greater vari-ety of games.

After a shakeout in the late 1970s, Atari revived the video game industry with its hit game Space Invaders. However, this was followed by another industry crash as the market became glutted by often imitative and inferior games. The next leader was Nintendo, with its own hit, Super Mario Brothers. By the end of the 1980s another Japa-nese firm, Sega, had entered the American market.

During the 1990s consoles grew in power and graphic sophistication. CDs (and later DVDs) replaced cartridges and allowed for larger, more complex games. By the end of the decade the main competitors were the Sony Playstation 2 and the Nintendo 64 (indicating a 64-bit processor) and GameCube. Meanwhile Microsoft entered the game console market with its Xbox, which featured a more PC-like archi-tecture including a built-in hard drive (soon also adopted by Sony).

New Technologies

A technology with applications far beyond games is the “cell chip” technology introduced by Sony in its Play-Station 3, introduced in late 2006. The Sony cell chip has seven cores and can reach nearly supercomputer-scale speeds (and in fact is being used to create impromptu supercomputers).

Sony also opted to include a high-definition “Blu-ray” DVD player in the PS3, strengthening its application as a media device as well as a gaming device, with Microsoft and its Xbox 360 initially opting for the ultimately unsuc-cessful HD DVD.

Nintendo’s Wii, the third major competitor as of 2007, innovates in a different area: the user interface. The Wii comes with a controller that can track both where it is pointing and how it is being used, allowing for rather real-istic sports and combat simulations.