CONSOLE-ATION PRIZE
The console gaming industry has expanded for years alongside PC gaming. We’re all familiar with titans such as Nintendo and Sony, but no matter what number comes after the new PlayStation, we’re actually currently in the ninth generation of home consoles. The first console to officially hit the market was the Magnavox Odyssey, which loaded games from “cards,” which were essentially PCB cutouts, years before cartridges or disks would become the norm. The Odyssey was only capable of displaying a monochrome line and three dots, and had a total of 28 games, 12 of which were bundled with the system. Many early home consoles were effectively limited microcomputers using dedicated controllers, rather than keyboards. The Atari 2600 ran with a simple joystick, while the ill-fated Fairchild Channel F used a strange clickable analog stick at the end of a grip. It wasn’t until the third console generation that conventional gamepads began to make an impact, with the NES and Sega’s Master System popularizing the new control method. Things haven’t changed all that much since. The Xbox Series X and PS5 are just gaming PCs in fancy cases running custom operating systems on specially designed APUs. Console game quality leaps forward every few years as the industry stumbles into each new product generation, as opposed to the steady component-based drip-feed of improvements seen on PC. One area where PC has yet to properly catch up is handheld consoles (although you should check out Alienware’s Concept UFO). The growing use of LCD displays in the ’80s saw the creation of Nintendo’s Game & Watch devices, with the notion finally being brought to fruition in 1989, with the Game Boy. This spawned a series of successful Nintendo handhelds, with fierce competition from Sony for a while with the PSP and PS Vita product lines. Will handheld PCs one day become the norm? Our phones have certainly become more and more like traditional computers, though we’d like to forget the awkward outing that was the Windows Phone. 5G rollouts mean streaming to a phone or tablet from your desktop PC is a real option, but will we be assembling custom pocket-sized gaming rigs a decade from now? We’d like to see it.