The Greatest Game Systems Of All Time
We asked you to vote for your favourite gaming machines, and now Retro Gamer proudly presents the results
Developers celebrate your favourite systems by revealing what they love about them
We love videogames, games are fun. They can take you to far-off worlds and let you shoot down entire space fleets; they allow you to find ways to save mankind or ways to quash it, and they let you play the hero, or the villain. For many of us they have helped define our childhoods, or even led us to our careers. And yet videogames would be nothing without the hardware that they run on, so we wanted to kick off our first issue of 2018 by celebrating the greatest game systems of all time.
We asked you to rank your top ten favourite gaming systems, and the results were interesting with 94 systems voted for from 35 different manufacturers. The top five
manufacturers will come as no surprise to long-term readers, but what is interesting is that no single company had all its machines appear in the final top 30. It’s also important to remember that this isn’t our list, but yours.
We collated a staggering amount of votes from the Retro Gamer readership in order to discover what you feel are the greatest machines of all time. Some of your choices raised eyebrows with us, as we’re sure they will with you, and certain systems simply didn’t amass enough points to make the final list, but it nonetheless gives a great insight into what you, the readers, enjoy as the magazine continues to evolve (some of the featured machines were considered cutting-edge systems when Retro Gamer first hit the shelves in 2004).
As with our greatest games feature from issue 150 nothing was excluded from being voted for so don’t be surprised if you see a few current systems in the list, you probably won’t be too surprised by the top spot, either, (even though it was hotly contested by second place to the bitter end). It’s also given us the opportunity to create a photography-led feature, something we’ve never done in the magazine before. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed creating it.