Soulutions Radio

In the ’50s, when the first Computer games appeared, they used vector displays instead of video. However Video Game Consoles made their mark only during the mid seventies. Fierce competition between two main game consoles manufacturer of that time – Magnavox and Atari, had resulted in many popular video games like PONG, Odyssey and Smash. These video games grew immensely popular among the masses and thus paved the way for the next generation of game consoles.

Though the journey from the first generation of game consoles to the current seventh generation has been plagued by video game crashes and market slowdown, the gaming industry have always come up with ground breaking games and technologies to overcome the gloom of the market. For example, during the video game crash of 1977, almost all game consoles developer and manufacturer withdrew from business when Atari came up with Space Invaders. The game was an instant hit. Space Invader became so popular that most of the people at that time bought Atari game consoles just for that one game. Similarly during the mid eighties slowdown in game consoles business, Nintendo’s breakout hit game ‘Super Mario Brothers’ had not only revived the industry, but also had set the stage for better graphic and sound quality among the next generation of game consoles. Read the rest of this entry »

Games consoles have now been in our lives for at least 5 decades. The systems have come and gone and we are now on our new generation of consoles, which include the Nintendo Wii. Which has taken an innovative turn and given the user more control, over the character it plays with. We then have the two power horses which are the Xbox 360 which was created by Microsoft themselves and the ever so successful Sony Playstation 3. But forget about the current consoles lets dive deep back in time and find out what happened to the consoles that the nation loved and who will win the top spot.

Lets first begin in the 80’s where the games console boom began, a fairly new Japanese company had released a games console to the nation called Famicom. This ultimately became a global success and was eventually renamed NES ( Nintendo Entertainment System) for domination in America and the UK. This is when we were first introduced to characters such as Mario and Donkey Kong who are still a global brand name. Moving on to another relatively small company in the name of Sega, who created a new games console called Master System, which was supposedly meant to eliminate the NES, but it never really obtained any kind of significant market share.

Moving on to the fourth generation of consoles and this is where Sega wanted to get it right, they delivered the ultimate 16 bit console called the Mega Drive. The Mega Drive gave us the likes of sonic and the system quickly rolled out globally. A year later and the console war was at an all time peak with Nintendo also releasing there new generation system called SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System), the console war was now hotter than ever.

As we move into the fifth generation a new competitor seems to be lurking in the backgrounds! Sega in the meantime were set to release a new mood of system called the Sega Saturn, the first ever system to use a CD Rom as the standard game play mode. Unfortunately Sega’s rein as a leader in there genre was coming to an end. The first ever console from Sony was born and was called the Playstation, this console was born out of a bitter feud with Sony and Nintendo, as Sony were due to create a CD add-on for the SNES, but Nintendo backed out and went to Phillips. Sony Playstation was then officially born; with there unparalleled technology the unit shifted 100 million consoles and became the most successful console in history.
Read the rest of this entry »