‘console wars’. Between 1985 and 1995, they sold between them over 100 million hardware units, and many hundreds of millions of games. The principle of games as electronic toys was, it seemed, approaching a high-water mark, with Nintendo increasingly the dominant player and Sega starting to overreach in its efforts to keep up. This particular brand of fun had saturated the teen and pre-teen market: where was it to go next?
As it turned out, the games industry had only just begun to transform itself. And the next stage of its evolution came courtesy of a newcomer to the industry, electronics giant Sony. Following a failed collaboration with Nintendo on a new console, Sony decided to go it alone and in 1995 released a games machine called the PlayStation. Other rivals to Sega and Nintendo had come and gone, including a belated and ill-advised attempt to re-enter the games console market from Atari. But the Sony PlayStation was different. Sleek, grey, expensively marketed and blisteringly powerful, it offered CD-quality sounds and gorgeous graphics at a heavily subsidized low price. It was something more than a must-have toy for teenagers: a desirable consumer product for young, upwardly mobile adults, complete with soundtracks designed for its launch titles by some of the hottest DJs on the global club scene.
The PlayStation was a bet on the claim that Stephen Russell had made three decades previously – that games were for everyone, and that their natural place was at the forefront of society’s relationship with technology. Astonishingly to most observers, Sony’s gamble was rewarded by its transformation into the world’s most influential games company, with the PlayStation going on to sell 102 million units during its lifetime, and its successor enjoying still greater success. The market for video games was, the world realised, far broader and deeper than most people had ever believed.
Sony’s ascendancy proved a knockout blow for Sega, which stopped making new consoles after 1998. Yet gaming was far from done with transformations, and the dramatic next stage of its evolution came thanks to Nintendo and their release, in 2006, of another entirely new kind of games console: the Wii (a name chosen, according to Nintendo, because ‘Wii sounds like “we”, which emphasises that the console is for everyone’). Ending once and for all the increasingly ruinous race for more potent technology, the Wii was a less expensive, less powerful alternative to the other machines on the market. But it had one great innovation – motion-sensitive controllers – coupled to a philosophy that chimed exactly with the sentiments of a new generation of gamers: that modern games could be not only a mainstream activity, but also something family-friendly, physically active, sociable and, above all, fun. It made a phenomenal impression, outselling its competitors by a factor of almost two to one, and left the video games market looking more wide open than ever.
Behind all of this, the slow, steady rise of the personal computer has continued: a story of gradually accumulating resources rather than the generational revolutions of games consoles, and one that leaped to a whole new level with the invention of the internet. Computers, unlike consoles, are an open platform. The divide between Macs and PCs notwithstanding, almost any computer can run at least one version of almost any game or program, something that has in the past restricted companies’ opportunities for maximising their gaming profits on computers. But the unrestricted freedom to browse the internet that computers offer (unlike consoles, which give online access only to the ‘walled gardens’ that their manufacturers are able exclusively to control) means that literally millions of games are now at the fingertips of their users. And with game-playing now a more popular online activity than anything else outside of search and social networking, the evidence for play as
As it turned out, the games industry had only just begun to transform itself. And the next stage of its evolution came courtesy of a newcomer to the industry, electronics giant Sony. Following a failed collaboration with Nintendo on a new console, Sony decided to go it alone and in 1995 released a games machine called the PlayStation. Other rivals to Sega and Nintendo had come and gone, including a belated and ill-advised attempt to re-enter the games console market from Atari. But the Sony PlayStation was different. Sleek, grey, expensively marketed and blisteringly powerful, it offered CD-quality sounds and gorgeous graphics at a heavily subsidized low price. It was something more than a must-have toy for teenagers: a desirable consumer product for young, upwardly mobile adults, complete with soundtracks designed for its launch titles by some of the hottest DJs on the global club scene.
The PlayStation was a bet on the claim that Stephen Russell had made three decades previously – that games were for everyone, and that their natural place was at the forefront of society’s relationship with technology. Astonishingly to most observers, Sony’s gamble was rewarded by its transformation into the world’s most influential games company, with the PlayStation going on to sell 102 million units during its lifetime, and its successor enjoying still greater success. The market for video games was, the world realised, far broader and deeper than most people had ever believed.
Sony’s ascendancy proved a knockout blow for Sega, which stopped making new consoles after 1998. Yet gaming was far from done with transformations, and the dramatic next stage of its evolution came thanks to Nintendo and their release, in 2006, of another entirely new kind of games console: the Wii (a name chosen, according to Nintendo, because ‘Wii sounds like “we”, which emphasises that the console is for everyone’). Ending once and for all the increasingly ruinous race for more potent technology, the Wii was a less expensive, less powerful alternative to the other machines on the market. But it had one great innovation – motion-sensitive controllers – coupled to a philosophy that chimed exactly with the sentiments of a new generation of gamers: that modern games could be not only a mainstream activity, but also something family-friendly, physically active, sociable and, above all, fun. It made a phenomenal impression, outselling its competitors by a factor of almost two to one, and left the video games market looking more wide open than ever.
Behind all of this, the slow, steady rise of the personal computer has continued: a story of gradually accumulating resources rather than the generational revolutions of games consoles, and one that leaped to a whole new level with the invention of the internet. Computers, unlike consoles, are an open platform. The divide between Macs and PCs notwithstanding, almost any computer can run at least one version of almost any game or program, something that has in the past restricted companies’ opportunities for maximising their gaming profits on computers. But the unrestricted freedom to browse the internet that computers offer (unlike consoles, which give online access only to the ‘walled gardens’ that their manufacturers are able exclusively to control) means that literally millions of games are now at the fingertips of their users. And with game-playing now a more popular online activity than anything else outside of search and social networking, the evidence for play as
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