I broke the 10th Commandment several times as a child in the presences of consoles my friends or cousins had, including the Atari 2600, Intellivsion, ColecoVision, and others. The first one I called my own? The Atari 5200:
Thanks Santa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_5200
1979: Mattel's Intellivision is where I entered the scene. I was introduced to it in 1982 though. How about you?
My dad outlawed Nintendo in the house, wouldn't even entertain the idea. Then one Christmas, there was a large package under the tree addressed to me and my brother form my dad. It was a Super Nintendo, which was brand new at the time. We were stoked, while my dad was incredulous and super pissed off, because it was actually from my grandpa, who was close to death from laughter at the whole spectacle. Greatest prank ever.
That's pretty funny. I sort of want to by my sisters kid a drum set for the same reason. He'll LOVE me but I won't have to bear the consequences.
I couldn't agree more. That was the first one that I actually owned. The Intellivision was at a friends house. I also played Atari at a friends house prior to the Nintendo. The Atari joystick might still be the apex of the controller. bgood79, I know you've begun "collecting" vintage game systems. What do you have so far?
Holy cow- I really didn't realize how long the present generation of consoles has been. I'm fairly certain this is driven by a few things, prominent among them the fact that gamers as a whole are not asking for better graphics any more.
Yes, we have reached a saturation point with graphics in a way. There's only so much better it can possibly get before photo-realism and it's questionable if that will even have an appreciable difference in making better games. Aside from that graphical cap though, there's also the cost of development. Making a new console now isn't like making a new console in the 70s, 80s or 90s - a console now is basically just a computer calibrated to be used with a controller and TV, and they're marketing themselves not just as game machines, but as "media hubs". Of course, designing a new computer that 1) works Microsoft, 2) works with old stuff (no one wants to abandon their whole game collection because the new system won't read it) and 3) isn't horrendously overpriced Sony is hard, it costs a lot of money and time to do intelligently, and even if you do everything right it can still flop. Thus, it's really in companies' best interests if they let a console generation last as long as possible, to wring out as much profit from it as possible before moving on to the next gen and facing serious diminishing returns. Nintendo is the only one who has a next-gen-kinda console out, and that's because they make hardware that's cheap but different from the last thing.
Get me their backgrounds. Find out if they had a family.