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.

Meanwhile Nintendo had to act and act fast as Sony were growing in dominance, so they released the N64 which beat all consoles processing power by double, but Nintendo were still using cartridges which was a downside.

We now move onto the sixth generation consoles and with the dominance of Sony we had to finally lay the once legendary Sega consoles to rest. There last effort came in the form of the Sega Dreamcast, but Sony's dominance was too much to handle, would there be anyone can stop them? As the Dreamcast lay to rest Microsoft released there first ever console which eventually took some of Sony Playstations market share. The sales were levelling out once again but it looked as though Nintendo were heading for the same fate as Sega, as there fourth console the GameCube became a flop due to insufficient production of games. Sony and Microsoft were Head to Head.

Finally our present day has seen the rebirth of Nintendo as they launched there innovative Wii console which has been a major success. Slowly behind them are Sony's Playstation 3 console and it now looks as though Sony is suffering, as they no longer have a positive grip on the market. Microsoft has taken the lead with the Xbox 360.

Well all in all I believe that there is not one overall great console, all have had there time and all have performed well for there genre. What has the eighth generation of consoles have to offer? Who knows, with richer companies in the mix we may see a new breed of consoles, with Google being my favourite.