History of video game consoles: History and Key Facts

The history of video game consoles, both home and handheld, began in the 1970s. The first console that played games on a television set was the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, first conceived by Ralph H. Baer in 1966. Handheld consoles originated from electro-mechanical games that used mechanical controls and light-emitting diodes (LED) as visual indicators. Handheld electronic games had replaced the mechanical controls with electronic and digital components, and with the introduction of liquid-crystal display (LCD) to create video-like screens with programmable pixels, systems like the 1979 Microvision and the 1980 Game & Watch became the first handheld video game consoles.

Since then, home game consoles have progressed through technology cycles typically referred to as generations. Each generation has lasted approximately five years, during which the major console manufacturers have released consoles with broadly similar specifications. Handheld consoles have seen similar advances, and are usually grouped into the same generations as home consoles.

While early generations were led by former manufacturers like Atari and Sega, the modern home console industry is dominated by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, colloquially known as the "big three". The handheld market has waned since the introduction of mobile gaming in the late 2000s, and today, the only major manufacturer in handheld gaming is Nintendo.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from History of video game consoles by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.