Long forgotten are the days of the SNES, the NES and the Sega Mega Drive, but they shaped and began what we all know today. Without these consoles, and many others, could the modern day consoles ever have been designed. Without Mario and Luigi, without Alex Kidd, without Sonic the Hedgehog, could we have Snake, Master Chief and the Helghast? Could we have reached the age of today, without Crash Bandicoot and his sister Coco on the PS1? I don’t think we could have.
When the Playstation 2 originally hit the market, it was a phenomenon, it had been believed to be impossible, it couldn’t be done. But there it was, in all it’s glory. It was the pinnacle of all we had worked to achieve. Then Microsoft’s Xbox came, and with it came the series that everyone now know: Halo.
Where would we be if we hadn’t have received those early consoles. They weren’t very like what we have now, but they started it all, didn’t they? They showed us the “light”, the planted the seed in our mind that one day, we would reach what we have today.
But are we happy with what we have reached? When we released the PS1, it was massive, unthinkable beforehand. When the PS2 was released, it was cutting-edge, years ahead of it’s time. Now we’ve released our Xbox 360, our Nintendo Wii and our PS3, but are we happy with them? The simple answer is no, we aren’t. Many already speculate about the PS4, many wonder what Nintendo and Microsoft will call their next consoles.
We haven’t been happy since those simple days playing 2D games on the consoles of old, and will we ever be happy with another console? I think not.
