You’re Playing It Wrong: the Console Wars, a condensed history

At this late juncture, no one can remember exactly how and why the Console Wars first began, and perhaps only their constant flogging in the media makes it seem like they’ve been a part a human affairs since the dawn of time. But it’s reasonable to assume that before civilisation, the first videogame consoles were just plain rocks, and the Console Wars originated when cavemen started throwing them at each other like a primitive game of Pong. Whether fighting over resources, territory or fiercely held differences of opinion on whether rocks should have lots of magical glittery bits stuck in them or be simple to pick up and use, these early warriors set in motion the dream of ‘one console to rule them all’, which led our world to its current state of absolute ruin.The first generation of consoles came together in ancient Greece after Archimedes invented the inclined plane, the wheel, the axle, the lever, the pulley, the wedge, the screw and, just for the hell of it, the egg whisk. These inventions primed the agora for competing products by three very different merchant guilds. The Sôny console offered superior technology at a daunting drachma-point, with upwards of 70 pulleys and levers pumping away inside a two-tonne slab of marble. The Mikrosoft console, with its more efficient machinery shelled in a sleek modern amphora, was renowned for its ergonomic handles and strong community experience. And the wildcard console, the Nintendos, was simply a cheap terracotta box, powered by a mouse on a treadmill and controlled, as far as we can tell, with an egg whisk.Few ancient Greeks could afford all three consoles. The Sôny alone could fill a small stadium and was worth hundreds of slaves – and that was just for the Arcade model; the Elite version was enhanced with enchanted dragon scales and could double as a funerary stele. Hardware makers ignited the Console Wars with inflammatory marketing slogans: “Genesis Does What Nintendoesn’t” trumpeted one of many attack ads in the Daily Papyrus cooked up by the Sêga guild, who tried to take over the hardcore sector but wound up abdicating the Console Wars to licenced games about an adorable mascot named Sonos the Vole. “Why did the Vole cross the road?” Nintendos shot back. “To place marker stones commemorating the god Hermes in his priapic form.” The reference is obscure now, but it apparently worked, as Nintendos far outlasted its rival.It was during the Industrial Revolution and beyond that the Console Wars really got interesting. By Victorian times, Sôny was selling a handsome teak-and-brass unit outfitted with the latest in gasworks and its own sewer system, which did not play games but could comfortably house a family of eight. Mikrosoft fielded a stylish, steam-powered console covered in punkish leather plates and meaningless gauges, enhancing its communications power with modern telegraph wires and an internal wet-plate camera process. Nintendos was marketing a hand-cranked console with a Kinetoscope that ran at a dozen frames per minute, whose whimsical titles were almost playable thanks to the invention of the Egg Beater Plus addon.One need hardly recap the depredations of the 20th century’s Console Wars, when a trend towards westernisation caused the three major companies to update their names to their contemporary forms. In short, the advent of the Internet shifted the onus of perpetuating the conflict from the companies to the fans, who avidly took up their new roles as unpaid kamikaze draftees in a vast, pointless psy-war. In my completely unbiased appraisal, you were either a Sony person, who valued processing power above all else in your abject fear of human emotion; a Nintendo person, a magical creature of pure imagination who functioned in the real world despite your irrational fear of complex technology (Nintendo was sticking with the gimmicky egg whisk controls, poorly disguised as a Nunchuk); or a Microsoft person, a well-adjusted and good-looking citizen who occupied the sensible middle.To be sure, there was slight justification for such fierce partisanship, as the popularity of your favourite console influenced its exclusives and its triple-A library. But was that worth all the rancour, the endless bullet-point skirmishes, the desolation and destruction that have characterised the 21st century? As we all know, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One took the Console Wars to the next level when they evolved into semi-sentient war machines, engaging each other in mecha battles across the continents, piloted by message-board trolls with unhealthy post counts and mortality rates equivalent to Advance Wars infantrymen. Couldn’t this have been avoided if everyone had simply played the console they liked and not worried about other people liking other things? At least Nintendo dropped out of the battle when its final console, the Wii U, became culturally adapted to all kinds of non-gaming functions, from exercise instruction and body fat monitoring to whipping up a delightful soufflé.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...ensed-history/