This year brings the most boring games console launch in history. I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic, share-this-incendiary-link-with-your-friends way: having lived through and been an active combatant in four generations of console wars, like many former soldiers I have now become an advocate for peace.
The First Great World Console War broke out in the early Nineties between Sega’s Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Nintendo’s progress in the 1980s was more a swift annexation). Both manufacturers were then broadsided by the introduction of the Sony PlayStation in 1995. Since then we have descended into effective Cold War, an ever-escalating technological arms race between equally weighted armies with few casualties. While there was isolated fighting in smaller Handheld Console Wars, a gaming Vietnam where Pokémon waged a guerrilla war for children’s minds, the Fourth World Console War ended with over eighty million consoles sold for each belligerent. I’d make an analogy about PCs and the United Nations, but I think the metaphor is already stretched to breaking at this point.
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