8 Days of Gaming, day 5: Here Comes a New Challenger
The PlayStation is another one of those consoles that defined a generation, introduced changes such as the use of CD-ROM technology and multimedia capabilities that are here to stay and broke the record of being the first console to surpass the 100 Million units sold mark. While the Sega Genesis put up a great fight against Nintendo, it was this one that finally shined well above the already established Nintendo franchise.
It wasn’t the lack of great games on Nintendo’s side, that part was fully covered with games like Mario 64, Super Smash Bros, Goldeneye, The Legend of Zelda and others, but there seems to be a trend here.
All these games are first party titles, that were great, but the lack of third party titles were evident (aside from Rare).
On Sony’s side, the PlayStation was the number 1 choice for most third party developers, and it also got a handful of great first party ones. This doesn’t mean the PS1 lacked shovelware, those things always exist in every system, but at the very least the good grealy outshined the bad.
While it was the games that made this console so popular, this attraction to third party studios couldn’t have been done without the hardware that the PS1 sported.
On a side to side comparison, the N64 leads the way when it comes to powerful hardware, having a 100MHz MIPS R4000 compared to the 30MHz MIPS R3000 of the PS1. Graphically the N64 was also pretty good, and lacked all the warping that the PS1 had. All this might have given a slight advantage to the N64. But Nintendo made a huge mistake when they unveiled the N64.
I’ve already talked about the birth of the Philips CD-i and the PlayStation, originally CD addons for the SNES. When Nintendo saw the huge disaster of the Sega CD, they decided to discontinue them and stick to cartridges instead. The problem came when Nintendo was unable to see that the Sega CD’s failure wasn’t due to CD technology, but how Sega used it, if used correctly it will be the future of gaming, but instead of this they decided to play safe and stick to what they knew that worked.
This was their own undoing as Sony did manage to utilize the full potential of CD technology for gaming, with much higher sound quality in games, full motion video, full voice dialog, longer games, better storytelling, and a lot of room for developers to be creative.
You have to take into consideration that CD-ROMs have 700MB of capacity, compared to the N64 cartridges having 100MB, CD-ROMs being a lot cheaper also helped, as some games even had two or three discs.
The only disadvantage to CD-ROM media was the loading times, due to game cartridges being mounted as Read-Only RAM, the load times where almost nonexistent, as opposed to some rather lengthy load times seen of the PlayStation, and there’s also the problem with piracy, although I tend to believe piracy mostly exists on the more popular consoles, had the N64 be the norm back then we’d probably be seeing a lot of N64 flashcart lying around. Overall CD-ROM technology was far superior to that of traditional cartridges, and with the PS1 they came here to stay.
Both the PS1 and N64 were great systems with lots of games that brought fun to many childs all around the globe. If you were lucky enough to own both systems you had the best of both worlds, if not then whatever system you chose of the two wasn’t by any means a bad decision.
Now that we’ve covered the good, let’s talk about the bad.
The Jaguar was the last console Atari came up in an attempt to get back into the console market after the Videogame Crash of the 80’s. The console was marketed as a 64 bit console, because Atari thought the bit wars was still relevant. Although it wasn’t really a 64 bit system, a combination of CPU registers or something like that made Atari come up with those numbers (I don’t know nor care about the full details, if you do and would like to contribute with it feel free to do it in the comments below).
Atari used this 64 bit marketing campaign to treat gamers as dumbasses with their slogan “Do the Math”.
Not only was their commercials insulting, the quality of the games was too. They were mostly composed of really primitive and eye-soring polygon graphics with little details, bad sound effects, missing ambient music, bad controls, and pretty much everything else that makes a game bad. The best Jaguar game can be qualified as mediocre at best. What’s even worse was Atari’s ego, not only they thought their console was good, they thought it was top notch for its price, so much that when the PlayStation was announced Atari’s then CEO said that it wasn’t possible to sell that system with those specs for anything less than $700, and that if Sony does sell it for anything lower than that they will sue them. When the PS1 launched at $300 Atari had to eat their words and the Atari Jaguar fell into obscurity.
The system also saw an addon in the same veins of the SegaCD, the Jaguar CD, how they expected people to buy an expensive addon for a console that wasn’t selling well is beyond me.
Here’s the AVGN episodes for the Atari Jaguar and Jaguar CD.
Finally, we got Sega’s answer to the upcoming generation, the Sega Saturn.
The Sega Saturn was a weird console, but not in the way you think. It utilized CD-ROM as the primary games distribution media, but also had a cartridge slot that could be used for either games or RAM expansion. Not a bad idea in itself, it’s basically an upgradeable console.
The problem came with its internals. The Saturn operated with two 32 bit CPUs running parallel, or at least that was Sega’s idea. The problem here is that both CPUs could not access RAM at the same time, so there’s not much to gain from having both of them, and it made programming for the system much harder, so this ultimately dropped the quality of games, the exact opposite of what Sega was attempting to do.
The system also lacked vital games like Sonic (Sonic extreme was being developed but got scrapped in its early stages), and although it had some great games, some of them available also on the PS1 with little changes between them, there wasn’t really anything memorable that could have made the system a top seller. It wasn’t as bad as the Atari Jaguar, but it wasn’t on par with the N64 and PS1.
The system is not crappy enough for the AVGN to make a video about it (at least not yet), but it isn’t that great either.
This generation was characterized for the appearance of the Sony PlayStation, which entered the market, saw the problems it had and what it needed, and it dominated it. Veni, Vidi, Vici.
Stay tuned as Sony wasn’t happy with beating the record of reaching 100 Million units sold, Sega still hadn’t say its last words, and Nintendo finally realized their mistake with game cartridges, and we’re about to see even another challenger entering the market, all in the next generation.
- Previous – 8 Days of Gaming Day 4: The Bits war
- Next – 8 Days of Gaming Day 6: One goes and another comes
Fιrst!
Nice sum up. I remember when I really wanted a Sega Saturn lol
I love this series!
oh mein gott.
ich weiss noch wie ich den atari jaguar im Karstadt gesehen habe.
ich war so begeistert von der konsole und wollte sie unbedingt haben.
zum glück hatte ich nicht das geld für den klotz. ich hätte mich zu tode geärgert.
Deuström der snich tlichtzez sumadren drunkendasdrunk
He says, he remembers when he saw the atari jaguar at kartstadt (a german department store).
He was so thrilled by the console, that he really wanted one. But now he’s happy, that he didn’t habe the money for the chunk of console, as he would have been riling to death.
@xXdinoXx: Ich bereue nie einen konsolen-kauf. Aber was den Atari Jaguar angeht, würde ich Dir da Recht geben, dass es kein guter Kauf geworden wäre.
I think gaming should return to flash devices, rather than DVD/Blu-ray. Imagine a SSD cart, or SATA carts for the insane games of the future. It is still prone to water damage, and contact corrosion, but a deep scratch on a disk is horrible. I tried every scratch removal myth on the internet. I have always been able to make a old NES game fire up with some copper polish. I’m glad the Vita uses flash carts, as I have ruined many UMD’s simply by having them in my pocket. I’m sure if Sony did make a new console 10 years from now with SSD carts, game prices would probably increase. Also it’s hard to beat that new 500gb/1TB Blu-ray Sony has been talking about (cost wise). Still, flash devices FTW.
The problem here is price. A 50GB blu-ray is way cheaper than an SSD or an HDD.
Good point – I burn blu rays and the discs average like less than $5 a piece are are now carbonate coated so their scratch resistant (almost proof) now. I’ve torcher tested some blu rays by not putting them in a case and just stacking them and grinding them in-between a stack of old DVD’s and the blu rays after being cleaned dont have any scratches. Touch the surface of a blu ray and you can feel it. Like glass. There are some quad layer blu rays that are 100+GB but cost around $20 a unit. With enough ram on a system you could just load larger amounts of a game and not see loading as frequently or at all.
Awesome article Acid_Snake is it true the N64 was more powerful than PS1?
Also i miss the Dreamcast =D
At least on the CPU side it was. The N64 had a 100MHz or so MIPS R4000 CPU while the PS1 had a 30MHZ R3000 MIPS CPU. The Dreamcast is part of the next generation (next article that I just finished writing).
I owned all Sega’s *** before that gen.(32X/Sega-CD) and guess I was smart enough to not want the next Sega console, moving on to N64 and Playstation, even skipping out on what came next. Though I wanted a Dreamcast a little more then I did the Saturn since it did have some pretty decent games on it.
Like I said, the Saturn wasn’t bad by any means, it just didn’t have that many good games, and the ones it did have were also available on the PS1, so there was no need to buy it. It’s sad cause if Sega had done the Saturn well we’d still be having them around, and not the freaking xbox.
Man – I was a huge Sega buff, and had the Genesis + Sega CD + 32X. That 32X had so much processing potential. Couldnt imagine a good RPG on that with its huge color pallet (32,768 colors vs genesis 72, SNES 256). I wonder if the 32X came out 2 years earlier if it would have shaped things differently. Now the PS1 had a huge advantage with a color pallet of 24bit 16.8 million colors (like your PC now) but the 32X was technically faster than the PS1 with two 32bit SH-2 CPU’s @ 23MHz over a single 33.8MHz MiPS, but I dont know if the 32X had the same memory access issue as the Saturn. Ironically the 32X games were still light years better than the Atari Jaguars.
I’m grew up in this generation in particular.
The N64 won that generation IMHO, not by sales but by having the holy trinity of games, Mario Kart, Zelda Ocarina Of Time and Starfox 64 that are still strong and being remade every couple of years.
Well the Saturn actually was an amazing machine, check any of the Capcom Ports or the Panzer Dragoon games that were exclusive, in japan it was actually very successfull, problem was, it was really hard to develop due to a bad devkit library from sega and lots of limitations of the convoluted hardware design.
Programming is in many cases is eventually superior to specs, check about a company named Lobotomy!
Sony changed the videogame industry, by embracing DevKits with C programming, making the industry focus more on higher level programming languages and not so much on assembly.
Programing became cheaper… and they made a butt load of money due to that!
I’m gonna have to disagree there, the PS1 had far better and way more diverse games. Smash Bros was epic, Mario 64 and OoT where the definition of jumping from 2D to 3D done right, but that and Goldeneye was the only thing you have on that system. If you’re a huge Nintendo franchises fan then it’s probably one of the best consoles for it, but other than that it doesn’t have anything to offer. Personally the GameCube was WAY better when it came to diverse games and also great Nintendo franchises, so it’s more of a balance that plays out nicely, too bad the system didn’t do well but the crappy Wii did.
“Smash Bros was epic, Mario 64 and OoT where the definition of jumping from 2D to 3D done right, but that and Goldeneye was the only thing you have on that system”
Mario 64
Mario Kart 64
Donkey Kong 64
Diddy Kong Racing
Banjo-Kazooie
Conquers Bad Fur Day
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (OoT and MM are two of the greatest games ever made)
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
Starfox 64
Super Smash Bros.
Turok
Golden Eye…
And that’s all the games I can remember, I’m sure there are more.
The Nintendo 64 defined gaming, it was home to a game that is considered by many to be the greatest game of all time (OoT), and it’s also home to two other games considered to be the greatest games, Mario 64 and Majora’s Mask. The Nintendo 64 had a huge influence on the way games are made. Nintendo are still remaking them, children and adults alike are still playing them, and they are still making boat loads of money. The Nintendo 64 had a far bigger impact on popular culture than the PS1 ever did.
Golden Eye 64 defined shooters, Ocarina defined RPGs, Mario Kart defined arcade racers and has been ripped off numerous times… You severely underplay the influence the N64 had, and still has, on gaming and popular culture as a whole.
I appreciate that you prefer the PS1, there is no right answer to which was better, because it really just comes down to personal preference. But do not claim that the N64 only had three good games. It shows a lack of research and knowledge of the console, which isn’t very good, considering you’re meant to be writing an unbiased look at the history of gaming. I completely agree that the PS1 defined the way consoles are made. Their decision to use disks instead of cartridges was a stroke of genius, but for me Sony’s offerings were in no way interesting until the PS2 came out.
I can only think of a few games the PS1 had, one was Krash Bandikoot, which, while popular, was hardly revolutionary. It was also very similar in style to games in the Nintendo franchise, it is also one of the franchises that copied Mario Kart 64. There was also Croc, but that was just a platformer rip-off of Mario 64’s formula.
After that, I’ve got nothing. I can’t think of a single game the PS1 had. Arguably it’s biggest and most popular game was Final Fantasy, but that wasn’t exclusive and started out on the NES.
Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 are still alive today, they are still praised by millions, and individual cartridges of those games can sell for more now than most PS1 consoles.
I agree with Acid Snake – N64 was decent but didn’t offer enough, I only continuously played GoldenEye & Killer Instinct Gold – everything else was pretty bland and looked too flat, games weren’t really engaging or had much depth.
(who won that genneration?) Look at PS1’s Gran Turismo sales – over 100 million units sold of this single game – you wanna talk about who ‘WON’ that generation? Sony sold 102million PS1’s worldwide (4 times more than the SNES) Only 33million N64’s were ever sold. Super Mario 64 was the best selling game on the N64 and only reached 11.62 million units sold, The best selling SNES game ever was Super Mario World @ 20 million, this was in direct relationship to how many of each of these consoles were in existence. Sony was was killing the Nintendo 64 with older hardware. The point being that more people had greater exposure to Sony products, and their PlayStation product saturation was higher than all their competitors combined and this gave the PS franchise a greater reputation. Sony won several generations because they listened to their customers. So if DRASTICALLY fewer people were using Nintendo products – how did they win a generation when nobody was playing the games? Nintendo could use all the high level programming in the world on the N64 but the games still weren’t ‘cool’ enough. Yeah and sales = money. Money = success. No sales = no 3rd party support or customers.
Fast forward to the GameCube and Nintendo was still struggling against Sony’s sales. Even the Wii never out sold the PS1 or PS2 (PS2 sold over 155million units, Wii only 101million – wow!). The best selling Wii game was Wii Sports @ 82.5 million and it came with the system lol Yet still never out selling Sony. Nintendo has won a console war since the SNES – sorry!, a generation? Not since the Wii, and the majority of people who owned that were little kids as most adults threw it in a closet after a week. I can’t honestly even give any Wii game credit for winning a generation when you look at the overwhelming game quality from other consoles. Nintendo has been slipping little by little over the years and as gamers get OLDER ; their fan base gets OLDER, so will their TASTES and making 1st party kid-friendly games for babies is not a winning strategy today. Nintendo’s generation winning days are over. Gamers are older and enjoy blood.
It’s true that the Wii sold a lot, but that’s because it was a thing of its own, a different product, a different market altogether, while the PS3 and Xbox 360 were both competing in the same market, and most people felt that you only had to own one of the two, while you could perfectly own the Wii and either the PS3 or 360. If we combine the total sales of 360 and PS3 (same market), you see that it clearly outsells way above the Wii.
To put it in perspective, if either the PS3 or the 360 didn’t exist (there was only one of those two consoles) then it would have sold way beyond the Wii. That was mostly the reason why the Wii won, there was little differences between the 360 and PS3 to warrant that one of them will be the clear winner of its dedicated market, but instead we got two very similar consoles in hardware, available games, cost, features, etc that ended up selling the same amount.
Nights, Guardian Heroes, all of the Panzer Dragoon games, Dragon Force and DFII… (even Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter/Fighters Megamix, etc)
I mean, sure, some of the good games on the Saturn were ports of arcade games that could be had on other systems (Capcom), but the Saturn had some truly great games that you can’t get anywhere else. I still play my Saturn occasionally for that reason.
And while I’d consider Panzer Dragoon (and Nights, to some degree) to be good enough to sell systems, obviously Guardian Heroes and Dragon Force are a bit more niche.
Albert Odyssey, MKR, and the Shining games are solid titles as well.
acidsnake you should do a series on the handheld consoles when you finish this series
…man, I guess your opinions about the Sega Saturn is based on it’s western (and localized) games. In Japan, it’s game base is HUGE, with lots of strong exclusives. Unfortunatelly more than 2/3 of these games didn’t make it overseas. But the Saturn beated easily the Nintendo 64 in that matter.
The Jaguar was bad but Tempest 2000 was pretty cool 😉