The Second Console Curse

Like many readers, I’ve been a gamer for a long time; when I first played space Invaders the cartridge was housed in a console which was part wood! Any Atari 2600 people out there will know how true that statement is. It was only until Nintendo and Sega stepped in with their 8 bit machines that I became aware of brands. You were either Mario or Alex kid, Link or Phantasy Star. Battle lines were drawn early doors, creating a legion of lifetime fans on the way. The problem that effected these companies, and later Sony was the dreaded second console curse!

With the 16 bit era arrived the Sega Mega Drive offering super cool Sonic and his tear up of Green Hill Zone, in comparison with Mario’s plodding pace it seemed, at least for a nano second that the king of platforming was felled. Anyone who knows their history will tell you that as a gamer you never back against the portly plumber, and when the SNES was released it soon heralded two of the finest Mario games of all time, namely Super Mario Land and later Yoshi’s Island.  

So far, granted this doesn’t sound much of a curse, each of the consoles above gained unprecedented success, and still to this day people will still argue over which console is best; although clearly it was the SNES! You see their success was ultimately their downfall; both Nintendo and Sega became arrogant, or at best presumptuous that their fanbase would always be theirs regardless.

For Sega it was a catalogue of console blunders: The Mega CD, the 32X, and fatally for the company as hardware manufacturers the much loved, but seldom bought Sega Saturn and then the Dreamcast. The sheer number of console iterations coupled with high price tags, confused the buyer or worse scared them, allowing them to think that SEGA had no clear vision of where to progress, and that their investment of money would ultimately be a waste.

Sega banked on people’s loyalty, and it was the wrong thing to do, especially when a new relative newcomer had entered the console market, The Sony Playstation. In the same way as SEGA did; it offered a ‘cool’ image for games, featuring recognised DJs like The Chemical Brothers, Fat Boy Slim. Gaming, at least on Sony’s machine catered for grown ups, while SEGA rather unfortunately seemed like a giant of the past, like a kids Television show that was now the people were too embarrassed to watch. The second console curse had struck claiming its first victim.           

Nintendo suffered the same fate, but for Nintendo it was their reliance on old technology that undid them. The Nintendo 64 launched in the UK almost 3 years after the Playstation and Sega Saturn. Sony took a similar stance with the Playstation 3, but at least they crammed it with new technology. Instead Nintendo offered another cartridge based system, that removed any hope of good quality music, but more crucially made the software crushingly expensive, especially when compared to the newer, cheaper CD based systems such as the Playstation. The Nintendo 64 though did push boundaries with the likes of Mario 64 and Goldeneye, but it never grasped the mainstream like its predecessors; and instead whimpered dying a slow death. It was even more tragic that Nintendo sold its soul to Pokémon and saw the birth of the truly atrocious Pokémon 64 iteration of the consoles.  The second console curse had struck again.

It is at this point the reader will announce the Wii, but that was more luck than a skillful maneuver. The Virtual Boy, the N64 DD, the GameCube? Nintendo’s success relies heavily on its ability to gamble, the fact that this time it paid off and paid off big, doesn’t remove the fact that Nintendo was only one bad console away from going the same way as Sega.

Move forward a generation or two and the curse soon hit Sony with the launch of the Playstation 3. The Playstation and more so the Playstation 2 had been colossal consoles with a heavily packed back catalogue of games, and relatively cheap price point. Due to the Failure of the Dreamcast and the late arrival of the GameCube, Sony enjoyed unmeasured success and it was with good reason. They had worked hard defining its brand; a brand which ushered in new formats to play games first with the CD and then DVD, and offered a huge range of exclusive titles. Ultimately though it seems Sony hasn’t learned from history and instead repeated the same mistakes albeit in one console.

Launching late, highlighted the companies presumption that gamers would hang on until Sony decided when the ‘Next Generation’ would start, they were wrong and drastically so. The Xbox 360 had already landed, and unlike the Dreamcast of yester year was backed to the hilt by 3rd party developers who considered the platform relatively straightforward from a development side; but more crucially the console had new IPs, namely Gears of War.

Sony must have thought ‘Oh shit’ as Marcus Fenix cut through a chunk of the market with his Lancer, coupled with the new achievements score to boot their was a new pretender to the crown Sony had considered theirs.

So roll forwards a year or two and it is only now that Sony s making some inroad to Microsoft’s lead. The Blu Ray revolution that Sony had hoped would push the console into family living rooms the world over hasn’t quite materialised, and the exclusives of yesteryear that Sony banked on, realising cross platform releases equalled oodles of profit, have long since left Sony, even Tekken is heading to the 360.

But if you can rely on Sony for one thing, is reliability and a dogged perseverance. The Playstation is as solid as a whole division of Panzer tanks, it works well all the time, and perhaps more significantly it is beginning to define its online as a marked difference from the 360. Keen to develop new IPs it has produced the likes of Little Big Planet, and with the upcoming inFamous Sony certainly hasn’t forgot the hardcore gamer, which it originally appealed to way back in 1994.