Now for a bit of History...

Atari

Ah Atari, the granddaddy of all gaming platforms, the editio princep, the grail upon which all future gaming developed. In 1976 the Saturday Night Fever crowd was tired of just Staying Alive and craved something new. One Nolan Bushnell gave them that new fix with the invention of the first Atari console. Bushnell created the first unit with $250 and a desire for something new. Within four years the company of one had grown considerably and was worth over $28 million.

The raving success of the Atari gaming console created a huge demand for games. Unfortunately this demand was to begin the downward spiral of Atari. Many companies started producing games that had little or no redeeming features. The sole purpose of some was simply to cash in on the Atari craze. The sleepless Atari gamers felt betrayed by this new generation of near pointless games and started losing interest. (Sound familiar? The same thing happened with the Sony Playstation in its early years, thankfully with out the same results) Surprisingly it was the arcade favorite Pac-Man that was the death knell of Atari. Its conversion to the home gaming platform was eagerly anticipated, but was the anti-climax of that early gaming era, having only a fraction of the pellet eating fun of its arcade cousin.

Thus it was the Atari faded into obscurity until the mid 90’s when the advent of a new gaming console level was about to take place. Redemption was to take the form of the Atari Jaguar, a 64bit system that was to go head to head against the Neo Geo console, the Sega Saturn and the little known Playstation. Playstation won out in this race to be the first new gaming platform and shortly thereafter Atari liquidated its assets and faded into electronic history for good this time.

Sega

Sega was born in 1965 and mainly focused on producing arcade games during the 70’s. Also during this time, they went into the console market and created a few hits such as Turbo, Frogger, and Zaxxon that appeared on the Atari. With the success of these hits the company changed its name to Sega Enterprises, Ltd. After the success of these games Sega created their own console called the Master System, which would contend against the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the mid 80’s. With NES taking the stronghold, many developers were unable to develop for other platforms, thus the Master System faded. At the end of the 80’s Sega came out with their first 16-bit console called the Sega Genesis. The Genesis had lots of great games and had a strong following. Their main competition again would be Nintendo with the release of the Super NES at the end of 1991.

After a comfortable and lucrative time, the console market started making headway towards 32bit gaming. Sega came out with Sega CD and Sega 32x that, much like its predecessor, was destined to fade away due largely to lack of worthy or memorable games. Sega made one last try at the 32bit market and produced the Sega Saturn, but without companies to develop and churn out games it met with only limited success. The Saturn seemed to have a good market share but for the most part it was based on the Asian consumer.

Last year the Dreamcast was born and became the fastest selling console ever with an eye bulging 500,000 units sold in the first two months of operation. Dreamcast looks to compete against the Sony Playstation II that arrives in the North American market later this year.

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