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    Default Video game generation between 2nd and 3rd?

    The traditional reckoning of video game generations has been to put them in (currently) eight generations. But I believe there is an unacknowledged generation between the 2nd and 3rd generation, and these are the systems launched around 1982, just before the video game crash.

    The first generation was, of course, the Odyssey and PONG clones, released generally in 1977 and earlier. The second generation was the first round of programmable video game systems, with the Atari 2600 exemplifying this generation. There was a round of systems launched in 1976-1979, including the Fairchild Channel F, RCA Studio II, Atari 2600, Astrocade, Magnavox Odyssey 2, and Intellivision.

    What we call the "third generation" were consoles launched in 1985-1986 in the USA, with the near-total of the 3rd gen market between the NES, Master System, and Atari 7800.

    But there are some major points to be made that the third generation was really the systems launched circa 1982, such as the ColecoVision, Vectrex, Atari 5200, and Arcadia 2001.

    1) Time. The "2nd generation" systems launched around 1977 and the "3rd generation" systems launched around 1985. If we look at other generations (pre-7th), we see their spacing is about 4-5 years apart, not 8. 1st gen launched circa 1975, 2nd 1977. 3rd 1986, 4th 1990, 5th 1995, 6th 2000, 7th 2006. These are dates the systems were released around: for instance the 4th gen systems were released 1989-1991, hence I used 1990. The 8 year gap is often explained to be because of the video game crash. The circa 1982 systems, however, would fit in this generational progression nicely, being about 5 years after the 2nd generation and 4 years before the 3rd generation. If anything they are closer to the 3rd generation. This is especially true if we consider that the NES, which had the majority of market share in the 3rd generation, was launched in Japan in 1983, just a year after the circa 1982 systems saw their USA launches.

    The circa 1982 systems' life was cut short by the video game crash.

    2) Successors. Some of the circa 1982 systems were generational successors to 2nd generation systems. The Atari 5200 was a successor to the 2600, in the same way that the SNES was a successor to the NES. The ColecoVision was a successor to the Telstar Arcade, a cartridge based system released around the time of the 2600. Magnavox was planning to release an Odyssey3, which would be an American localized version of the Philips Videopac G7400, which was the European successor to the Odyssey2 (known as the Philips Videopac over there). The Videopac G7400 is called a "third generation" console on Wikipedia, yet wasn't even as powerful as most of the circa 1982 systems.

    3) Power. In most contiguous generations, there's a pretty significant gap between the earlier and later generation, but it's an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step. The 4th to 5th gen was a larger step due to 3D, but even 4th gen could do 3D (albeit clunkily). Atari 2600 vs. NES, however, is a massive leap. The leap from NES to PS1 is about the same. Atari 2600 to Colecovision to NES, on the other hand, is a smoother generational "stairstep". In fact the SG-1000, with hardware very similar to the Colecovision, was able to compete for a short time with the Famicom. The Colecovision, the leader of the circa 1982 systems, was closer to the NES hardware wise than it was than the Atari 2600. And the Atari 5200 had audio capabilities that could have easily competed in the 3rd generation.

    The traditional argument for lumping the "true 2nd generation" and circa 1982 systems together was the video game crash, the fact that these new systems did not "overthrow" the older systems. But the journalism of the time called these systems a new generation, even calling them "third wave". This sounds like a 1980s way of saying "3rd generation" to me. But I see the circa 1982 systems as being a generation "cut short". This generation lasted from 1982-1986, roughly, but much of this time was taken up by the video game crash and little was selling. Even on the eve of the video game crash, the Atari 2600 was beginning to decline. Had there been no video game crash, it's probable that the "true 2nd generation" systems would have been fully supplanted by the circa 1982 systems within a few years. Some of what caused the video game crash of 1983 - a glut of systems - repeated itself around 1994, but the much more mature video game market was able to survive.
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    Kirby (Level 13) Leo_A's Avatar
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    You can thank Wikipedia and a few overzealous editors for the Atari 5200, Colecovision, Vectrex, and such being lumped in with the preceding generation despite the clear and significant leap over the generation that began five years earlier. It's that site which has popularized this idea.

    Obviously if the line of thought that applies to every other console generation is applied uniformly, this era is the 3rd generation of home console gaming. Yet people with little interest in pre NES gaming have found it more expedient to simply lump it all together, out of ignorance of this era.

    As far as I'm concerned, console gaming is in its 9th generation. I see no reason to not think so, and find arguments from those more knowledgeable about this era that still attempt to justify this categorization by mentioning the console crash, just ringing hollow. Should the Dreamcast, for example, not be categorized as belonging to the same generation as the PS2/Xbox/GCN? It died right along with the Playstation and Nintendo 64.

    Why should an extreme market event that shortened the lifespan of this generation significantly, change anything?
    Last edited by Leo_A; 06-14-2015 at 12:44 AM.

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    To be honest, I have never cared about keeping a tally of system generations or about their numbering. If you refer to a generation as the #-th generation, most of the time I'm just going to scratch my head and then have to Google which is which. Maybe it's a little more cumbersome, but I much prefer to refer to things as say, the 8-bit era, the 16-bit era, the 32/64-bit era, the PS2/GC/Xbox era, etc. If I want to talk about pre-crash gaming, then I'll say exactly that ("pre-crash gaming"); I'm not going to lump all the systems together in the same "generation" as if the Odyssey was a contemporary to the Colecovision.

    The way these generations have been split up is questionable. I have always found it peculiar how the Colecovision is made out to be so distant and separate from the NES when, not only are early NES games not far off from how the average Colecovision game looks and plays, but they were released only one year apart (Colecovision in '82, Famicom in '83). I find that this whole numbered generation system is very Western-centric, wanting to go off of the US release dates for Japanese systems, and thus has produced a skewed vision of the industry, and where it was technology-wise, worldwide, as a whole.

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    Pear (Level 6) Gentlegamer's Avatar
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    I agree; I often refer to those systems as 2.5 gen systems for the sake of fitting into the commonly espoused generational scheme.

    There is another .5 generation as well between the "4th" and "5th" generations (16-bit to PlayStation), where Jaguar, CD-i, and 3D0 fit in; we could call them the 4.5 gen.

    As Leo points out, the whole concept of numbered video game generations is a product of wikipedia and not really any "scientific" or categorical authority.

    I usually refer to generations by the market leaders or unique descriptive label to encompass both the technology of the era and the general design philosophies in game play and aesthetics: NES gen, 16-bit gen, PlayStation gen, PlayStation 2 gen, and HD gen (not sure what aspect differentiates the current gen from the last, maybe this will be the PS4 gen).

    While the 2.5 gen systems may have been closer to Famicom in hardware, the types of games made for them firmly fit in with the previous gen, so I think it's accurate to put them all together as the Pre-Crash gen [or Atari Age ]

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    I've also never cared about numbering generations. Honestly, I've never really cared about the crash talk either, as during its time, I never experienced anything that made me feel like a crash had happened, as games kept coming out, and I kept playing them with my family. I feel like much of video game "history" has been sort of standardized over the years by journalists and Wikipedia in some weird attempt to canonize the history of a hobby and industry. Arcade games kept coming out and getting quarters. Merchandise kept being sold and produced along with cartoons of popular characters. Really, I kinda feel like Atari's collapse and down-sizing has been expanded to encapsulate everything that happened, whereas console gaming continued here, PC gaming really started to come into its own on the Commodore, Spectrum, and NEC computers, and Sega and Nintendo were coming into their own in Japan. I really feel like the whole thing sensationalizes a downtime in new IP creation and one company's struggle to try and give a climax in describing an era, but at the time, I don't recall people talking about video games dying at all, and I vividly remember reading tons of fun books that used games as subject matter in my elementary school library that were written between 1982 and 1984.

    While Atari struggled and sales may have lagged a bit, what really happened is that journalists and authors created storylines to add impact to their history lessons to sell books and make things interesting, and they sensationalized reality to get it. I much prefer my video game "history" to come in the form of memories of the people who lived it as players and creators, like Rob Strangmann's Memoirs of a Virtual Caveman or The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers. These accounts of history are openly subjective, and tell a story that is honest from their point of view instead of trying to manufacture an overall subject matter codex. These stories are more interesting as well, at least to me, as they contain the passion of relating each person's perspective, which carries with it the context of their life in the era. Authors like Steven Kent, on the other hand, look to create a standardized history for an expansive subject with impossibly few sources.

    Just my two cents.
    Last edited by celerystalker; 06-14-2015 at 07:59 AM.

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    It is a fact that video games went from hugely mass market (you could find Atari games in the check out line at grocery stores) to retail poison, where everything was on clearance for $1 and video games were considered a fad that had passed. That was a real crash.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Aussie2B View Post
    If you refer to a generation as the #-th generation, most of the time I'm just going to scratch my head and then have to Google which is which. Maybe it's a little more cumbersome, but I much prefer to refer to things as say, the 8-bit era, the 16-bit era, the 32/64-bit era, the PS2/GC/Xbox era, etc.
    While I have an opinion about this, I'm still in full agreement with what you've said.

    When someone mentions the 5th generation of consoles for example, I actually have to run through these in my head to be sure just what group of systems they're talking about. It's anything but the less cumbersome system. But a reference to the 16 bit era yields zero confusion.

    I know exactly what's being talked about with such a term, where as a mere number doesn't provide any sort of clarification.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aussie2B View Post
    The way these generations have been split up is questionable. I have always found it peculiar how the Colecovision is made out to be so distant and separate from the NES when, not only are early NES games not far off from how the average Colecovision game looks and plays, but they were released only one year apart (Colecovision in '82, Famicom in '83).
    I agree, it often doesn't work out too neatly (Such as your Famicom example).

    Quote Originally Posted by Aussie2B View Post
    I find that this whole numbered generation system is very Western-centric, wanting to go off of the US release dates for Japanese systems, and thus has produced a skewed vision of the industry, and where it was technology-wise, worldwide, as a whole.
    There are inconsistencies with Western systems, too.

    The XEGS is a prime example that just shows how weak this classification scheme really is. We're talking about hardware marketed as a console (Which has computer capabilities) that was released as a contemporary to the NES, yet is essentially little changed computer hardware that appeared at the end of the 1970's that had already been consolized once with the previous generation of consoles.

    Is it a contemporary of the Atari 2600 due to its roots in the 1970's, albeit as a computer rather than a console (Anything but clear cut divide for this era)? Is it a continuation of the following generation with the Atari 5200? Or is the XEGS really a member of the generation that brought us the NES, SMS, and 7800 like its release date implies?

    I guess I don't so much criticize this particular classification scheme, but attempting to categorize consoles in the first place.
    Last edited by Leo_A; 06-16-2015 at 02:06 AM.

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    ServBot (Level 11) tom's Avatar
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    First of all, the crash, according to Digital Press (and Alan Miller), was in 1984:












    second, Colecovision, Atari 5200, Vectrex are THIRD gen consoles:














    Wiki is totally wrong with these two infos, it was done by NES fanboys.....

    I mean the proof is there, from magazines at the time, but they won't have it.
    Last edited by tom; 06-16-2015 at 12:25 PM.

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    I assume '84 is cited because '82 was the last really good year, but industry analysts couldn't make the call on how '83 was until the year was over and they could observe just how poorly it went. So you could say that '84 was when they could officially recognize that the Western console industry had gone belly up, but that doesn't mean '83 was a profitable year. Sort of a it's-not-over-until-the-fat-lady-sings scenario; it surely wouldn't have helped to prematurely say the industry has crashed at the first sign of things going sour. So I think a case can be made for either year.

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    well when did ET come out, I know it didn't cause the crash but it is definitely a marker to when everything started to crap out at that time

    Quote Originally Posted by WelcomeToTheNextLevel View Post
    What we call the "third generation" were consoles launched in 1985-1986 in the USA, with the near-total of the 3rd gen market between the NES, Master System, and Atari 7800.

    But there are some major points to be made that the third generation was really the systems launched circa 1982, such as the ColecoVision, Vectrex, Atari 5200, and Arcadia 2001.
    I snipped this out because I know what your getting at but I think it might be a bit misguided or, and I am not aiming to offend with this comment, narrow minded. atleast in a trivial sence that has no real bearing on life just as to the subject in these two lines that I have quoted.

    I agree, the 5200 is a third generation console, it falls into the time line and in line of the general progession but that puts the 7800 in a strange generational spot, it was better than the 5200 but it wasn't far enough out to be 4th generation either, almost a generation 3.5 but since it was a "lets try and save our asses from getting burned" I can imagine more companies would have tried 2 systems within the generation to keep them in business if they had that sort of money and Atari did still have money from the home computer lines at the time.

    so yes Atari 5200 is 3rd generation (in my mind atleast) but heres where I am getting at the narrow part. you say "in the USA" gaming is gaming, the generations don't change outside of the US. if a 2600 comes out as a 2800 in japan its still the same thing, it doesn't change generations its still generation 2. with out systems from other countries we wouldn't have generations.

    these "third generation consoles launched in 1985" like the NES started sooner as another system, the Famicom, in 1983. so technically, even though we didn't get it here till 85 it wouldn't have existed if it came out in another country in 83. so if third generation stuff came out as pretty much the same thing in another country then why did it not become 3rd generation until it got to the US? long story short, it doesn't. the NES was 3rd generation before it was even released in the US because it already existed 2 years earlier in another country and that shortens up the gap between coleco and the 5200 (amongst others).

    so take that in to account as to what your saying about the 5200, coleco and all that and it effectively fixes your mid generational gap you were talking about. colecovision and 5200 isn't hanging out as an in between when the famicom comes out less than a year after it and sg-1000 shortly after that I feel that solidly makes the 3rd generation start late 82 early 83.



    and if TLDR

    Console generations are not just dictated by US markets

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    Quote Originally Posted by Niku-Sama View Post
    well when did ET come out, I know it didn't cause the crash but it is definitely a marker to when everything started to crap out at that time
    It came out in December of 1992, 9 months after the other "crash-causing game", Pac-Man.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Ozzy_98 View Post
    It came out in December of 1992, 9 months after the other "crash-causing game", Pac-Man.
    Typo there

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    heh 1992

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    This is a very interesting thread. I can see both sides of the argument. I'll also compliment tom on the posting of several scans, verifying at least the US market's acknowledgement of a 3rd generation with the 5200, Colecovision, et al. I would tend to lean toward the inclusion of everything from the 5200 to the SMS as the 3rd generation, rather than lumping them in with the 2nd generation, as is traditionally done. That's also as opposed to creating a generation between the 2nd and 3rd as is generally accepted now. I think Niku-Sama's line of thought tracks, in terms of the major North American consoles coming out in the 1982 timeframe, and being followed very closely by the Famicom, SG-1000, and somewhat later the Mark III/SMS. It gets trickier when you think about later, when the PC Engine came out - it was marketed in the US as a 16-bit system (the TurboGrafx-16), though it technically was not, and yet, it was an obvious advancement over BOTH the NES and the SMS, and was similarly matched with the Megadrive/Genesis in a number of ways, from a technical perspective. So was the PCE the start of the 4th gen, or would some consider it half-gen because of it's mix of processors and earlier release?

    Getting back to my original thoughts, I would say 8 generations is still right, because the NES and SMS were built on technology that was released not long after the NA release of new hardware, and though they ended up being superior (or at least, had a long enough shelf life for programmers to get real performance out of them), their hardware was not vastly different from most of what comprised the earlier 3rd gen systems, save for the Vectrex.
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