and wasn't there a book about this already? I know there was a good one about the 360 and PS3 years.
Steven Kent and Richard Stanton don't really have the space within their total scope of their work.
Game Over is the original and tells the NES story obviously, Steve Harris' book covers the Genesis and the resulting titular "Console War", but most everything else is about the first generation and earlier and Sam Pettus and Sega-16 both told the Sega stories at length.
The Wii/360/PS3 generation would be the endpoint of my narratives. With the epilogue being both Sony and Microsoft releasing basically the same console for this generation.
That gap period is where I'm interested to start by helping compile for posterity. The return of the corporate behemoths to the industry. The leap into 3D. The expansion of storage into optical discs. Testing the waters of the online connection. The rise of a true mainstream multibillion dollar entertainment industry that over the period confined one of the giants to software and the other to having to find a niche.
The basic structure I've sketched out probably ideally calls for volumes that work more like a collection of individual articles thematically tied together, than a regular work of history set out in one of the customary methods of historiography for the masses. Such collections are much more common in academia, but I certainly don't intend on applying academic style or methodology to it other than in what comes naturally. And usually they're multiple authors obviously with the thematic in the editing, but since I see part of the appeal as the collection itself I'm not seeing an actual problem.
Funny enough as I was sketching out the ideas to outline I realized that there's a double prologue to it. Initially, I imagined that the main prologue was the SNES CD-ROM, where Nintendo at CES spurns Sony and the PlayStation for Phillips and what would become the CD-i and Nintendo abandoning CDs altogether. Then I realized that if you go back earlier, to 1979, well before the NES, and not too long after the 2600, there's Phillips and Sony again, beginning the process of inventing what would be the CD, which they did and standardized via Red Book in 1980 and released in 1982. The NES would come out in Japan in 1983. (Also in 1979, Microsoft moves to Washington. In 1980 they contract to make DOS, and in 1981 release MS-DOS. Windows comes out in 1985, the same year as the NES in the U.S.)
Coincidences are fun for constructing a narrative, especially if we're good Marxists and see the predestination of all these factors once the sheer unchecked forces of history drive them to their natural endpoints.
It seems natural that the stuff seagrams (beaks) quoted above that I wrote about the Xbox's ram bottleneck compared to the PS2's "unlimited" vector units once reformatted and placed into a sensible narrative is just the kind of ideal thing I need to start bending over and spreading my ass cheeks to take all that liberal "mainstream" dick I'm all about 24/7/365.25.
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