Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft have all released mainstream video game consoles. From the Atari 2600 all the way up to the Xbox One, different consoles have been released, with many different hardware configurations.
Some of the engineering gave rise to great consoles like the Super NES with its unique ability to have hardware upgrades built into the game cartridge itself, and others like the Playstation 3 which was so hard to develop for, developers needed at least one year to learn how to program effectively for the console.
But out of all the engineering choices made, the design choices behind the Xbox 360 stand out to me as probably the best ever.
The tri core CPU, GPU(with unified shaders), 512MB unified RAM, 10MB eDRAM, excellent controller, easy game development and superb online infrastructure made it an almost perfect gaming console. These design choices were so good, they influenced the development of ALL of the 8th gen consoles. So good was the design, I am led to believe that there was no need for Microsoft to have rushed the manufacturing, which led to the Xbox 360 being released only four years after the original Xbox. This rush to market caused them to incur the now legendary failure rate of the first wave of Xbox 360s.
Yes, Sony messed up the ps3’s launch. But a big reason for their gigantic loss of market share was due to the fact that they had a rival console which was simply one of the best engineered consoles ever. Console sales, software library, game performance and developer praise all support this line of thinking.
Feel free to leave your thoughts below.
