Which is the most significant (important) console in history?

[Lawlight]

Shadow1980 said:
I'd have to say the NES. While the Atari 2600 may have the first to have popularized the home video game console as we know it in North America, video games were essentially a fad at the time. The console market crashed in 1983, abruptly ending the commercial viability of that generation of late 70s/early 80s consoles.

But the NES single-handedly revived the console industry in the U.S. after the Crash of '83, plus it established the console market in Japan (which didn't really latch on to the 2600 and its competitors) and made the Japan the gravitational center of the industry for the next decade-plus. It also fundamentally changed our perceptions of what console gaming could be like.

Prior to the crash, most console games were essentially arcade-like experiences with the goal of getting a high score. But the NES had more better hardware allowing for more sophisticated games that simply weren't possible on older systems. Super Mario Bros. revolutionized and popularized the platformer genre, and it's scrolling screens and more advanced gameplay showed that video games could have a vibrant future ahead of them. As platformers were the dominant genre, you saw the genre proliferate, with many games from Mega Man to Ninja Gaiden to Castlevania adding their own distinctiveness to the genre. Meanwhile, The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy were adventures of epic scope for their time. Metroid and Blaster Master provided nonlinear level progression focused on exploration and upgrading your character. Console gaming became a far more diversified medium on the NES, and showed that gaming was capable of advancing beyond pure arcade-style experiences (though there were certainly still plenty of arcade-style games, and actual ports of arcade games, being released for the NES).

Put simply, gaming as we know it today wouldn't exist without the NES. It cemented consoles as a mainstream product, thus showing that video games (or at least consoles) weren't a passing fad, and helped push the medium forward and further into the mainstream.

A couple of things wrong here:

- The console market crashed in 1983 in the US only

- The console market crashed because Atari (having been sold) messed up badly and bad games just flooded the market.