Who popularized and/or mainstreamed video games is a very heated topic. Enthusiasts even older than you would argue vociferously for Pong mainstreaming it. You state Atari. I say Nintendo because waiting 2 hours for my older brother and his friends to get bored with Super Mario Bros. on the NES was my earliest experience in video games. It got me hooked and unashamed of my passion because it was normal in my family for all of us to sit around taking turns on Duck Hunt and those days playing Street Fighter 2 where my Dad was always E. Honda...Oh geez, parents and video games makes the kid feel like the parent LOL!

Hell, one can even argue Pac-Man and all the arcade games, it is just one of those debates where everyone has a point and ample evidence to back up their case. Reminiscent to arguing who created Rock N' Roll where Blues purists will argue Robert Johnson had some songs that invented Rock N' Roll. Chuck Berry fans will argue for Chuck Berry. Then you have Little Richard and Elvis.

Neither is substantially wrong, but neither is right without giving credence to those who came before them. In this case, Nintendo would have to pay respects to Atari and Pong, likewise Atari and Pong would have to give Nintendo credit for creating the modern day video game industry as it is along with paying their respect to Ralph Baer.

The PS1 was for sale for 11 years it was discontinued in lat 2005 to early 2006 the NEOGEO was also discontinued around 2006 in Japan because Samurai Spirits V(Samurai Showdown V) was on of the last Game released on NEOGEO in 2005 in Japan and the SEGA  Dreamcast in Japan was discontinued in 2006.

Wow it looks like the 3rd place console of this generation will still outsell every other console in every other generation (excluding the PS2 & PS1).

lmao I live how the 5200 and the 7800 were discontinued before the 2600. The 2600 was a juggernaut.

8th generation: Nintendo 3DS : p

There's plenty of youtube video's on this. lol

Samurai Shodown/Spirits 0/5 (way to name things playmore) actually was released in the US as well,or as much as any later neo geo game was released in the US,

anyway not a terribly complete list by any stretch of the imagination,plus it isn't really a history just a time line, given that I"ve played the vast majority of different consoles released worldwide.

the Radofin 1292 APVS from '76 deserves mention as it came out shortly after the fairchild,

the trashtacular RCA studio 2 (also from '76)is worth mentioning as the single worst console ever made.

anyway the most unique consoles of all time are the Telstar Arcade, a wierd trinagle with a steering while, light gun and paddle built in, loaded different discrete logic cartridges,

the vectrex which features a built in vector monitor, and the adventurevision which used an oscillating L.E.D array (obnoxotiously rare)

and I'd say their have been 2 to 4 over powered consoles released (depending on your definition of released)

The Bally Astrocade/videolibrary/proffessional arcade (plus other names), this thing was basically bally's arcade hardware in a box top save for ram (16 k and this thing would have been able to compete with the colecovision and 5200 despite being from '77) instead its visuals exceeded that of the '79 intellivision, plus it featured 4 control ports and pretty nice basic programming support (again save for the ram issue), unfortunately it was harmed by a few things, first was bally's odd support, they failed to even secure the rights to their own arcade games (don't know how they pulled off that one) and they seemed to struggle what they wanted to do with it, and it saw very poor distribution.

The neo geo, most of us know the deal with this one, a sprite handling beast with a huge address bus, it was released before the snes yet could play games like Metal Slug and Garou Mark of the Wolves, it wasn't until the ps2 that hardware could run its games without comprimises, (the Dreamcast port of Last Blade 2 actually had animation cuts) and enjoyed incredible longevity (1990 to 2005) not bad, frankly the neo geo suceeded as a niche product (2 million consoles with games that cost as much as their competitors, I'd say that is a pretty big success), shame snk got butchered by piracy in the later years with games being pirated as soon as they were available

The last 2 are the Halcyon, a wierd laser disk console with a voice command interface, it could be purchased but it was nearly impossible, and the capcom system changer which was their neo geo like console that played cps 1 games, but for all intents and purposes that was just a super gun (arcade people will know what I"m talking about)

plus wikipedia's genesis/mega dirves number is way off, 36 million is the minimum as the genesis had sold 18 million units in the US and Canada by 1995, 10 million in Europe by '95 and about 4 million in Japan plus the it did fairly well in many other parts of the world with techtoy having sold 2 million, Plus Majesco sold 2 million pieces of genesis hardware in it's later years and that doesn't include other hardware like the cdx/multimega (probably a very small number despite being awesome hardware), the x'eye/wondermega (also tiny numbers), the nomad (probably substantial), as well as other genesis variants like the offical Gam*boy of Korea, I wouldn't be surprised if when you tallied up all genesis/mega drive sales of official hardware it probably exceeded or was on par with the super nintendo save for Japan