The early CD-Roms didn't come with a caddy, you put them in the caddy first and then into the PC.



Good old days where it took 10 to 30 seconds for a jpeg to load from CD-Rom. That thing was slow! But it did double as a CD player so I could play Wolfenstein 3D while listening to 90s German techno :)



Worked very well together!

Sony's PR in 2005-2007 was so hilariously godawful it's still living rent free in my head nearly 20 years later.

The generation starts when we say it does, $599 US dollars, people will get a second job to buy a PS3, the Cell has supercomputer performance, it's probably too cheap, the PS3 is not a games machine, Microsoft shoots for the moon Sony shoots for the sun, the PS3 will instil discipline in our children...

It was a goldmine of stupidity.

That said, Xbox 2013 was equally dumb. I was only 5 when the Saturn came out and wasn't following games PR at the time.

The funny thing about the actual Nintendo Super NES CD drive (not the Playstation variant) is Nintendo basically solved all/most of the CD issues people were bringing up.

The SNES CD drive came with a cartridge that could act as a loading buffer and thus effectively eliminating loading times. Once you took a few seconds to let world/level data load into the cartridge the rest of the game could be designed to run as quickly as a cartridge game with smart programming.

The caddy prevented scratches on the disc and also prevented piracy. It also meant it was a wholly proprietary disc format and Nintendo was free to charge whatever licensing fee they wanted.

It was stupid to not use that same design for the N64. They did all that work and for nothing. I also hope at the Nintendo Museum thing where they are showing off prototype models we actually get to finally see a real version of the SNES CD drive made by Nintendo, or maybe it's too painful a part of their history and they don't want to show it off.

In retrospect the Saturn might be the better console out of all four, but business-wise it was certainly either the biggest fail or the second biggest.
I think, considering all the circumstances at the time of release and their long-term impact. I would probably say most successful to least successful would be:
N64>PS3>Saturn>XBONE

The N64, all things considered still performed fairly competitively, and had a strong appeal not only with the core fanbase, unlike the GameCube. They lost a lot of third-party support for sure, but their strong grip on the market had already diminished during the SNES era, and would hit the bottom during the 6th. The N64 was really held up by a handful of extremely highly regarded games, that even mainstream games saw as must-play (Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye).

The PS3 was clearly the best selling out of all four, but considering the position Sony was in prior to it's release, where they were essentially heading towards a potential market monopoly, they really messed up losing so much marketshare to Xbox, Nintendo and PC. Financially it was also not a success. On the other hand, they did manage to get a lot more success towards the end of the generation. And they were also fighting two wars, trying to win the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD format war as well, which they won. Had they lost that war, Sony would have been in serious trouble, so in that sense the PS3 was really a success.

The Saturn didn't do very well compared to the Genesis, but a lot of that can be attributed to the handling of the Genesis towards the end of its life-cycle, with the release of the Sega CD and 32X. Sega essentially flooded the market with hardware. Still the marketing of the Saturn was poor and how they handled the North American release was an absolute disaster. On the positive side, it was their most successful console in Japan, and received solid third party support. The DreamCast also failed, and caused th

The Xbox One did not sell that poorly all things considered, and was overall a decent piece of hardware. However considering the resources MS had, it was a huge disaster. I think mostly, the reveal, release and subsequent decisions made, weakened the brand to an irredeemable extent. The always online DRM, they tried to push might have been the single most anti-consumer, idiotic decision in the history of the industry. Thinking Kinect would be a selling-point was a giant miscalculation too. Then a few years into its life they decide to release everything on PC too, which along with the overall lacking first party support just weakened the Xbox brand even further. They gained some good will with the backwards compatibility and they launched Gamepass, which has yet to prove itself successful, but might end up as such.
Safe to say, MS is still working on recovering from the poor decisions they made during the Xbone era.

Ken was one of the main reasons why I finally hopped off the Sony train back then. I bought my PS3 after saving up nearly a year for one via my retail job, then my PS3 ended up breaking down just a day before the warranty expired, but Sony still wouldn't cover it, and the PS3 was still expensive as hell to buy another, so I just decided I'd had enough and went for the cheaper Xbox 360 (My friends at the time had moved over to Xbox due to Modern Warfare II and Gears of War by that point, so that got me more involved with online play). 

Some CEO's will say absolutely daft and out of touch things to their public, but when it comes to insulting your fanbase or telling them to "get a second job", that's kinda where you draw the line, and it becomes more reasonable to just turn the other way and focus on something else instead. I was actually much better off going from PS3 to my 360/PC, but it Ken wasn't the sole reason (PS3 ports weren't that good, online play sucked for me and friends, hence why they moved to 360 before I did), he was just a domino effect for me to make the move to the competitor console at the time.

I still think he's an asshat to this day though.

Don and co at MS basically put the final nail in the coffin for me to stop bothering with Xbox altogether, and I just stayed with PC, with a side of Nintendo (Until last year, when I decided I'd had enough of stick drift, expensive games, less games that entice me to keep using the system, locking emulators behind online connections, etc, and then I sold my Switch). 

Of the current three, it's hard to understate how bad the Xbox One initial reveal was. Microsoft had major momentum coming from the 7th gen, and the ill-will they got from that first conference likely lead to 50 million+ lost sales in that generation and the current one.

While a lot of the points on the X-Box One are quite valid, the Saturn's issues are overstated, and some people have made good points on the 64, I do wonder if the PS3 might prove to be a more severe one in long-term.

The PS3 basically killed off the bulk of Sony's 3rd party exclusives outside of a few publishers like Atlus and Capcom, and the latter might have been kept along by financing a few titles in part. With the 360 fixing the 3rd party issues and having actual 1st party games at the time as headliners, Sony had to go into the exclusives race, and hard.

Now I'm a Nintendo fan, I would never consider exclusives a bad thing and Sony makes some good games. But Sony took to a very different approach to them that started at the end of the PS3 era with The Last of Us: the biggest, flashiest, most expensive productions short of GTA, while reducing their focus on smaller, more niche game types to a point Ratchet and Clank is basically the last of a dying breed. And that, as has been shown recently, is not healthy or safe and is starting to cause some real issues.

PS3 might top the list in a few years if this continues to go. If nothing else I suspect that without the PS3, we'd never have gotten Sony buying Bungie, Helldivers 2 (not a bad thing, just a reflection of how live service games and Sony have developed), or Concord.

What's weird about this "curse" is that all four companies were at the time coming off a period of immense success; the PS2, Megadrive, and 360 were the most successful systems from each manufacturer, and while the SNES was not as it faced stiff competition, it eventually emerged victorious and reasserted Nintendo's dominance over the console market.

Then, collectively, they all lost their minds and shot themselves in the foot.

It could be argued that it was precisely their success that lead to overconfidence and subsequently grave mistakes. Pride cometh before the fall, as they say.

No company has put out three smooth generations in a row, unless you count Nintendo's handhelds apart from their home consoles. 

Arrogance and changing markets more or less make it nearly impossible. 

Yeah Gameboy-GBA-DS was three, but at the same time they fumbled the N64 and Gamecube. And the 3DS after those, to a lesser extent.

Sony have their work cut out for them with PS6; graphics seem to be plateauing, dev times ballooning, and given the price of the PS5 Pro, matching the success of PS4/5 will be no easy feat.