actually i agree with you there the dvd movement was going already but the need for a newer cheaper format and easier to store format is why the ps2 and dvd's did so well. the thing i like bout yourpost is the blue ray not fillin any necessity which i true. there still are tons of people still replacing their vhs collection with dvd's. i think its too early and not much of a jump and such for any hd dvd or blueray to really sell well at all. i think the next big thing besides downloading movies onto lets say sd cards will be recording them on your own dvd's when you do download them. if sony had been smart making a system that saves game data onto the discs themselves would've sold millions more then what the ps3 is doin. and it would be much cheaper.

I hoping you're referring to Australian dollars or something like that... The Sega Saturn launched at $400 (US) in 1995, while the Playstation launched at virtually the same time for $300. That's a major reason why the Playstation stomped all over the Saturn - well, that and Saturn's disastrous "surprise" early launch, one of the single dumbest decisions ever made in gaming history.

This is easily verified by any gaming history source.

E.T in Atari 2600. It almost destroy video game industry. Then it saved by Japanese company NINTENDO. We should thank them.

too much shovelware in the Atari era?.. ehh.. right..

You know what always makes me mad? Why so much shovel ware is allowed to exist, but games like Star Fox 2, Donkey Kong Racing, and Sonic Xtreme are cancelled.

sorry guys but the biggest mistakes have to be the events that resulted in these 3:

Nintendo's fall
Sega's fall
Sony's fall

Sega lost most of their fanbase extremely quickly and lost tons of money. Sega is only a shell of what they used to be right now.
Nintendo lost 3rd parties and were left only with people wanting to play first party games (although they didn't lose money). This can't be first because Nintendo never lost money, and their software still sold very well despite losing 3rd party support.
Sony lost about a decade worth of profits, many exclusives, 3rd party support, were forced to get rid of BC because costs were too high etc.


-The virtual boy was bad but it didn't result in anything bad happening, the gameboy still continued to dominate and Nintendo was still profiting.

-RROD hasn't shown any terrible effects on software or hardware sales yet. It did cost microsoft 1 billion dollars, but if Microsoft didn't get the 1 year head start they would not be in the position they are in right now. Microsoft basically forced companies to make PS3 exclusives multi-platform because of the amazing software sales they had, that was thanks to the 1 year head start.

-Anybody putting the dreamcast up there is wrong, the dreamcast failed because of the mistakes Sega had made before the dreamcast, not after. The dreamcast was actually a step in the right direction for Sega after how badly the Saturn failed. If they would have built the saturn more like the dreamcast (more cost effective and easy to develop for) they would have been much more successful.

256MB system RAM for PS3. Yes, yes, I know the video RAM can be accessed but what would 256MB more have cost for the system. 512 system/256 video split would resolve many issues devs are having with current gen systems. It would also have provided a larger performance/visual delta with the xbox360.

Reasons 1-100 : E.T. That little alien almost single-handedly destroyed the videogame industry. Take some Reese's Pieces, phone home, leave, and don't ever come back.

Here's something else about the Dreamcast that isn't often considered - Microsoft made the OS for it - a variant of Windows CE. They made sure they had some experience in consoles before the xbox was launched - the Dreamcast had Internet access too (you could probably call this xbox Live 0.1 beta or some such). To me this pretty clearly explains why the Dreamcast just wasn't destined to be a real contender as MS already knew the xbox would be coming. Sony was just lucky in their timing to trump the xbox last gen and get a large enough install base.

For the record, I still have a Saturn lying around somewhere - an amazingly forward looking feature was the internal memory for save games - which wasn't seen again until the xbox ( if my console knowledge serves me correctly )