Generation 7 Consoles: 20 years Later | Design Club

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Good time zone internet. Hello and welcome to design club. The only game design show on the internet that will boldly attempt on this the 11th of December 2025 to not talk about the game awards more than to tell you that we're going to try to not talk about the game awards. I am your humble host will joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people Jeff. Hi to the people Jeff. Hey everybody. I am Jeffrey Zatkin the studio director of extra credits and extra history and more importantly for this discussion 20 year plus video game designer here here with my good buddy will to talk about something that is older than will. No, it's not. Okay, something that is older than many people in our audience.
That is true. Yeah, where we are officially using this opportunity to cast bones to dust on our viewing audience because dear friends in November of this year November the 22nd

a momentous birthday happened. The Xbox 360 turned 20. Now and we're going to use this opportunity to talk about all of Gen 7. Now we're going to acknowledge right at the top right at the top the Wii and the PS3 are only 19. They came out days apart in 2006 but Gen 7 as a whole because it started with the Xbox
officially with the Xbox 360's launch.
Yeah. Uh yeah, so it it it is I feel old. You kind of should. I mean these were momentous consoles and with within a one-year time span we basically went from the consoles people had a lot of people grow up with into what I would call the modern age of consoles cuz seventh gen is where almost unarguably consoles went into what we would consider to be the modern form of

how these are how we get these kinds of games and how they're delivered. Yeah, absolutely. I think Gen 7 like if we were going to point at pivotal moments in gaming I would
I forgot about this too. Yeah, the red ring. Oh, yeah. Oh, dude. You didn't have to bake your Xbox? I never got a red ringed one. I got a red ringed one once but it was a it was a used one I got off a buddy so I was like okay with cracking it open. It actually turned out not to be the it was a different red ring. So the red ring the three-quarter red ring was your console is not is bricked. It's not really bricked. You could fix it. Um but I got the one-quarter red ring which is component failure on the disk drive so I had to like open it up and that was in the days when you could open up a console and replace parts. Actually intentionally. Yes, on purpose. Amazing. Um yeah, uh ridiculous. So

we're going to try and not get bogged down in our memories of of Gen 7 launches and the like though Jeff, do you remember like did you participate in like midnight launches or day one launches for any of the Gen 7 stuff? Like either as a developer or as a consumer. Yes, I'm hold on. Okay. I do and this is pegged indelibly in my memory because this was also right as I was spinning up my game research studio. Right. And we had the fortune to launch it as the 360 like and I was doing all the research on all the stuff I wanted to track. So we had the fortune to launch it as the fifth gen or seventh gen was coming out in 2005 and 2006.
Right. And some of our very first

reports and the things that made our company were comparisons of the seventh gen consoles of their launch titles of their early sales of the you know spread of the games they did and other things and that's what put us on the map. So at a certain point I owned all three brand new shiny consoles pretty much every game they'd put out and like that was the foundation of our studio. Yeah, for me it was cool new games to play
Yeah. and a whole bunch of stuff we're going to talk about soon but yeah cuz the Xbox 360 was November 22nd of 2005 and the PS3 and the Wii came out two days apart.
Which is ridiculous.
Less than a year later on November 17th and 19th. So within a one-year time span we went from the initial Xbox from the PlayStation 2 which is one of the best-selling consoles of all time

Yeah, the remains the best-selling console of all time. It's like 150 million units. and the GameCube like all three of those were also standouts like the sixth gen like hey Xbox is now a thing. I believe Dreamcast fell into the sixth gen but I I will double check that. I think that that sounds correct to me. I think Dreamcast
which was Sega's last piece of hardware or console. Right. Um and and there wasn't anything like it it wasn't wasn't anything wrong with Gen 6, right? It wasn't that Gen 6 was bad though some people have criticisms of the lunch box aka the GameCube, right? It was that the differences that went into Gen 7 were monumental.
Monumental and universal across the gen. So we'll talk a little bit a little bit about that more specifically when we get into cuz that's necessary to understand some stuff. So I'm seeing that It was what it

followed. Yeah. If we hadn't had the hey if we hadn't had the look, it's an Xbox which is now an honest-to-god competitor with the PlayStation and the PlayStation 2 being the thing that sold so many units that everybody had one Right. and of course the GameCube which is like six was a good generation. Like six and six going to seventh were we had a great series of years Yeah. on that but there were some huge things that the seventh gen did that wouldn't have happened without the success of the sixth gen. Yeah. And the sixth gen also showed a lot of companies you can make real money on this. Yeah. We can sell enough hardware that people devs can make an you know, put out games that there's enough of an audience to buy so we can spend real money. Yeah. So by the way, so I've I've done a brief bit of looking around. It depends on how you look at generations because the Dreamcast is either the last Gen 5 console or the first Gen

6 console and some people argue that it should be considered Gen 5 because it had more titles which overlapped with Gen 5 than Gen 6 but it did have many features that would considered to be hallmarks of Gen 6. So it's sort of in the middle.
mentally classifying it as Gen 6 but it it doesn't matter. Yeah, it really doesn't.
That was also where we saw the you know, Sega's last hardware the Dreamcast because they didn't enter enter the seventh gen. Right. They decided to switch from being a hardware and software or hardware and game dev to just game dev. Yeah, correct. Exactly. So there's um Yeah, God Gen 6 was a hell of a time especially because I think for a lot of people up until Gen 7 the generations kind of naturally I'm going to say naturally slid together. Right? It felt like it

was a relatively I don't know. Maybe the maybe the N64 generation. Maybe Gen 5 was different in that it was 3D, right? PlayStation N64 were like three-dimensional and we only had like faux 3D on the SNES. Also with the PlayStation entering I don't know. It it it does feel very much like Gen 7 not only from all the technical reasons that we're going to talk about but also from an emotional and like consumer standpoint felt like a change in the way that we progress through the evolution of console gaming. And actually we should call out here. Why do we keep saying gen? Yeah. So one of the interesting things about consoles is they're in the one of the reasons they're grouped in generations is from a developer's point of view. Like let's let's pull back the curtain a little bit. Yeah. People at the time were making games either for or either both but for PC or

consoles. One of the hardest things about developing for PC is there's no standard spec for a PC. Right. When you're devving for a PC, you're looking at a wide range of processors, a wide range of graphics cards. The graphics cards didn't exist back then
Right. but types of memory, hell even keyboards, mice, input like there's a range of different things that can be hooked up and what a console sells you as a developer is hey look, this is a PlayStation 2. We've sold millions, tens of millions in some case a hundred million plus of these. The hardware is exactly the same on all of them. The operating system is exactly the same on all of them. You don't have to worry about if they're on Windows 3.1 or 3 or they've upgraded to 4 or like all of the different is standardized on a console and then they lock that. And they hold that for years.

Which means that all of the tools, all the games you build for it keep working. You don't have to worry about all of these weird windowy updatey things, etc. And so from a developer's point of view, you know what you're devving for, and that makes development significantly easier. And from the people making the hardware's point of view, sure, they make it cutting edge when it comes out, but they didn't get to lock that hardware for four, five, six, seven, whatever years. And as the hardware gets cheaper, they usually get still keep charging about the same price for the console. And so they make more money over time. And they get a cut of all the games that get sold on it. Right. So like both sides really like it. The you know, the hardware devs, the Sonys, the Play the Sonys, the Microsofts, the Nintendos, they get to sell their hardware, they put their branding on it, they get a cut of every game that gets sold. And as a developer, you actually get to develop for a much more stable platform than when you're devving for the PC

market. Right. And because of the nature of the competition, um the generations, uh sort of aren't they aren't exact, right? We we just addressed that Xbox came out in 2005, and the uh Wii and the
Like within a year is Correct. Yeah. And um they all have obviously different specs. The Wii was notoriously uh under spec in comparison to its competitors, and we'll talk about some of the specs on those competitors um when we get there, but uh they generally were seen as like being in the greater ecosystem at the same time, right? Not each other's like software ecosystem, but like the big ecosystem that we could consider the marketplace um is them competing. Uh And the generations are basically when they're like, "Okay, we've It is time for us to start selling the PlayStation 3 instead of the 2, even though we sold the 2 for six or seven years or you know, whatever it was." So that's basically a

generation is a set of hardware comes out, it's pretty much locked. There's exceptions, you know, maybe there's the pro version of something or whatever, but the hardware is roughly locked so that people can dev against it, and it stays locked for a whole generation till the next set of hardware comes out. Yes. Um uh to people are asking about earlier generations, if this is generation 7, the easiest way to sort of like mark this is that the first two gens were like the very early stuff, the Odyssey, the Atari. The third generation is the Nintendo Entertainment System. So third is NES, fourth is the Super Nintendo, fifth was the N64, sixth was the GameCube, seventh was the Wii. Is the way that and and you can think about other consoles, but because Nintendo's been in the game the longest, it's easiest at least for me to keep track of it based on the Nintendo console, because Xbox and Sony both entered later. Uh they were competing with Sega

for a while, then they're now they're competing with Microsoft. Well, they were competing with Microsoft, and they're still competing with Sony. Rip the Xbox. Um As an aside, Jeff, did you did you see the stats? Um which stats? The Black Friday stats? No. The Xbox the this entire generation of Xboxes Okay. was the fourth best-selling video game console device this Black Friday. Wow. And that math
that that math is not good
[laughter]
for Microsoft.
PlayStation? Yes. Um Switch? Yes. There's an exercise console whose name escapes me that out-sold the Xbox uh with like 15% market share, by the way. PlayStation 5 was like 50% market share, Switch 2 was about 25% market share. Uh this console was like 15%

market share, give or take. And then what everything that was left, including the Xbox, divvied up that last little bit. It was not good for Xbox. Rip Xbox.
that's a huge falloff. Yes. Yeah, the next, thank you. Yes, yes, he has. Um yeah, it's uh yeah, huge falloff. Anyway, uh only relevant because we're talking about this. So um gen gen 7 launches with the Xbox 360 November uh 22nd, 2005. With a lot of fanfare. Yes. And actually a surprise name reveal. So Will, I have a story on this. Yeah. So the PlayStation 1, the PlayStation 2, Xbox comes out in 6 gen with the PlayStation 2. They know Sony's going to name it the PlayStation 3. Like there's no way Sony's not going to do that. Right. We,

excuse me, Nintendo is working on this new console type that they keep saying is going to be a revolution. And its working title is the revolution. Um before they actually name it the Wii. Okay. Somebody at Microsoft, I don't know if this is true, but I swear it's true, even though I don't know it's true. Sure, it's true. Says, "Okay, it's going to be the PlayStation 3, and Nintendo's promising a revolution. Let's name ourselves the 360." Okay. They skip they will from the Xbox to the Xbox 360 because they get to put both revolution Right. and a three to match the PlayStation 3. It's a good marketing move. Well, especially because it
I no official confirmation, but I can't see how that's not true. And especially because they beat both of them to market. Yeah.
Right, which is big because most consumers don't think about the lead and development time that goes into a product like this. They care about what's on store shelves first.

Right? A reminder, you're here watching two guys in an animated coffee shop talk about the history of video games. You're not the average game consumer, right? You you are more invested and probably more informed about the behind the scenes than the average game consumer is. Most of them don't care about dev cycles or how long a generation was uh in in the oven for. They just care about what came to uh What can you get?
shelves first. Yeah, exactly. So
and so um Miss Inkwell and New Guy were calling out, you know, basically bigger number better or things like that, and that I think was a real thing. So anyway, the Xbox comes out, it's named the Xbox [snorts] 360, and it's great. Yeah. Like and heralded that the you know, it basically set the bar for the PlayStation 3. Yes. And the Play Yeah. I would say the PlayStation 3 handily cleared for reasons we'll talk about uh uh when we get to the hardware section.

And one of the problems though is that I think Microsoft wanting to be first, Right. they were plagued for the first year or so with a series of hardware problems, which you heard us talking about at the beginning of the episode, the red ring of death, which is some of their soldering inside wasn't heat tested right, Correct. and would melt in certain conditions, causing parts of the Xbox to break. Yep. Actually, how many uh just just by curiosity, comments, chats, how many of you had or knew someone who had an Xbox 360 that red ringed? Because I feel like everybody knew somebody who had one that red ringed. Right. It was ubiquitous
Yeah, it was ubiquitous enough that it was pretty damaging to their to their launch, right? It was only because it was a gen 7 um uh thing that or was like the newest shiniest thing that they managed to survive. If I actually argue that Xbox if the PlayStation 3 had made it to market first, and everything else had been the same, and the Xbox 360 had still been red

ringing, Microsoft might not have made it out of gen 7. They might not. Right, cuz the only reason that I think they survived was that everyone else was still competing with gen 6 stuff. Uh And they had good games. Yeah, they did. They really did. Actually, we'll get to that. Anyway, so like that's kind of setting the groundwork for, you know, when it came out, what was before, and I can say this as somebody who lived through this, gen 7 was transformational. Like going from six to seven felt like you were just getting this whole slate of games and things games could do that was just different. Mhm. Straight up, 100% people would look at them and be like, "Wow, this is an amazing console." And I think one of the reasons they all sold so well is all three, the PS3 and the 360, and the Wii for a different reason, but all of them felt like they were bringing cool, fresh, new games in a lot of different ways. Yes.

Yeah, I think that's that's a very good way of putting it. And so some of the transformational aspects were things that individual members had done to greater or lesser extents in gen 6 that were now becoming commonplace, right? Gen 7 was uh the first with uh dedicated graphics cards. Though Dude, that's huge.
by itself Absolutely massive, right? Will, let me tell you a story. Sure. So I launched a MMO in '99 Yeah. called EverQuest. Yeah. And it was one of three games that basically came out somewhat near each other. Mhm. It was Ultima Online, EverQuest, and then Asheron's Call. And these were the three that basically all competed against each other on that first wave, and then Dark Age of Camelot came out later. One of the choices we made, I believe in '98, like a year before it launched, was were we going to require a dedicated

graphics card? Because at the time, graphics cards were new. Most computers didn't have them. And so we bet we said yes. We made that bet. And that's part of what won us that generation was even though you had to have up, you know, there were we when we sent out review copies to game reviewers, we sent graphics cards with our copy of the game Uh-huh. to ensure that the reviewers had a graphics card on their computer so they could play the game. Right. Graphics cards, for those unfamiliar, you take the processor, the brain that thinks about your game, and you're like, "Hey, what if you had a second brain just to think about the graphics? How much better could we make them?" Yeah. The answer, a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. Especially because the way that a graphics card processes graphics is specific, right? Uh a um a um processor is a general-use

processing unit. And a graphics card is a specific dedicated graphics processing unit. So it is good
and a specialized brain.
specifically that thing, right? Which means that you get a lot better graphics, and you free up the processor to do everything else.
more stuff. Yes. Yeah. So sixth-generation consoles, the PS2, the Xbox, and the GameCube, which all came out in the roughly 2000 Yeah, yeah. year of 2000, roughly, none of them had graphics cards. All of them were using general processors because again, graphics cards were so new at the time. Moving over to seventh gen, which is coming out roughly 5 to 6 years later, all of these had graphics cards. Mhm. You know, it went from being an optional thing to just a thing. By that point, you every everybody who wanted to game on a PC had a graphics card in their PC. Like by the time you hit 2005, 2006.

Yep. And so the consoles, which you know, at the end of the day, a console is just a dedicated gaming PC that's been optimized for running a certain style of game, and they've stripped out everything else. Yep.
Like it's just it's a gaming PC in a box. These all came with graphics cards. And so the jump from sixth gen to seventh gen games, you went from games that didn't have an extra thing to process graphics to games that did with five or six years of development on graphics cards in that time, just the visual fidelity in what these looked like was staggeringly [snorts] different. Right. You can think about the difference between um Halo on the Xbox and Halo on the 360. Or Wind Waker on the GameCube had very good graphics, very stylized, very cell-shaded graphics to Twilight Princess. Right? Ne- different universe of graphics available, right? So So that

was sort of a big leap forward. It was I would argue more impactfully a leap forward than the leap from 2D to 3D graphics, largely because the 3D graphics that we leaped towards were kind of crunchy, not necessarily the great. Donkey Kong 64, anybody? Donkey Kong 64 notoriously like technically has 3D graphics, and they look crunchy. [snorts] Blocky. Yeah, correct. Um But like it was And one of the things that that helped with is all the TV commercials that got run.
Yes. You know, you're sitting there playing your sixth-gen consoles, and you're looking at the TV with commercials, and you're like, "Wow." Yeah. And it was little things like actual game footage. You're like, "Oh, wait, I thought that was just pre-rendered, you know, stuff for the cutscene, or you know, the opening. That's what the gameplay looks like." Right.
So it was really it was almost shocking to people Yeah. how much better it was. So number one in the sixth to seventh gen, the leap in graphics because of

dedicated graphics cards, and you know, five or six more years on processors was just something that blew people away. Yep. And actually, the processing power was also um significant. Like this was still when Moore's law was in full effect.
Right. And so the you know, this wasn't like twice as powerful. This was orders of magnitude more powerful than what we'd had before on a console. And because they were lost leaders, right? It's important to remember that this is a period in time when it the gaming console manufacturers were still taking a pretty significant cut to get their consoles on the market because the market was still growing pretty significantly, right? So they were lost leaders to the extent
A lost leaders meaning they sold the consoles for less than it cost them to make it because they knew as players bought bought games and other things, they got then they got a cut of each of those. That's how they would make their money. And they also knew the hardware costs would come down over the years. So at a certain point, they'd stop losing

money and start making money. Correct. And so to uh and that was true to the extent that the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 were both overpowered compared to pretty much any other way that you could uh way that you could spend that money on the market, right? Dollar for processing unit, they were better than they should have been. Wait, they were good. Yeah, they were extremely good to the extent that even years later, um there is a story which sometimes gets dismissed as apocryphal, but I have looked it up, and it is true. The um Air Force bought a bunch of PlayStation
Air Force.
Yeah, the US Air Force couldn't find maybe as a joke, we're not really sure why, but the US Air Force bought a bunch of PlayStation 3s, wiped the uh Sony operating system off them, threw Linux on them, and turned them into a cluster computer because it was one of the most effective ways to get that amount of processing power. Right? Like that

of that's probably because a lot of um those people were also playing games on the PlayStation.
Sh- Sure. We're not going to talk about that bit, but yes, no, yeah, for sure. Like but it was it was a um at a time when computers were still well, I don't know if we could say still expensive given the current cost of RAM, but uh we're we're, you know, becoming more expensive to have the 360 and the PS3 outperform their cost to the extent that they did was pretty significant, right? And noticeably so going hand in hand with those graphical processing units. They were equivalently swinging at um computers PC computers two to three times their cost
Yes. and being equal. Yeah, correct. Absolutely. [clears throat] Um And so uh in in terms of Uh one of the the the other like big advancements. So they had better processors, they had dedicated graphics card, they also had hard drives. Who remembers memory cards? Who

remembers memory cards? You could still use them, right? But mem- memory cards were like a thing, right? I was actually at my my parents' house for Thanksgiving, we were cleaning up, and we found a bunch of the memory cards for like our GameCube and N64 from when we were little, right? The
So for those unfamiliar, Yeah.
on the sixth gen, they didn't come in with built-in built-in built-in hard drives. You would They had little equivalently disk drive slots that you would slot generically memory cards. Yep. Lots of different things served as them as ways to save like your game progress or other things. And so what this also meant for games was all saves had to fit on tiny amounts of memory. And this is because of something we're going to get to in a minute. Um Where is that? Da da da da. Oh, um

Oh, you you jumped to hard drives. Hold on. Yeah, I was I was These were the first consoles that came out of the box internet connected. Yeah. And so because of that, they needed hard drives. Prior to this, on the sixth-gen stuff, none of those came with internet connections, which meant that there was no way to patch your games or other things that we'll get to in a minute. And so that this meant you didn't really need hard drives. You just needed tiny amounts of storage to save your game state. Right. And see, I think it's very interesting because I think for Jeff as a developer, the internet thing is the primary thing, right? You can patch the game, you can do updates, you can sell games over the internet. And Jeff has seen a lot of that. For me as a user, for me as a kid using it, not needing to worry about fumbling around with memory cards, not needing to worry about buying a new memory card or juggling things, was another huge thing. It was cool, I guess, that the internet was connected, but that was that only

mattered when I was changing the game that I was playing, right? Like in in the terms of like buying a new one or patching one or doing an update or whatever. I wasn't a big online kid to begin with. Um but not needing to worry about external storage for your game save state, and just being able to like switch games around and not have to like go, "All right, so I don't want to play this game anymore. I want to play that game, which means I need the Well, that's right because one of the things because the storage is so small, you had used to have to delete old game saves Yep. to make space for new things, which meant like say you'd solve Final Fantasy Tactics on the PlayStation 2. Right. And you're like, "Hmm, I'm playing another thing. Did you want to keep your old save of that? Or did you want to move on to the next thing? Because most of us didn't want to didn't have the money to keep buying more and more memory cards.
Right. Even though I think developers wanted this too. Sal's got a really good one. When game disk cases came with a little clip for your memory cards. You

could have a memory card in the case. Right? And now, of course, if you get a Switch game, the memory clip is the game. How far we've come. Uh But anyway, so like there's a couple of things that we bunched all together here. Right.
Number one, they all came out of the box internet connected.
Correct. The sixth gen, for most of them, had ways you could buy an external thing to hook up Mhm. for online things, but again, they didn't have hard drives. Seventh gen, with going these saying these are coming in out of the box internet connected, meant a couple of things. Number one, they actually built them in. You could plug your ethernet jack in, you know, right from your home and your cable, and it just worked. You didn't have to do all sorts of other fiddly stuff. This meant that all of the consoles could launch with full digital storefronts. Because you can't have a digital store if you're not connected to the internet. All of these were like, we're connected to the internet, which meant that we you could start now selling older games digitally. You could sell

updates to your game digitally. And this is why we started getting things like DLC and expansions. Beforehand, you know, if you were going to go play Warcraft 3 Frozen and then Frozen Throne came out, you had to go physically buy that, bring it in, take your you know, install already, and you'd be slotting new CDs back and forth. Yeah. Cool. This just downloaded it and put it all together for you. Yeah. No, let me
digit Oh, go ahead. I I I do want to take this opportunity to address some to expand on something you said about the sixth generation real quick. Yes, the Xbox had a hard drive, and yes, it was internet connected. It was the first of them, but it wasn't a generation-wide thing, right? That was exclusively siloed to the Xbox. It was cool that the Xbox had it, but if you weren't an Xbox kid, it didn't impact you at all. Right? And not at all.
was not nearly as clean Correct.
as the seventh gen. But you have to It did It that It did exist. Correct. And similarly, modems, external modems did

exist for both the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube. Under the They were the If you've ever flipped them over, they have like ports underneath, the GameCube at least. You could use it for the The Game Boy Advance Yeah, the Advance adapter on the GameCube or for a modem or other stuff, but those were aftermarket accessories that only some games took advantage of, and it wasn't something that was built in. It wasn't a generation-wide assumption, right? So, like yes, there were internet-connected things, and there were some cases, like fringe cases in gen six. But we're talking about it for gen seven, it was a fundamental assumption of the entire generation going in, and that's a pretty big pivot. That everyone was going to be a developer.
Yeah. I mean, like one of the reasons Do you remember the Kinect on the 360, we or Will? The or not the the Was it Kinect? Um The motion sensor thing.
Yeah, the Kinect. Yeah.

One of the reasons that so, they ended up not including it in anything except the premium editions, because it ended up like raising the price by 80 bucks or something. Yeah. And so, they decided to leave it out so that they could be lower priced than the PlayStation. Because of that, you had to buy it as an add-on. Nobody developed for it.
Right. Because if they'd included it, you know, you would have had 50 million of them out there. Right. Buying individually and separately for something most people didn't think they needed, there weren't enough to justify making Kinect-enabled games.
Yes. And so, for the sixth gen, because modems were an afterthought add-on, and there weren't really hard drives, Yeah. most developers didn't develop internet-enabled games. They just went for LAN stuff, because there wasn't enough of it out there to justify the cost. Seventh gen changed that, because it was just a feature. Yeah. It was a It was an across-the-board feature. Um And so, yeah, the digital storefronts meaning meant you needed hard drives, because

you had to have a place to put the thing you bought. Which in hard drives meant that you could then um A, you didn't have to shuffle memory cards. B, meant you could patch your games. And what this meant was you could do ongoing development, and you could fix the bugs that got found along the way. And this was a really big thing, because up until then, once your game went gold, so gold used to be the term, Will, where you would take the last last build of your game, Mhm. and it was called the gold master, and that would be the thing that got sent off to printing to go make, you know, 50, 100, half a million, a million copies of the game that all got sent out to Toys "R" Us and GameStop and all of these other places to sell the games. And if you found a bug after the gold master, you're effed. I mean, there was no way to fix it. Uh right, for that version, right? There were there were several examples where like the NTSC release and

the PAL release were at different times, so one of them has bugs fixed that the other one doesn't. The The easiest place to see that
of the year edition. Right. But like, once that gold master went out, Yeah. that was it. Yeah, yeah. Like, testing before that was fierce and brutal. Yeah. And so, hey, cool, you could patch. And then, you know, we also then had online games that you could play. You could have your Halos and your Call of Duty's and all of these other games that said, "Oh, we can build a multiplayer-first game, because there'll be enough people to have it." And so, this was really also the generation of consoles that said, "We can do multiplayer Yeah.
in a way that no generation before it had. Right. Now, Mhm. I do encourage people to remember, of course, that when we are speaking of this, we're speaking exclusively of consoles. Cuz I too went, "Wait, wasn't

I playing StarCraft on Battle.net well before this?" And the answer is, of course, yes. But that was a That's a different kettle of fish and a different can of worms.
Well, it's also the generational It's the boon and the problem. Yes.
Like, games Consoles all coming out in roughly 2000, when the internet was still an up-and-coming thing, was very different than by the time it hit '05 or '06, when the internet was a thing. Yes. Yeah. 100%. That's That's very true. That the our standards changed, right?
Yeah. And the tech changed. Yes. And the expecta Yeah. Right. So, anyway, so the out-of-the-box internet-connected, you know, led to the having storefronts, hard drives, no memory cards, patching, and being able to do online-first play. Like, that one feature alone would have been the generational shift, in addition to the great processing power and the graphics cards with a large leaps. Yeah. I mean, and but there was also another

thing. Right. Why would you bother Well, I mean, you could patch things later, but you could also just do bigger games, because the entire generation had higher-density media, DVDs and Blu-rays, right? You could release a game that was bigger, because you weren't bound by the restrictions of a cartridge. CD to DVD was a large jump in storage space.
Yeah, it's it's not quite 10 times. I think it's like five times, give or take. It's like It's roughly 720 megs for a CD, and it's like 4.7-ish for a single-layer DVD. Dual-layer DVDs, you can obviously fit about twice as much on, but it's a significant increase in storage size, right? And of course, you also have to remember that for Nintendo specifically, they weren't using the whole thing, because we had the mini bagel disks for the GameCube. Do you remember the Who remembers the mini bagel disks, right? That were like this big. Like, the whole disk is like

this big, and you had the little itty-bitty thing for the GameCube, and they were so easy to lose and teeny-tiny. Anyway. Um So, the They all had those. And another big feature that helped the PS3 in particular on sale was it was a Blu-ray player. So, for those unfamiliar at this time, in addition to in the console wars and other things, there was a format war going on of which was [snorts] going to be the successor to CDs. Was it DVDs or Blu-ray? It was So, everyone had settled on DVDs. HD-DVDs or Blu-rays were the generation after DVDs. Yes. I stand Sit corrected. Yeah. And we'll step. And Sony, who was the proprietor or who basically owned Blu-ray technology, was like, "Hey, what if we just built it into our PlayStation?"

And that was a huge thing, because at the time, if I remember correctly, a good Blu-ray player was more expensive than a PlayStation 3. Right. Why would you ever buy a Blu-ray player? You could just buy a PS3 instead. Get all the features of the PS3. Yeah. Non-gamer.
one of their secret weapons, where there's like, "Oh, see that expensive thing? What if you just bought this? Oh, and now you're going to want to buy our games." Right. And you know, they basically got to jump in and be like, "We're worth putting this format of movies. Here's it for the games. It holds a lot." And yeah, they just they went all in on that. Right. And it's hard not to pay out. The Xbox was fortunately not completely hampered because it's built-in is a DVD drive and it later had an HD DVD add-on when Microsoft was still throwing their weight behind the HD DVD. So, it didn't like completely brick itself when the Blu-rays won in the long run.

Um but that was another big deal, right? And the fact that you could use all of them as media players. Not a normal thing, right? The the the gen before The PlayStation 2 could play DVDs. The No, I know the PlayStation 2 could play CDs. I don't remember if it could play DVDs. The Xbox had some media station capability. It was a first for Nintendo, though. Nintendo could you couldn't use the GameCube as a media device and you can use the Wii as a DVD player. And that is one of the strategies actually that both Sony and Microsoft were loudly espousing was they wanted to be the seventh gen consoles and it basically stuck from then on to become the center of your living room.
Yes. They wanted your console plugged in to be your DVD player and on later gens they started being DVD-Rs and other things like do your Netflix, whatever. Yeah. But on this one it was like, hey what if we could control the living room? You play your games, you watch your movies, etc. Oh, you play your

music. It's internet connected and so they really went all in on saying trying to sell it as not just a gaming platform. Right. But as the hub of your media experience in your living room. Yes. And so the DVD and Blu-ray player was also directly going after that. Yeah. And and I think that we still see that as like a major thing now, right? That that is now with um it feels like in a lot of ways this is the predecessor to uh like smart TVs. Right?
Mhm. In a there's an internet connect
weren't smart TVs at the time.
Right. No, the TVs were TVs were stupid. Very stupid. Incredibly, unspeakably stupid. They did two things, turn on and change the channel. That was it.
Oh, and volume. Three things.
Oh, three things. My bad, volume. Yeah. Right? Uh and so having an external box that became the media center rather than needing to Who remembers switchers?

You had like the button switchers where you had to like change inputs between different devices and you still can do that on some TVs, but like you generally don't need to as much. Right? Where you had to be like, I want to use the VCR or the DVD player because a lot of families had both at the same time or the console or the you know, and you had to change the right channel.
Yeah. Let's see, when plugged into your TV, you'd have a cable box Oh, yeah.
Forgot cable boxes. And let's see, a V cable box, a VCR, a DVD player possibly a second DVP player for a different format um and a console like or possibly more than one console. Like there were times I remember having like six or seven things plugged into my TV and having to like switch between them. Yeah. Yeah, it's
And part of what the seventh gen consoles were trying to do was to

simplify that which it was an actual pain point. All of these things hooked up to your TV and say we can take care of almost all of that. Yes. And that And and then it also creates a kind of loyalty, right? Like especially with the PlayStation 3, right? I think the PlayStation 3 with the Blu-ray player is the easiest one. Yeah, sure. Um uh Percival is likely up to no good again. Uh so for the with the PlayStation 3, right? You could play DVDs you could play Blu-rays and you could play games all on one device which meant that more often than not if you weren't watching live television you were connected to a PlayStation 3. Which meant that you got used to doing everything with it which kept people in the ecosystem. That wasn't really an advantage the console manufacturers had before, right? Um Yeah. Uh the All the heat from the stack is what caused red rings of death. There's a whole bunch of okay. The the cause of the red ring is heat

got places it wasn't supposed to for a bunch of reasons. That's one of the like I'm actually willing quite willing to give Microsoft some slack on this one given that it hasn't been as much of an issue. It wasn't one cause. It wasn't one solution. That's one of the reasons why like re-flowing the solder worked in some cases and didn't in others cuz there were some cases where the solder cracked, in some cases where the solder just melted off and like it was not a universal experience, right? So, I do just want to like it wasn't one simple thing, right? I think one simple thing would have been would have been a thing that got found. It was a bunch of weird things that caused a similar end result which was the Xbox 360 sucked at heat management um in general, right? Um So, uh I was talking about how the PlayStation 3 as the entertainment system caused people to stay on the PlayStation on that switcher. Right? DVDs, Blu-rays, games you just stayed on

the PlayStation 3. Why would you do anything else?
Actually, and friends. Yes.
Like because these were internet connected and you know, you had friends on there. You could start seeing what are they playing? You could hop on and play with them. You could chat. Yes. Like So, they really this was the generation that shifted into the consoles the hub of the living room. Yeah. Actually, to that whole point about friends and interconnectivity, right? We had uh some amount of the idea of achievements brewing before this, but adopting achievements and trophies was a big part of that social experience on an internet connected
roll out versus piecemeal before. Yeah, right. Right, but that was a big part of the social experience. You could see what your friend's gamer score was. Yeah. Right? That's a big deal. You could see what your friend's trophies were. Right? Those were
There was actually enough competition on that that there were lists. Oh, you know what existed at the time as well, Will? Mhm. Blockbuster. You could go

and rent video games. Hold on. I'm I'm I'm going to do one better. I'm going to do one better. Chat you are now remembering the smell of Blockbuster Video. You're welcome. Go on, Jeff. So, you could rent video games and there were lists on the internet of which games had the easiest achievements to get. Mhm. And those games would get rented a lot even though a lot of them weren't great games just to inflate your gamer score of getting achievements and trophies. Mhm. Because you could go for a couple of dollars with your you know, Blockbuster card and go get [snorts] I remember actually picking up a couple specifically just to inflate my Actually, I didn't go to Blockbuster cuz at E3 we had a library of every game Yeah. published on sixth and seventh and then later eighth gen. Yeah. But um checking those out, bringing them home, be like, oh yeah. You can get you know, all of these in one evening of play. Yeah, correct. Exactly. I remember It was enough of a

thing at the time that people were doing that and there were lists and like I actually remember when I rented consoles for my birthday. Before I had an N64, we rented consoles for my birthday. I remember that we could rent them from Blockbuster. Oh god, we're old, Jeff. I've earned I've earned this gray. I've earned the gray in this beard. I've earned it. I'm just hiding the rest of it with the purple. Um Did you know you used to be able to rent VCRs, too?
Yeah. Cuz of course you could. Like why
Rented for a birthday to watch a movie. Yeah, right. Yeah, 100%. Um Okay, so achievements, trophies. Then we got to talk about So, we've talked a lot about the things that the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 did super well and we've sort of left Nintendo's beautiful new brainchild out in the cold. So, let's let's take a second for the Wii. Let's talk about motion controls. Actually, before we get there. So, one of the reasons this got left out a little bit is the Wii Nintendo had a different strategy. Nintendo refused to

do a loss leader console. Yeah. They said, we are going to make money on this. And they also said, we don't think super high fidelity graphics are what sells it. We think fun gameplay does. Yeah. And so they came in with a console that honestly had lower specs straight up. But they came in with something that was innovating in a radically different way Yes. which was the Wii motion controls.
Right. And those Wii motion controls were very big part of reaching a group of people who had been
Wait, did you say reaching? No, I said reaching. Okay. Trust me, when I make a pun you'll know. You won't have to ask. Um uh My ears must be congested from the flu still. Yeah, reaching a a generation that had been underserved which was gamers' parents. So, if you had a Wii Mhm. how many people got their parents to try Wii Sports? Mhm.
[clears throat]
Right? It was a way to play Yeah, right.

Yeah, no, I definitely did, right? Now, my parents were pretty avid gamers. I remember one New Year's Eve we stayed up till midnight having four-player Tetris matches in Tetris like 64. Like So, they weren't like completely unfamiliar, but like playing games recreationally was kind of new to them, right? So, like the the idea of the motion controls being simple enough, intuitive enough, and fun enough to reach people who weren't traditionally gamers was pretty big, right? And then of course, we can't talk about motion controls without talking about Wii Sports being bundled with the Wii. A huge deal.
brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. It's a giant tutorial, right? Just so we're clear. Wii Sports is both a beautiful game and a giant tutorial. It's a giant tutorial
of mini games.
Yes, correct. On how you can use the motion controls, right? But I I still I will remember forever when we played Mario Kart on the N64, my mom

uh would both turn with the joystick and turn physically turn the N64 controller cuz she'd been driving her entire life. It's an over-learned skill for most people who drive. So with her mind, turning also meant turning the thing. And the absolute moment of unlocking that occurred on her face when I handed her the Wii remote in the wheel and went, "Okay, so you drive it like a car." Mhm. I cannot overstate how big a deal that was for people who weren't traditional dual stick or um mouse and keyboard gamers as a way to interface with the game, right? The Wii didn't just do motion controls as a gimmick. The Wii did motion controls on purpose broadly, right? And especially Nintendo first party like did it well. I mean, Wii Sports when you handed people a Wii and you said, "Let's play tennis."

or or Wii remote and they and they're like, "Oh." I get it. Yes. It was amazing and combined with this. It's funny, a lot of the game dev community kind of laughed when we said or Nintendo said, "We're doing motion controls like this." And the general sentiment was, "Who wants to stand around flailing like an idiot and who has room to you know, swing their arms around?" Yep. And the answer turned out to be a lot. A lot more people than you thought. Yeah.
And Nintendo had a brilliant marketing campaign that went with this. The "We would like to play." one where they had two Japanese actors who basically were supposed to be like Wii ambassadors. Mhm. Who would just show up like on a commercial at a family's living room, at a retirement home, at a fire station. And they you know, it would always say like they'd be like or the fire station like, "We would like to play." And they'd be like offering the Wii then you'd see like

it'd get plugged in and everybody would start playing and you just saw people on the TV dancing around and having a good time. It was like a Coca-Cola or a beer commercial. Right.
It was good-looking people having a good time. Yeah.
And people were like, "Oh." "That does look kind of fun." Yeah.
And you got consoles getting putting into put into places like retirement homes, like bars, like other places that wouldn't normally have a console and getting played. Yeah. I I also
brilliant marketing. Yeah, I also want to point out Snackin's got a really good point here, which is that the Wii remote being literally a Wii remote and having a very similar form factor to the TV remote, very smart, very clean, very good way to make that readable, right? Um Yeah, so so Wii's motion controls made up in a lot of ways for its lack of raw power in other places. 100%.
Which has sort of been a trend that

we've seen with Nintendo's consoles since, right? We're going to disregard the Wii U, okay? Just for this conversation cuz I don't really want to do that, but like we're going to disregard the Wii U, all right? We're just going to leave that one alone.
about taking swings or sometimes you miss. Nintendo didn't play it safe with a whole bunch of these. They said, "We're going to try a new thing."
Right. And and the Wii U
the same way. The Switch could have failed.
Right. The Wii U I also think has a more complicated story because a lot of it is a marketing failure more than a like a design failure. There are design failures in it, please don't get me wrong, but there was a larger marketing failure that went into the Wii U being not as great, right? So like there's a whole bunch of stuff there that we could talk about later, but maybe we'll do that in a couple of years when we do our 20 years of Gen 8. Anyway, um Take a swing at it. Yeah, right. Um uh Nintendo has done the motion control thing consistently since then. This was not like a one-and-done. This wasn't like a this is the gimmick. Every Nintendo console

since then has had motion controls. They stuck with it for a reason cuz it's worked, right? And so that marketing that is like the big pivoting point in Nintendo's MO is also really important. Um Okay. And this is where it came in. It also by the way, remember all when I said a whole bunch of devs kind of laughed at it?
Yeah. The Wii outsold anything ever anybody thought it was going to. Yeah. And you got this huge rush of nowadays we'd call it slop. We had a different word back then. This huge rush of slop. But basically companies coming in trying to make quick games to capitalize on the Wii success. And at one point, so remember I'm running EEDAR at this point. We did an analysis of the average review score like on a for all games that came out on the console. And the 360 and the PS3 were like one point apart. Yep. The Wii averaged I think six or seven

points on a 100-point scale below that. Yeah. Purely due to the slop. Just the quantity of slop that came out. Yeah. Because it was easy to dev for, too. Yeah. But that and that's taking into account all of these stellar first-party titles from Nintendo that were like 90 pluses. Yeah. There were so many crappy games that just Right.
It actually lowered the entire industry average by it. So there were a lot of good games. There were a lot of really bad games for the Wii. Right. And and
None first party. Right. And the other by the way, the other reason was it was um it has a bigger install base, right? The I've got the numbers pulled up. The Xbox 360 has an install base of about 84 million units total. The PlayStation 3 has about 87.4 million units. And the Wii has 101.63 billion units sold. Right? So we like

and that's not a huge Okay, when we when we say it like that, it's not a huge margin, right? Mhm. But you also have to remember that the margin we're talking about is at least 13 million people, which is not a small number of people, right? Compared to one another, it doesn't seem like that much, but that's still 13 million people. And And sorry.
I will the the Switch excuse me, the Wii 2 came out earlier than the other eighth gen stuff. So they actually cut off some of their sales in some way or sabotaged themselves cuz they'd already moved to a new console. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They could have done more. Yeah. Okay, so we've talked a lot about the consoles. The other big thing that I think a that caused a lot of people to remember Gen 7 fondly and as a turning point was the a lot of games sort of either hit their stride or

were released for the first time or really took advantage of that GPU processor increase in power to really hit the big leagues right about the time that Gen 7 came out. Right. And we're going to name a couple of games. All of these came out within the like the first two or three year either were launch or the first first couple years. Not like five years into the dev cycle. Right.
But hey Will. Yeah. Halo. Yeah, right. Huge.
BioShock. Right. Call of Duty 3. Uh-huh. GTA 4. Right. Metal Gear Solid 4. Hold on.
[laughter]
I just I just got to pause real quick. A reminder, GTA 4 came out 20 years ago and we're still waiting on 6. Go on.
[laughter] [snorts]
Jeff. Um Super Mario Galaxy. Yeah. All of the sports titles came out on there. The Madden, the NBA, the NHL. Right. You know, Wii Sports just like

the sheer quantity of good titles that were in that first small batch of time. Yeah. Just like it felt like an overwhelming amount and that list goes on. It felt like an overwhelm Oh, there we go. Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2. Yeah. Yeah. It just felt like there was an overwhelming amount of good stuff. Um Wait, didn't Mass Effect When did Mass Effect come out?
Mass Effect Mass Effect 1 might have been a Gen 7 title. I'm looking. I thought it was. Hold on. Let's see. Now I'm curious. Mass Effect. Mass Effect's original launch was 07. Yeah, 07. So yeah, it was the entire Mass Effect trilogy.
that would fall into the release window of the first couple years. Yeah. So it's just Mass Effect. Right. Because and I think this is the the I think it's really important. We can wax from a from a like analytical

perspective about the benefits of what the consoles were. Mhm. Most of us were in a time frame, sorry Jeff, of our lives where we weren't thinking about that bit, right? I wasn't thinking about what the horsepower, what the tech specs of those consoles were. I was thinking about the experiences that they could give me. And so these are all like stellar examples of the experience that was you that those um advancements were used to give me, right? As a gamer. And that that experience being so transformative because of the increase in power, the internet connectivity, the updates after the fact, all of that is something that I don't think we've ever seen as big a change as the Gen 7 launch caused with all those titles to the way that we perceive and connect with games. 100%. Yeah. Yeah, it was it felt pretty astounding. It was a good time it it felt like a good time to be a

gamer. Yeah. For the reason or for the look at all these great games out here. Yeah. Absolutely. Wait, hold on. Mhm. Did I now need to look at the Halo franchise real quick? Cuz I remember I remember going to
I think it was Halo 3 because Halo 1 and 2 were on the Xbox. Halo was the game that made the Xbox.
Yep, Halo 3. I also remember I went to the midnight release of Reach. Halo Reach in 2010 as a junior in college. I remember going to that midnight release. I think I still have kicking around in a drawer somewhere a remember Reach shirt. Like that era I think was also not the last but one of the last it sort of was this weird middle ground between you can buy games online but there are still midnight releases to go to that are worth going to and there are still midnight releases and for some games it's things that

people are interested in but that's largely for consoles now. Right? But the Gen 7 cultural event still had both parts of that. They had you could play online and do updates after the fact and um you know uh all all of those parts but also Yeah. They didn't have buy games like excuse me in a very rare circumstances but it wasn't go buy Halo 3 digitally. You still went and bought the physical media. Yeah, that's true. Um eighth gen was really the place I think they started doing major game or games of that size getting downloaded as a more common feature. I think that sounds right. I think I think that feels most correct cuz like I don't think of I can't remember ever downloading a game on my buddy's PlayStation 3 but I know a bunch of people on like PlayStation 4s just went all digital. I remember downloading some but it was like

Carcassonne and Uno. Right. It was the um Xbox Arcade titles.
Yeah. Right? There there was like a whole branch of games that were designed to be downloaded and it wasn't main releases though. Mhm. Um but that still counts, right? Those are still like fun transformative experiences. Wow. I I just I feel like I can't help but get into nostalgia blasted every time we talk about this just because it was su- the like I oh god, I'm going to feel so old doing this. If you're too young to remember that period in time and there's a very good chance that some of you are, right? Because it was 20 years ago and like if you're you know not probably 25 you probably don't remember it. Um it is really hard to overstate how cool the moment of like Gen 7 arriving was. I remember getting the Wii cuz my little brother was the one who wanted the Wii like wanted every fiber of his being. So

my dad and I conspired and I did a bunch of internet research and I found the place that was going to have pre-orders for the Wii and like my dad went out and did like the 3:00 a.m. get in line get the pre-order coupon from Toys R Us for the Wii cuz you remember those days before we had digital pre-orders? You had to go to a store to get a ticket to pre-order a thing. Okay? I know this is like wild but I remember the experience of like getting to do this new thing and we had a whole bunch of friends over and we all played like um Wii Sports games on a teeny tiny TV cuz our big TV was broken at the time which was hilarious. Played on like a little tiny CRT. Um and it didn't matter because the experience was so cool and transformative. Now I will also fully own that it's possible that that's because the Wii was like the first generation that I like really remember the launch for.

But I also was around for the GameCube launch and it did not feel nearly as transformative. It felt like hey, here's a slightly better N64. Uh and I don't know if other people share that too but like that emotional connection seems like it's a purely personal thing but I think enough people have had those that it is one of the reasons that Gen 7 is so fondly remembered, right? Like people in chat are talking about like the um about all of the like experiences that they've had with franchises and games that started in Gen 7 that were really foundational for them. Right? And that's It was a good time in the industry and again I I can't stress this enough the success of Gen 6 Mhm. I think got a lot of companies interested in trying to fit early cool games in on Gen 7.
Yeah. And Halo's success coming in on a new platform you know on the Xbox and people watching it go from unknown kind of unknown to flagship title

convinced a lot of people they wanted to be there to do that on Gen 7. Yep. Which is I think why you saw so many companies angling and gunning to put out really badass things as these um consoles kicked off. Yeah. Everybody wanted to be Bungie or have the Bungie story. Right. And of course it's absolutely hilarious that Bungie is now owned by Sony. And that Halo got bought out
Bungie's been on a wild ride. Bungie's wild ride could be its own whole episode. Uh the history of Bungie is absurd. Um yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so and good games. Yeah. Um and it really just kind of went to that feeling that you know the consoles were a big step up from what we'd previous had. Yeah. Um I you know there's other things in there too like you know the 360 went from having wired to wireless controllers improved graphics, Xbox Live. Yeah, there was

Or go ahead. There was Xbox so before anyone get gets on me for that though I I did a little looking. The Jeff, do you know that Xbox had Live with voice? It just sucked. Like it existed and was not good which is almost worse for a console than having a feature not exist is having a feature exist and be bad. Uh but the Xbox 360's voice chat and and Live was good and it worked. I remember talking to people during Halo matches. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's funny. My wife who's my wife is a social gamer. So she likes games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band or things you could play a group. But she was also a huge Firefly fan. And so when the Halo crew sorry, when the when the Firefly crew did voice acting for Halo she'd watch me play enough that she's like hey, I want to give it a try. So it was her first 3D like control a person from first person game. Yeah. And then

first couple sessions where we played together were rough but she got good enough that we solved the campaign and then she was like hey let's try this online play version you do. And I was like okay, honey but like warning, you know, it's a little wild out here and like I remember our first online match and her just listening to people chatting on it and her afterwards being like who the are these
[laughter]
No, that's No, and that's that's very fair. Even though did you play the cuz the Halo 3 multiplayer disc came with ODST. Mhm. And there was also ODST Fireteam. Yeah.
The co-op horde mode. Mhm. Uh and both of those were kind of wild. Uh by the way, I will I will now take this opportunity now that we're very deep in the episode to issue the following gauntlet. ODST is the best Halo game that's ever existed and it's not close. Fight me. Anyway, um That's a good one. Yeah, it's it I think it does the best job of

[laughter]
Uh anyway, um the the Wii got better online support over the GameCube. It also got that motion control thing and the PlayStation by the way, I literally in our notes just have PS3 versus PS2. Mhm. The PS3 is the weirdest of these because it just literally did everything the PlayStation 2 did a little or a lot better. Like it just moved up one step across the board. It's very Sony. It's an incremental advance. Incredibly Sony. Um Uh well, question is ODST I'm good. Uh someone wanted to know is ODST the best Halo game the best Halo game released under the Halo title. I don't know enough about the non like shooter Halo games to say on anything else but I will say it's definitely the best shooter. It's definitely the best shooter.
of these together just made it really feel like a step up in a way that to me no other generation has because for example going from seventh to eighth generation there were lots of incremental

improvements but it all felt like things we had. We were connected. We we already had graphics cards. There were online stores. We had hard drives. You know, there was already connected play. There was good sets of games. Like the eighth gen and every gen after hasn't launched with kind of that huge disparity between what we had on six and seven. Yeah. In some cases I almost can't remember even though I can. Like if you ask me, what were the differences between eighth and ninth and 10th gen consoles? They all kind of blur together for me. And I think that's been one of the problems that they've had with selling some of them. Is that it doesn't feel like Sure, it's an incremental increase in graphics, but the graphics had gotten good enough that it wasn't this that huge thing we got looking like from sixth to seventh gen. Yeah. And and weirdly, like it most shockingly, even Nintendo's in that spot, which is weird cuz Nintendo is

both weirdly risk-averse and also down to like just yeet something at the wall and see if it sticks, ala Wii U, right? But the Switch 2 is just more Switch 1 better. The PlayStation 5 is just more
It's switched up a little. Yeah, right. Like it's not It's not a huge transformational experience, right? It does everything the Switch 1 does a little bit better. That's it. Which is good. Like
Right, it's Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that, but it also means that it's not exciting. Yeah. Right? It's not emotionally resonant, like oh my gosh, there's this cool new thing and I get to experience something that feels truly transformational and new for the first time. Yeah. Yeah. And so that is, like there's a reason people remember the seventh gen fondly. And you know, this is kind of a hour plus some, you know, run through of a lot of the reasons that kind of led to that feeling. Yeah. Cuz I don't think

most people would break it down into the parts like we have. It was more just a overall and it was a gestalt feeling. It was felt very broadly across the gaming community that this was just good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And everybody was happy about the good stuff. And there was a huge rivalry between Xbox and PlayStation on which one was better. And at the end of the day, they were both great. Yeah. Like It was kind of a rivalry about nothing. Sure. It was sort of a rivalry to cause people to buy more merch. It was like one of those sports team rivalries where they're all like, "Hey, we're playing crosstown rivals in the big game this weekend. You better buy a new jersey for your team to support against crosstown rivals in sports ball." Right? Like it does No, it doesn't matter, right? You're there just to like You're You're You're picking a side to pick a side, I think in a lot of cases. Um Actually, um Darkwolf just Where'd that go?

And actually, yeah, seventh gen console game prices Yeah. was where they locked in $59.99 for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 and $49.99 for the Wii for standard titles. That was the generation that locked it in and it stayed that way for an absurdly long amount of time considering kind of price changes on everything else.
Yeah. Uh yeah. Jeff, do you know what a conclusion I have reached from this from this excellent deep dive into uh Gen 7? I need better flu or getting better medicine? Yeah, that. And we're old. I think I think we're officially old. I think that's like really where where we're at right now, unfortunately, is that we're just old. Uh and But we can still play games. That's true, and that's the great part. That is definitely the great part. Everybody, thank you so very much for joining us uh in this little walk down analytical

memory lane about Gen 7. Let us know uh down below, were you an Xbox person, a PlayStation person? Did you Do you have a memory of like a Gen 7 midnight release that like has stuck with you? Tell us about your favorite parts of Gen 7 down in the comments below. Also, if you're watching us live, join us tonight. And if you're not watching us live and you're watching this later, there'll probably be a vod floating around. Matt and I are going to tackle the Game Awards tonight. Bum bum bum.
to We're you know, we're going to get our fake non-alcoholic cider. We're going to probably be wearing our pajamas. It's going to be a great time. Please join us for that tonight. 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. Check the listing for your local time zone. Or it'll be on YouTube forever, probably, or until there stops being internet, whichever comes first. Um until next [laughter] time, everybody. I think all that's left is for Jeff say bye to the people. Bye to the people. Thanks, everybody. Have a good week.
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