Here comes tomorrow
I remember when the Xbox first launched a year after the PlayStation 2, and I thought again, “Wow the future sure is coming fast!” While the orginal Xbox never appealed to me, it was quite a marvel to have a system with a built in harddrive that was used to add “computer-like” features to enhance your gaming experience. From downloading games to the drive to cut out load times, ripping music, making playlist, and so on. Back in 2001 we were in the thick of it.
Next we would see the introduction of Nokia’s N-Gage, a cell phone that doubled as a handheld gaming machine. The cell phone industry was no stranger to game applications, but no one had ever tried to put a serious effort into combining the gaming market with the phone industry until Nokia. The N-Gage was released in 2003 to go head-to-head against the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, and as we all know it failed miserably.
And then there was the introduction of Sony’s PSP, and boy, what a statement that was. Who wasn’t impressed in 2004 when the PSP dropped into our collective conciousness to say “Hello!” A system that used optical disk media to play games and movies, had built in Wi-Fi, could connect to the Internet out of the box, store pictures, songs, and transfer your own personal files to an SD format to use whenever? Not to mention it had the strength of the Sony brand backing it up? I was sold instantly. But it was here that the monster first began to show its ugly head.
Moving along…
I’ve touched up mainly thus far on the gaming aspects of multimedia, but there were many other ways to waste your time on the go. See it was 2004 and around this time electronic media was hitting its stride with the regular consumer. There were portable DVD players, music players, cell phones started offering music options, heck if you had the money you could set up an interface to watch DVDs and play a console in your car. For the practical person devices like the PSP was a god send. Why have 4-5 seperate media devices when you could just have it all wrapped up in one neat little package? But the reality was a lot further from the truth. The iPod had become the music media player standard, followed closely by other third-party music players. So if you owned one (which a lot of consumers did) you were probably more comfortable using that piece of hardware. But the other options were there. Between hotspots, cell phone web browsers, or your handheld browser, if you wanted to connect to the net that was also an option depending on what you owned and were comfortable with.
As we moved into the current generation of gaming we saw the media format war pan out in the early life cycle of the PS3 and Xbox 360. Both systems had similar features and some striking differences, but ultimately it came down to media format to draw a line between the two. A format that wasn’t established or overwhelmingly neccessary for quality games, just another option with how consumers could waste their time. Nintendo, who chose to sit the media format wars out, was often ridiculed for the decision to not give players an option to watch DVDs on the Wii. But Nintendo towed the line that they would rather concentrate on the actual gaming experience and not all that other stuff.
