Why are Consoles and Home Computers Segregated?

[jeff20]

Gaming historians, are there any segregationists' arguments for discussing consoles and home computers apart from one another?  For example, (if one subscribes to the idea of console generations) it seems the C64 and VIC 20 are essential in discussing the 2nd Generation.  Reading some wiki on the subject always seems incomplete. It also feels weird to discuss the Atari XE with the 3rd Generation, ignoring the computer roots.

 

There are even different sections in this forum for the two.  I honestly want to know if there is a reason for this I may be overlooking.

[Keatah]

Well I always played console games to have fun. And did computers to do serious stuff (and play games). Consoles were generally closed to us kids of the 70's and 80's. Had to rely 100% on game cartridges. Computers were open and we could get inside and do things, like program and create stuff.

 

Consoles were single-function game machines. Computers were multi-purpose.

[CatPix]

I think because historically those groups were always separated. There is a clear divide in my retrogaming club about people that played on 8/16 bits computers and people that played on 8/16 bits consoles : they rarely go to the other's platforms (well less so for modern computers and from computer to console but that's becaus we're all grown adults).

Also there is a really different mindset on technological level :

Console gamers are usually more adamant in preserving their hardware "as is" with the exception of A/V -HDMI mods.

Computer games are usually very happy to upgrade their machines (to ridiculous levels sometime if you consider the Amiga scene).

 

The divide is also probably historical :

Retrogaming history was first/mostly written about the Atari 2600 and the Krach of 83. And people that were there and lived through it, and wrote about it, did not went to play computer games.

Thus the legend was born that "video games almost died" (when in reality, at least the C64 had a spike in sales in the US).

This mean that newcomers in the retrogaming scenes are first dragged toward consoles, and computers are in a sort of "nerd guetto" where people spent more time tinkering with their hardware and writing shoddy BASIC programs and demos than playing, making those machines unnappealing.

There's also probably the fact that the PC/console war since the 90's is all about PC being superior in power to consoles, which wasn't true in the 80's, so new retrogamers come in expecting the C64 to just crush the NES graphic-wise... Which it doesn't (especially with original games. Less so with homebrews)

 

This is especially aggravating in Europe since computer steamrolled consoles up to 1990 yet today if you listen to "gaming historians", the Atari 2600 then the NES were the queens of the gaming field (with the Master System, that shared the European market 40/60 with the NES, mostly forgotten).

(on a side note it also mean that computers are also an exception, with PAL being the dominant format for the most popular platforms since most games come from Europe)

I could add (so many little differences) at least in Europe, the computer scene had many "local" games, made by local people and focused on very local things.

One example : French singer Renaud was hugely popular in the 80's, and he got at least one video game based on his songs.

This is somethign you may have seen on the 2600 but was completely gone on the NES.

 

I think that also, the hardware being one generation ahead also made them hard to classify at first.

The 16 bits computers arrived in 1985, before the NES came out! And they petered out in the 90's, replaced by the IBM PC, as the 16 bits console came.

 

 

Edited January 20, 2023 by CatPix

[zzip]

50 minutes ago, CatPix said:

Console gamers are usually more adamant in preserving their hardware "as is" with the exception of A/V -HDMI mods.

Computer games are usually very happy to upgrade their machines (to ridiculous levels sometime if you consider the Amiga scene).

And because of that the discussions in the computer forums tends to be quite tech focused, rather than about games

 

 

[CatPix]

Someone should bother comparing if there are really more topics on tech, rather than computer forums having the same number of "games" topic but much more tech topics.

[82-T/A]

On 1/20/2023 at 1:52 AM, jeff20 said:

Gaming historians, are there any segregationists' arguments for discussing consoles and home computers apart from one another?  For example, (if one subscribes to the idea of console generations) it seems the C64 and VIC 20 are essential in discussing the 2nd Generation.  Reading some wiki on the subject always seems incomplete. It also feels weird to discuss the Atari XE with the 3rd Generation, ignoring the computer roots.

 

There are even different sections in this forum for the two.  I honestly want to know if there is a reason for this I may be overlooking.

 

 

Hahah, this started out like Civil War discussion.

 

I'd kind of wondered the same thing, but I think it's simply a matter of cost. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s... very few people actually had computers. I know many of us had an Atari computer, or a Commodore computer, or something else like a TRS-80 or Aquarius or Timex Sinclair. Some of us even had PCs (I had an 8088 KayPro) and slogged through monochrome or CGA graphics early on.

 

But the overwhelming vast majority of people during this time did not have a home computer. I didn't even get a home computer until 1985... so my earliest memories until that point were just of the Atari 2600. Most people wanted to play games, but there was little need for a Computer for home use. No one is going to spend big money on a home computer just so they can do spreadsheets and type a school paper up, especially if they didn't also have a printer (and schools expected you to hand-write things at the time). So... I think game systems became far more prevalent in the homes than PCs did early-on, and it just stayed that way.

 

Today, I don't know that there's really much difference other than the fact that people who still play games, likely want to play it on their big screen TV. The number of people who actually play computer games (rather than tablet games, etc.) is a very, very small number of people. But like... the XBOX is basically a modern day computer, so is the Playstation, etc. The Atari VCS runs some kind of Linux I guess... so we're pretty close to a compatible framework.

 

I really do think that the days of consoles is somewhat limited.

[+madman]

'Eh, post deleted. No need for jokes in here.

[Bromosel]

Well, my TI-99/4a came to me at Xmas 1982. Several game modules followed but I was very interested in learning to write programs in TI-BASIC and later XB. I spent a lot of time typing down programs from magazines to store them 'forever' on tapes, mostly games. Whilst typing down the programs I learned a lot about the structure of TI-BASIC.

In 1984 at school we had a physics theme about the solar system. At that time there was a printed simulation in a magazine that showed the movement of the planets around the sun. Our school did not have computers at that time and I think I was the first one that had a programmable comuter. I talked to my teacher and he was very interested to use this simulation in one of his lessons.

So they day came when I took my TI to school, connected it to the Tube-TV and the teacher and my classmates were very impressed. It was obviously the first time they saw such a computer simulation.

After running 1 hour the TI hung up, it had a heat problem. Back at home my father identified an overheating IC inside and he removed this IC, placed it on a passive cooling unit and screwed it at the back of my TI.

From then on the TI never ever hung up anymore. 🥰

Many of my friends had the game consoles like VCS2600 or Intellivison. But I had a real programmable computer...

 

Cheers,

Dirk

 

[zylon]

Some of it, likely had to do with licensing back then. The Atari v Coleco battle over Donkey Kong, is a well known example. I'd imagine some of that carries over today still.

[MrMaddog]

On 2/13/2023 at 6:56 PM, zylon said:

Some of it, likely had to do with licensing back then. The Atari v Coleco battle over Donkey Kong, is a well known example. I'd imagine some of that carries over today still.

 

Back then it mattered, not only the difference between gaming consoles and home computers as well as rights for either cartridge or disk/tape media.

 

Nowadays the PC (primary Steam) counts as a fourth gaming platform with all the console ports made for it...

[zzip]

On 1/20/2023 at 1:52 AM, jeff20 said:

 For example, (if one subscribes to the idea of console generations) it seems the C64 and VIC 20 are essential in discussing the 2nd Generation.  Reading some wiki on the subject always seems incomplete. It also feels weird to discuss the Atari XE with the 3rd Generation, ignoring the computer roots.

C64 would be a 3rd generation system if it was fit into the console generation paradigm   XE should be as well.   2nd generation systems were extremely limited in graphics/sound memory.   Think 2600, Channel F, RCA Studio II.  Maybe the VIC-20 would fit 2nd generation, but certainly not the C64.  If you think about it, the 400/800/XL/XE/5200 line was designed to be the replacement for the 2600 and the C64 was to replace the VIC20 so it doesn't make sense to lump them all in the same generation.

 

This was understood back in the day, but somewhere along the line there was a historical revisionism that anything before NES was 2nd generation no matter how powerful.   They used the crash as an excuse, but the C64 thrived during the crash and paralleled the NES commercial life so how could it possibly be lumped into the previous gen?

 

On 1/20/2023 at 1:52 AM, jeff20 said:

Gaming historians, are there any segregationists' arguments for discussing consoles and home computers apart from one another?

These days consoles have hard drives or SSD to install games to, and controllers with lots of buttons, so the difference between console gaming and computer gaming has never been narrower.   But this wasn't always the case!    Consoles used to run code off ROM carts or CD-ROM where the code was fixed.  You often couldn't save games or even high scores,  while computers had floppy disks and later hard disks which made saving game state easy.   So two parallel game industries appeared in the 80s,  one catering to consoles and the other catering to computers.  A lot of games didn't cross over from computer to console or vice versa.

 

On the computer side the extra memory, keyboard and storage opened up entire new game genres-   war games, RPGs, text adventures, simulations.   Some of these did later appear on consoles in stripped-down versions, but consoles mostly focused on action games and they often did action games better than computers because they were more likely to have game-focused hardware.

 

The parallel game industries continued through the 90s and probably ended sometime in the 00s.   Instead of getting stripped down versions of computer games on console, you started seeing the console and computer games get built from the same code base and look and play identically.

 

So for someone who's been around, it makes sense to treat them separately since they were such different experiences.  

[Keatah]

Today I see consoles and computers as variations on a single architecture of x86. Different implementations and styles, but little more.

[MrMaddog]

7 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Today I see consoles and computers as variations on a single architecture of x86. Different implementations and styles, but little more.

 

True, I use my Xbox as an extension of my gaming PC...

 

 

[Tanooki]

Considering since primarily the PS3/360 era most of the games came to Steam and/or GOG that were not first/second party games for Sony and much of the MS did since well...Windows and PC based 360 controller sales it's easy to call them just walled garden outdated PCs of convenience sold as consoles because they are.  That's the only reason why the considered outdated backwater Nintendo stands out because they won't put their crap on PC, and their systems are more uniquely designed in odder ways to just not be a x86 style PC too.

[leech]

On 4/29/2023 at 6:50 PM, Tanooki said:

Considering since primarily the PS3/360 era most of the games came to Steam and/or GOG that were not first/second party games for Sony and much of the MS did since well...Windows and PC based 360 controller sales it's easy to call them just walled garden outdated PCs of convenience sold as consoles because they are.  That's the only reason why the considered outdated backwater Nintendo stands out because they won't put their crap on PC, and their systems are more uniquely designed in odder ways to just not be a x86 style PC too.

The opposite is true to this though, most of the non-Nintendo games for the Switch are the same games that are released for Linux native.  At least it sure seems that way.  Not sure if that just makes it that much easier to port or what though.

[MrTrust]

On 1/20/2023 at 1:52 AM, jeff20 said:

For example, (if one subscribes to the idea of console generations) it seems the C64 and VIC 20 are essential in discussing the 2nd Generation.

 

Well, they're not.

Until roughly '93, console gaming was largely an effort to translate coin-operated amusements into home products, while computer gaming was largely concerned with translating tabletop gaming into computerized form, whether that was hex-and-counter wargames, pen-and-paper RPGs, choose-your-own-adventure books, etc.  There was some overlap; just about every machine that could play games got some form of Pac-Man, and every console ended up getting some passable version of Wizardry, or some JRPG that was highly derivative of it.  There were genres that were popular on one or the other that didn't quite fit either paradigm like flight sims or Zelda-likes.

 

Broadly speaking, though, the games everyone is interested in on consoles come out of the arcades, either directly, or by extension of ideas established there.  The games everyone is interested on PC are derived from Dungeons & Dragons and Battletech and so on, again, either directly or by extension.  There are many people who are fans of both, but they're two very different kinds of thing.  Two groups talking two different languages.

When Doom hits in '93, the blood/brain barrier gets broken.  It hybridized the two things, not in a way that hadn't been done before, but in a way hardly anyone had actually played before.  Shortly thereafter, that became a viable thing to do on consoles, and at the same time, computers became less of a niche appliance in the home.  A lot more cross-pollenation happens from there.

 

Now the distinction is entirely meaningless.  Probably has been since at least '05, but at the time being referenced, the worlds are almost entirely distinct unless you're talking about electronic gaming at the most zoomed-out, low resolution.  

[MrMaddog]

Very true, but don't forget there was a time in the early 80's when home computers from Atari, Commodore & TI had cartridge ports so they received the same type of games as the other 2nd generation consoles.  But of course that didn't last long so computers went off to having disk or tape based games while consoles moved on in a different direction.

 

Honestly I still wouldn't group those types of computers with game consoles because they can also do other things, including the Atari XEGS (IMHO of course).

[MrTrust]

1 hour ago, MrMaddog said:

Very true, but don't forget there was a time in the early 80's when home computers from Atari, Commodore & TI had cartridge ports so they received the same type of games as the other 2nd generation consoles.

 

Yeah, and the 2600 got a version of Star Raiders and had a cassette drive.

 

Eddie Van Halen was 5' 8" and Yao Ming is 7' 6", so obviously we can't say the Dutch are taller than the Chinese no matter how clear and obvious the trend is, and even if you qualify it up the wazoo and make it known you're aware of statistical outliers.  You will be told not to forget them.  Every time.

 

Did this happen before the internet, where people just absolutely cannot accept even the most trivial, uncontroversial generality?  Nothing personal, but this drives me nuts.

[Albert]

On 1/20/2023 at 12:52 AM, jeff20 said:

There are even different sections in this forum for the two.  I honestly want to know if there is a reason for this I may be overlooking.

Well, I can answer this as far as the forum is concerned.  They are distinctly different systems, and there's not necessarily a significant overlap between the two as far as fans go.  Yes, of course there are people who love the Atari 2600 as well as Atari 8-bit computers, but there are also a LOT of people who love the 2600 and have no interest in Atari's line of computers, and vice versa. 

 

Additionally, there is a LOT of traffic for some of these forums.  The Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit Computers forums are both very active, and it makes sense to me to keep them separate so it's easier to find topics related to one or the other.  I mean, we could just shove everything into one giant forum like GBATemp (or two), but I'm not a big fan of that, I prefer things to be organized.  LOL, now that I go look at GBATemp, I see they now have a typical, organized forum setup. 

 

 ..Al

[zzip]

14 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Did this happen before the internet, where people just absolutely cannot accept even the most trivial, uncontroversial generality?  Nothing personal, but this drives me nuts.

It's always been like this as long as I can remember.   Someone will always find an exception to the point your making and act like it completely disproves the entire trend you've identified.

 

Well except there was that one guy who didn't do it that one time so I guess this isn't a thing