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Sixth generation of video game consoles

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The sixth-generation era (sometimes inaccurately referred to as the 128-bit era; see section below) refers to the computer and video games, video game consoles, and video game handhelds available at the turn of the 21st century. Platforms of the sixth generation are the Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo GameCube, Sony PlayStation 2, and Microsoft Xbox.

Video game consoles

PlayStation 2 dominated sales, with over 100 million units shipped to retailers [1]. Xbox was a distant second, with 22 million units [2], according to the latest available official figures, and Nintendo was third with 20.61 million GameCubes sold [3]. The Sega Dreamcast is thought to have sold roughly 10 million consoles despite its shorter lifetime.

Number of bits

Bit ratings for consoles largely fell by the wayside after the 32-bit era. The number of “bits” cited in console names referred to the CPU word size, but there was little to be gained from increasing the word size much beyond 32-bits; performance depended on other factors, such as processor speed, graphics processor speed, bandwidth and memory size.

The Sega Dreamcast, the first of the “128-bit” consoles, has a dual-issue 32-bit CPU core, 64-bit GPU, and 64-bit data bus although the geometry sub-processor GPU can perform internal math on 128-bit words. One of the PlayStation 2's many processors is known as the “128-bit Emotion Engine” but has a dual-issue 64-bit core; the graphics synthesizer has a 2560-bit DRAM bus. But the Nintendo GameCube is more powerful than the PS2, with only a single 64-bit CPU core. The Microsoft Xbox, the most powerful of the sixth-generation era consoles, uses a 32-bit CPU and 256-bit GPU, a configuration that is becoming standard in many desktop computers. The importance of the number of bits in the modern console gaming market has thus decreased due to the use of components that process data in varying word sizes. It is also important to note that most game companies sell on “n-bit talk” to over-emphasize the hardware capabilities of their system. The Sega Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 were the last systems to use the term “128-bit” in their marketing to describe their capability.

Video game handhelds

During the sixth generation era, the handheld game console market exploded, with the introduction of new devices from many different manufacturers. Nintendo maintained their large market share of the handheld market with the release in 2001 of the highly upgraded Game Boy called the Game Boy Advance. Two redesigns of this system followed. The first, the Game Boy Advance SP in 2003 and the second, the Game Boy Micro in 2005. Also introduced was the Neo Geo Pocket Color in 1998 and Bandai's WonderSwan Color launched in Japan in 1999. Notably, Korean company GamePark introduced their GP32 handheld in 2001, and with it came the dawn of open-source handheld consoles.

A major new addition to the market was the trend for corporations to include a large number of "non-gaming" features into their handhelds. Everything from cell phones, MP3 players, portable movie players, to Palm Pilot-like features began to pop up on a regular basis during this generation. The first of these was Nokia's N-Gage, which was released in 2003 and doubled primarily as a mobile phone. It subsequently went through a redesign in 2004 and was renamed the N-Gage QD. A second handheld, the Zodiac from Tapwave was released in 2004 and was based on the PalmOS; it added numerous features typically found in PDAs.

With more and more PDAs arriving during the previous generation, the difference between consumer electronics and traditional computing began to blur- and cheap console technology grew from that blur. It was said of PDAs that they are "the computers of handheld gaming" because of their multi-purpose capabilities and the increasingly powerful computer hardware that resided within them- the capability existed to move gaming beyond the last generations 16-bit limitations. However, PDAs were still geared towards the typical buisnessman, and lacked new, affordable software franchises to compete with dedicated handheld gaming consoles.

With more and more handhelds arriving towards the end of this generation, it gets harder to locate exactly where the sixth generation ends and where the new seventh generation begins. It is believed that the seventh generation began in late 2004 with the introduction of Nintendo's Nintendo DS and Sony's PlayStation Portable.

Video games

Four horse race

Major developers such as Electronic Arts and Activision for the most part released games covering the PC, Xbox, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast and GameCube. Notable cross-platform games released every year include EA Sports titles and the Tony Hawk series.

Controversies

Main article: Video game controversy

The sixth generation era was believed by some to be a dark age for video game players in terms of controversy. This era became the most controversial, with extensive criticism of "objectionable" content such as sex, crime, violence, profanity, drug use and social propaganda as well as topics of debate such as religion, politics, feminism, and economics. However, many people will note that controversies are hardly unique to the sixth generation, and go back at least as far as the early 90s with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. The earliest occurrences of such public outcry dated, in fact, as far back as the 70s, with the games Death Race and Custer's Revenge.

The sixth generation was notable because it spurred lawmakers into taking action against the video game industry. The most infamous was the Grand Theft Auto games with Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City facing lawsuits over alleged racial slurs and influencing minors to commit crimes, while Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was briefly given an adult rating and banned from stores over the availability of an abandoned sex mini-game using the Hot Coffee mod.

The sixth generation also covered the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and The Pentagon, which had a huge impact on the entertainment industry as well as the video game industry forcing many games to be toned down. Most notable was Metal Gear Solid 2, which prior to its release depicted the destruction of the Statue of Liberty and a good portion of Manhattan. Similarly, several undisclosed modifications were made in Grand Theft Auto III, most notably the change of the police cars colour scheme (the old scheme resembled that of NYPD's older blue and white design).

Emulation and retro gaming

Main article: Console emulator

Due to the increased usage of emulators and the increasing ease of finding ROM images of previous video game consoles, most notably the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Master System, and the Sega Genesis, the sixth generation of consoles coincided with the rise of console emulation.

It was also a time when an increasing number of retro games were being enhanced or redistributed on newer systems. Nintendo, for example, introduced a line of "classic" NES and SNES games for their Game Boy Advance handheld. Enhanced games include Wild ARMs: Alter Code F, Square Enix's Final Fantasy Origins, and Nintendo's Metroid: Zero Mission. Also, an increasing number of third-party developers released anthology collection games such as Midway Games, Capcom, Namco, Atari, and Sega, even though Atari and Sega both released new, enhanced versions of their retro titles. Also, some video game characters have collections of their past games (e.g. Sonic Maga Collection Plus & Sonic Gems Collection; Mega Man Anniversary Collection & Mega Man X Collection.) Additionally, this is also a time when certain video games or video game series that were originally confined to Japan came to North America and Europe.

Sixth Generation consoles

Video game consoles released during the sixth generation era include:

Note: First year of release is the first year of the system's worldwide availability.

Handheld consoles

Video game handhelds released during the sixth generation era include:

Note: First year of release is the first year of the system's availability in the world.

Video game franchises established during the sixth-generation era

Milestone titles

  • Shenmue went down in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most expensive title to date($20,000,000). Produced by AM2, this game helped set the graphics standards of its time.
  • Halo was the Microsoft Xbox's most successful launch title. Its sequel Halo 2 set records as the highest grossing release in entertainment history [4] and was a very successful killer app for the Xbox Live online gaming service.
  • Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels for PlayStation 2 (later Xbox) brought violence and other potentially objectionable content in video games back into the mainstream spotlight, thus reviving the video game controversy. The series remains the highest selling franchise in the US for the past ten years. It signalled the prominence of mature gamers in today's market.
  • Metroid Prime remains one of the Nintendo GameCube's highest rated titles, as well as an outstanding example of how cooperation between Nintendo and a second-party studio revived a long-time franchise.
  • Soul Calibur for the Sega Dreamcast is widely considered one of the greatest fighting games of all time, and is the only game of its genre, on any platform, to have ever received a perfect 10.0 rating from IGN (review) and Gamespot.
  • Fire Emblem (Blazing Sword, the seventh in the series), formerly a Japan-only franchise, was finally released to American and European gamers during late 2004. From there, the series has continued to be released worldwide with each new installment. It is highly speculated that Fire Emblem: Sword of Seals(Blazing Sword's "sequel") is expected to be released globally sometime soon. Ths is probably due to Blazing Sword's cliffhanger of an ending. However, no word has been confirmed yet.

References

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