History MediaNotes / TheFifthGenerationOfConsoleVideoGames

* [[/index]]''Franchise/ShiningSeries'':[[index]]

The kingmakers of the generation would be the third party developers. Especially many Japanese developers had for a long time been disgruntled with Nintendo's rather restrictive licensing policies and their insistence on taking a relatively large cut of the sales, which had in many cases made turning a decent profit on their games a difficult task, and this generation would see the blowback from these policies starting to kick in. With Sony emerging on the console scene as a serious competitor, many developers found that the company was willing to offer them far more lucrative deals and a greater degree of freedom. As a result quite a few developers, who up until this point had been synonymous with quality games on Nintendo's consoles, most prominently Creator/{{Capcom}}, Creator/{{Squaresoft}}, and Creator/{{Konami}}, decided to jump ship and make their next big projects or main installments in their running franchises exclusives for the [=PlayStation=]. Another major feather in Sony's cap in this area became manging to win over the fighting game developer Creator/{{Namco}}, whose output up until that point had been pretty much synonymous with Sega's consoles.

An area where many developers would stumble along the way was in attempting to replicate the previous generation's abundance of MascotWithAttitude platformers. While the generation would see a few great success stories when it came to platformers with mascot characters, they were by and large original to this generation, such as Creator/NaughtyDog's ''VideoGame/CrashBandicoot'', Creator/InsomniacGames' ''Franchise/SpyroTheDragon'', and Creator/{{Rare}}'s ''VideoGame/BanjoKazooie''; these were less associated with straight mascot platformers, instead becoming known as the shining examples of the CollectAThonPlatformer, a permuation of the genre that would come to largely dominate the late 90s.

* ''Conker's Pocket Tales''

* ''VideoGame/{{Shantae}}''

[[/index]]

The era marked many developments in terms of how games were controlled. The UsefulNotes/Nintendo64's controller was rather awkwardly designed compared to the more practical format codified by the UsefulNotes/{{SNES}}, but the controller featured a revolutionary development: a thumb-controlled analog stick. The analog stick was key to controlling 3D games because they allowed a fuller range of control over the player character that couldn't be achieved with a D-pad. The UsefulNotes/PlayStation controller didn't initially have an analog stick, but it eventually one-upped the N64 with the [=DualShock=] controller, which featured not one but ''two'' analog sticks: one primarily for controlling the player's movement, and one primarily for the camera. Unlike the [=N64's=] C-pad, a second analog stick gave the camera more freedom in movement -- and Sony didn't [[ExecutiveMeddling patent using the right stick for this purpose]] like Nintendo did with their C-pad -- making CameraScrew and thus InterfaceScrew much less common than in N64 games. The "rumble" feature standard in most controllers today also originated in this era. It originated as the Rumble Pak peripheral for the N64, and it proved highly popular for giving games a new sense of "realism" by vibrating the controller whenever something "forceful" happened within the game. The [=PlayStation=] also adopted this feature for itself in the [=DualShock=] controller, in its case incorporating the rumble into the controller itself rather than it being an add-on. With very few exceptions, every console from that point on has incorporated rumble into the controller.[[note]]The later UsefulNotes/PlayStation3's original "Sixaxis" controller omitted rumble, due to fears it would interfere with the controller's motion control, though it would come back with the later [=DualShock 3=].[[/note]]

* ''VideoGame/PerfectDark''

** ''VideoGame/VirtualBoyWarioLand''
** ''VideoGame/WarioLand3''

* [[/index]]''VideoGame/WarioLand'':[[index]]

* [[/index]]''VideoGame/Quake'':[[index]]