Media Notes / The History of Video Games

An index for the various generations of video games, telling the development of the medium and indexing games in each generation.

Fun fact, categorizing video game systems by generations only began at the start of the 21st century, with the de facto Trope Namer for the idea of numbered console generations being Wikipedia, whose organization of console generations has since become the most commonly agreed upon.

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• The Golden Age of Video Games (first and second generations, 1972-1984 ^note 1989 for the Atari 2600 and 1990 for the Intellivision; The IBM PC is still going strong through Software OSs like Windows)
  • The Great Video Game Crash of 1983
• The 8 Bit Era Of Console Video Games (third generation, 1982-1994 ^note 1998 outside of America)
• The 16 Bit Era Of Console Video Games (fourth generation, 1987-2000)
• The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games (1993-2003 ^note 2006 outside of America)
• The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games (1998-2011)
• The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games (2004-2013)
• The Eighth Generation of Console Video Games (2011-2020)
• The Ninth Generation of Console Video Games (2020-)
• See also Console Wars, which only tells of the competition between each console in each generation.

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