You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII was originally going to be a detective story set in New York City in 1999, starring a character called Hot Blooded Detective Joe. At one point the…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: Game Boy Advance
The Game Boy Advance was born from a machine Nintendo had already given up on. In the early 1990s, Satoru Okada's team built a colour handheld prototype codenamed Project…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: Game Boy Color
The man who invented the Game Boy ended up building its rival. Gunpei Yokoi left Nintendo in 1996 after the Virtual Boy flopped, and in October 1997 news broke that he…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: Game Boy
The Game Boy was cancelled before anyone outside Nintendo ever saw it. In the summer of 1988, company president Hiroshi Yamauchi looked at a prototype, decided the screen…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: GameCube
The GameCube went through a pile of names before it got its real one. Inside Nintendo it was N2000, then Star Cube, then Nintendo Advance. In May 1999 Nintendo announced…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: N64
The Nintendo 64 started life on a supercomputer. Silicon Graphics, a long-established leader in high-performance computing, wanted to shrink its technology into something…PRESS START
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You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: Nintendo 3DS
Nintendo had tried 3D before, and it had not gone well. The Famicom 3D System used shutter glasses and never left Japan. The Virtual Boy in 1995 sold fewer than a million…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: Nintendo DS
In February 2004, with the GameCube selling lukewarm and the Nintendo DS still in development, Nintendo's former president Hiroshi Yamauchi summed up the stakes in one…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: PlayStation Piracy
Sony itself installed chips in PlayStations. Because of an engineering oversight, the console did not produce a proper signal on several older models of television, and…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: PS Vita
Sony announced its next handheld on January 27, 2011, under a code name that sounded like a filing cabinet: "Next Generation Portable" (NGP). It aimed for PlayStation 3…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: PS1
The PlayStation started out as a Nintendo product. On the first day of the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony announced its partnership with Nintendo and a new console, the…
You had to be thereYou Had To Be There: PS2
The best-selling title at the PlayStation 2's Japanese launch was not a game. According to Shuhei Yoshida, who later ran Sony's studios, it was a DVD of The Matrix. Sony…
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Console icons for Game Boy, GBC, GBA, DS, PSP, PS1, N64, Dreamcast, SNES, NES, Genesis, Game Gear, Neo Geo and TurboGrafx-16 from retro-game-console-icons by KyleBing (GPL-3.0).