This year, the Nintendo DS will be six years old. The PSP and Xbox 360 will turn five, and the Wii and PS3 celebrate four solid years of existence. In other words, we are now well into what is known as the seventh generation of video games, and with no end in sight, it may end up being the longest. This generation has seen gaming sales records shattered year after year, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 recently hitting the billion-dollar mark. The industry is constantly evolving and moving forward with new technology, innovative titles, jaw-dropping visuals, and unique gameplay; video games are also becoming more mainstream, meaning that within a decade or two, gaming should be as acceptable as watching movies or reading books. This may be the most technologically advanced period in the history of video games… but is it the best? More importantly, is it your favorite? If not, what is your most beloved generation in gaming?

Though you could spent countless hours studying the history of video games and debating the exact start and end dates of each generation, these periods of the industry are most easily defined as centering around all of the major consoles that released in the same timeframe. This generation, that means the 360, Wii, PS3, DS, and PSP; last generation was the PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and Game Boy Advance (and, officially, the Dreamcast, though its awkward 1999 release helped contribute to its failure). The fifth generation included the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and Atari Jaguar, and was the beginning of the end of console-making for both Sega and Atari. Preceding Sony’s first console and the demise of longtime hardware publisher Atari was the fourth gaming generation. This included the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive, which were in direct competition with Nintendo’s Super NES. Despite being vastly technically superior to Sega and Nintendo's offerings, the TurboGrafx-16 and Neo-Geo were generation four’s losers.



The third generation, and first that I was actually a part of, came immediately after the video game crash of 1983, and introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy to the world; this would change the industry forever. The Sega Master System and Atari 7800 also did fairly well, although neither is usually remembered as fondly as the NES and Game Boy. The second generation, on the other hand, helped lead to the aforementioned crash due to a glut of cheaply-produced games. The main consoles during this era were the Magnovox Odyssey 2, the Atari 2600, the Fairchild Channel F, Intellivision, the Vectrex, and the ColecoVision—but that’s not even every home console produced during this period, which helps to explain the crash. Before all of that, though, the 1972 launch of the Magnavox Odyssey began what would be known as the first gaming generation. The Odyssey was packaged with a ping pong game that would then blatantly be ripped off by Atari and renamed Pong.

Now that we’ve gone through a brief history of video games, it’s time to choose which generation you like the most. Maybe it’s the one that made the biggest impression on your life, or perhaps the era that yielded your personal favorite video game. Personally, it’s a hard choice. I was born in 1983, so I completely missed the first two generations, and the NES was my first home console. Because my parents didn’t want my brothers and me to have more than one system, I also didn’t partake in the fourth generation other than occasionally playing some 16-bit games at friends’ houses. In the fifth gen, I was on board with the PS1 in 1995, but didn’t get a Nintendo 64 until 2001, by which time generation six had already begun. I also started college in 2001, meaning that for the most part, I was far too poor to participate in the latest video game crazes, instead replaying the same PlayStation games over and over for four years. I started to get caught up on the sixth generation just as the current generation started, but by 2007, I owned every seventh-gen system. I’ve also kept my old ones and collected a few more along the way.



If I really, really had to choose my favorite gaming generation, I think it would have to be the fifth one, with generation three coming in a really close second. Gen three was my first, but the fifth generation—and more specifically, the PlayStation—served me extremely well. The PS1 introduced me to role-playing games with Final Fantasy VII, and I was never the same after that. The Nintendo 64 was the first console I bought with my own money, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remains one of my favorite games. I mentioned that the PS1 and N64 got me through college; when I couldn’t afford to buy new games, I was still happy to play my fifth-generation favorites over and over again. Even when I could finally afford to buy a used PS2 in 2006, I still kept my PS1 hooked up in another room. I used my PlayStation regularly for over a decade, which is the main reason that the fifth generation of gaming is probably my favorite.

Which generation do you remember the most fondly, and why?