17 Facts About Game consoles

Video game consoles are a specialized form of a home computer geared towards video game playing, designed with affordability and accessibility to the general public in mind, but lacking in raw computing power and customization.

Further, modern Game consoles can serve as replacements for media players with capabilities to play films and music from optical media or streaming media services.

The first consoles were capable of playing only a very limited number of games built into the hardware.

Programmable Game consoles using swappable ROM cartridges were introduced with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976, though popularized with the Atari 2600 released in 1977.

Some consoles are considered dedicated consoles, in which games available for the console are "baked" onto the hardware, either by being programmed via the circuitry or set in the read-only flash memory of the console.

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The user can typically switch between games on dedicated consoles using hardware switches on the console, or through in-game menus.

Persistent computer memory was expensive, so dedicated consoles were generally limited to the use of processor registers for storage of the state of a game, thus limiting the complexities of such titles.

However, Game consoles differ from computers as most of the hardware components are preselected and customized between the console manufacturer and hardware component provider to assure a consistent performance target for developers.

Whereas personal computer motherboards are designed with the needs for allowing consumers to add their desired selection of hardware components, the fixed set of hardware for Game consoles enables console manufacturers to optimize the size and design of the motherboard and hardware, often integrating key hardware components into the motherboard circuitry itself.

All game consoles require player input through a game controller to provide a method to move the player character in a specific direction and a variation of buttons to perform other in-game actions such as jumping or interacting with the game world.

Some newer Game consoles include optional support for mouse and keyboard devices.

Since the Channel F, nearly all game consoles have featured the ability to purchase and swap games through some form, through those forms have changes with improvements in technology.

Certain Game consoles saw various add-ons or accessories that were designed to attach to the existing console to extend its functionality.

Over time the launch price of base consoles units has generally risen to about, with the average game costing.

Since the Nintendo Entertainment System, console pricing has stabilized on the razorblade model, where the consoles are sold at little to no profit for the manufacturer, but they gain revenue from each game sold due to console licensing fees and other value-added services around the console .

Mario caught on quickly when the NES released in the West, and when the next generation of Game consoles arrived, other manufacturers pushed their own mascots to the forefront of their marketing, most notably Sega with the use of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Further, with the number of available consoles growing with the fifth and sixth generations, game developers became pressured to which systems to focus on, and ultimately narrowed their target choice of platforms to those that were the best-selling.