1. The Generations of
Consoles
&
Arcade
Level 2 Games Design
Dan Smith

2. Arcade
In the golden age of games in 1971 the new arcade games were released. One
of the first arcade consoles to come out was the ‘Galaxy Game’ it was the first
coin operated arcade device back then. One of the first games to be brought
to the arcade was Spacewar!
Spacewar! Was one of the first games to be released on consoles like this it’s
capabilities were high back In them days but now it’s really low.
The Galaxy Game had two joysticks one for moving and the other for looking
around / other mechanisms.

3. Earliest Gaming Device
The first ever gaming device to come out was
the ‘Cathode ray tube amusement device’. This
was made in 1947 and it only had a few games
some of them were; target shooting and tic-tactoe.

4. First Generation
The first ever big console to hit the market was the
‘Magnavox Odyssey’. It’s nickname was the ‘Brown Box’
and it was made in the US in 1966. After the prototype
they released the full console shortly after the release
of the arcade games in 1972. The amount of games on
it was 27 and it was distributed into 12 cartridges.
There was not much storage on this device so it was
hard to get all the games.

5. Second Generation
Second generation console was the ‘Atari 2600’ which
was named the golden age of video arcade games in
1978. It was in the golden zone because of the game
Space Invaders it was a massive hit. However, there was
another console made which reached to the top; it’s
name was ‘ColecoVision’ and one of it’s famous games
was Donkey Kong
ColecoVision
Atari 2600

6. Third Generation
After the 1983 video game crash the third gen of
consoles the ‘NES’ or ‘Nintendo Entertainment
System’ was the big seller. This is when games
like Mario and Mario Bros were brought out.

7. Fifth Generation
Not much happened in the fourth generation
except from the release of the ‘Megadrive’ and
‘SNES’. In the fifth generation the biggest and
most tech changing console was released; the
‘Sony PlayStation’. Many, many games were
released onto this platform and the graphics
were phenomenal.

8. Handheld Devices
In the latest generation, many changes have happened, within these changes
the new smartphones/handheld devices have powerful technology that can
run short and huge games. The first ever mobile game was Tetris which was
released on 1994. Over the years graphics and other visuals have been
improved drastically; from Tetris to gta!
Phones can have powerful connectivity, but then again they can sometimes
lack it. It can normally depend on the network provider e.g: O2, EE..
The higher the better!
Handheld devices can also contain some gigabytes of data which can be
easily taken up from big games.