It seemed like I always had the wrong console. I had Genesis and all my friends had Nintendos. I had an N64, but all of my friends had Playstations. I must have been the only kid in the school district with a Dreamcast and without a PS2.

There's a simple reason for this; price and timing. I knew better than to ask for expensive presents, and I never had any money of my own, so I just didn't have reason to pay attention to video game news. My parents tried their best though; they knew I loved video games whether I asked for them or not. So they did their research and just got unlucky; they always got the cheapest console that was still competitive, but they were cheap because they were unpopular. They could have done a lot worse and gotten a Saturn or a Jaguar, and I love the libraries I accumulated for the machines I had, but my experience with video games would be in isolation. I didn't worry about getting better at games to beat my friends, because they never wanted to play my games, so I could focus on playing the games I wanted to play in the exact way I wanted to play them. Some of the games I spent the most time on I never beat, like Sonic. I just spent all of my times scouring the map, drawing my own guides, looking for every last secret room and hidden message.

Despite my experience, I think the most important difference between consoles is their library of games. Without games consoles are just expensive CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/Netflix players, or completely useless. What makes a great catalog of games is quality, quantity, and marketing. Nintendo always had a moderate quantity of high quality games, and marketing to match. I was too young for the edgy-ness of the Genesis campaign; but I saw Kirby, Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong every time I walked into a video rental place, or picked up a Nintendo Power in the school library. The Genesis had great marks in every category, but the Dreamcast had fewer titles, but a handful of extremely high quality, and crap marketing. Most of my friends had no idea what a Dreamcast was until they came to my house. Playstation had more high quality games than any system before it. All of my friends had Spyro and Crash Bandicoot. I had one friend just down the street who owned Legends of Dragoon; that game required four CDs! I was so jealous. I knew I loved RPGs, and I was just heartbroken that I couldn't participate in the Final Fantasy series. Sony's marketing was know joke either, but it came hand in hand with star characters like Spyro the Dragon, Cloud and his Buster Sword, and Lara Croft's…polygons. They were fresh and badass, practically selling themselves based on imagery alone.

So what makes a console? Its games and their marketing. What makes good games? Gameplay and great characters, both of which can be aided, but not solved, by improved hardware. And then finally there's price, but it is not as important as you might imagine in America. Perhaps in the early days uneducated parents made decisions with heavy financial consideration, but in today's market customers are well informed and willing to budget for exactly what they want, no matter their income.

Game Boy is an outlier I believe. Nobody thinks of a Game Boy as a console; it is virtually a category unto itself. The thing was truly ubiquitous because it had the hottest game the industry has ever seen, Pokemon. Even I had a translucent purple Game Boy color, but the only games I owned were Pokemon Red and Blue. The PSP came and went. I think I knew one kid with a grandma who owned a GameGear. But for two or three years it was difficult to find a single boy on the playground without a gameboy and a Pokemon cartridge. So it is truly unfair to lump Game Boys in with non-portable consoles.