What’s the best game console ever made? It’s an impossible question to answer definitively... personal preference and other factors means that nearly everyone you ask will have a different response, and no one answer will be more or less valid than the others. (Except the guy in the back who said the game dot com. Stop screwing around and take this seriously!)
Instead, let’s look at something that’s easier to objectively measure. Which of history’s game consoles and handhelds were best prepared to outlive their natural lifespans with smartly designed hardware that stands the test of time? Here now are my choices for the ten most future-proofed game systems, in no particular order.
NEO-GEO
It may have been entirely too expensive for the average gamer, with a six hundred dollar price tag and two hundred dollar games, but the Neo-Geo was a lean, mean, (too much) fighting machine in arcades, with a lower price than competing arcade cabinets and the option to swap out cartridges for when players inevitably lost interest in launch titles like Ninja Combat and Cyber-Lip.
Designed by Alpha Denshi as a pumped up version of its earlier arcade hardware, the Neo-Geo had more than enough muscle to impress arcade goers when it was first launched in 1990. With its massive sprites, flashy scaling and rotation, and cartridges that tipped the scales at up to 330 megabits, the Neo-Geo remained a dominant force in arcades for thirteen years. It eventually succumbed to the decline of the arcade market and SNK’s own flagging fortunes in 2003, being discontinued that year.
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| Dramatic cut scenes like this one from Fatal Fury 3 were the Neo-Geo's specialty. You know what they say about big sprites with big feet! |
ATARI 2600
With 128 bytes of RAM, absolutely no video RAM, and tone-deaf one channel sound, the Atari 2600 doesn’t seem like much in 2025. It wasn’t even all that impressive next to its archrival, the Intellivision, released a couple of years later. However, some of the programmers from Atari, and later Activision, found a way to grow flowers in that rocky soil. If you can stay one step ahead of the beam that draws Atari 2600 graphics line by line, you can layer the machine’s 128 colors, and get attractive if somewhat primitive results. All these years later, Atari 2600 graphics remain among the most iconic of any game system, looking like the video game equivalent of cave paintings. When you see those bars of color sandwiched together to create Pitfall Harry, or a flying saucer, or the frantic turkey from Eggomania, you know exactly which system you’re playing.
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| Solaris is the pinnacle of Atari 2600 game design. Games just don't get any better than this on this hamstrung hardware. |
Look, the core technology is from 1977, and it cost fifty dollars in 1987. These days, the chips needed to boost the 2600’s capabilities might cost you three dollars plus shipping from Mouser. The Atari 2600 doesn’t strictly need that boost in performance to make an effective game, but with technology that primitive and prices that low, you can afford to splurge.
SEGA GENESIS
The Sega Genesis and the Super NES have a contentious relationship, sparking the bitter console wars of the 1990s. Truth is, both of these machines are excellent, but they take different approaches in their design. The Super NES is the show pony, loaded with all the bells and whistles afforded by early 1990s gaming technology. It’s got scaling and rotation, once only a feature in costly arcade games! It’s got a sound chip from Sony with startlingly realistic instruments and crisp digitized voice! It can display 256 colors! Like, all at the same time!
(If you weren’t alive at the time, this was a big deal in 1991.)
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| Genesis does! Still! (image from the Earthion web site) |
The Sega Genesis keeps on tugging at the plow to this day, thanks to SGDK and an enthusiastic base of dedicated coders. Dream arcade ports like Final Fight, R-Type, and Sunset Riders are in development, and don’t suffer from the limited cartridge sizes that had hobbled past Genesis arcade conversions. Most recently, Yuzo Koshiro’s Earthion, a Neo-Geo quality shooter that somehow found itself on the Genesis, proves that there’s still work left in this old horse.
SUPER NINTENDO
Once upon a time, Nintendo was at the forefront of video game technology, rather than lagging a generation or two behind. Its long-awaited sequel to the Nintendo Entertainment System was dramatically improved in nearly every area, and even leapfrogged contemporary consoles like the Sega Genesis and Turbografx-16 with a warm, friendly color palette and features once limited to costly arcade cabinets and home computers. One headliner was Mode 7, which let programmers smoothly resize and rotate onscreen objects. Nearly every Super NES game used this in some capacity, and its racing and flying games were almost uniformly smoother and more pleasant to the eyes than their Sega Genesis counterparts. Barring extra hardware on the cartridge or a Sega CD attachment or divine intervention, the Sega Genesis was never, ever going to handle a game like Pilotwings.
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| Colors on the Super NES often have a radiant glow, as seen in this screenshot from Sony and Ukiyotei's Sky Blazer. |
SEGA MASTER SYSTEM
The Texas Instruments TMS9918 was a dominant force in early consumer technology. It’s a very basic video chip, with sixteen preset colors and tiny, single colored sprites. It’s just good enough for an early 1980s game console or computer, but more importantly, it was cheap, which is why so many game consoles and computers from the early 1980s used it. You can find a TMS9918 in the MSX computer line, the ColecoVision, its Japanese cousin the Sega SG-1000, Texas Instruments’ own TI 99/4A... I could go on, but it’s a big list. If you know how to program games for any one of these machines, you know how to program games for all of them.
Ubiquitous as it was, the TMS9918 had numerous shortcomings that wouldn’t stand up to the demands of late 1980s gaming. It had no hardware scrolling, an essential ingredient in action/adventure games. Its color output was limited to the point of distress, and the sprites were feeble and flickery, no match for the recently released Famicom (our own NES).
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| It's hard to overstate how impressive Phantasy Star is when compared to the average NES RPG. These dungeons fill the screen, and the walls move smoothly with every step. |
The improved graphics chip pays dividends in Master System games like Rampage, which is light years ahead of its NES counterpart visually, and R-Type, an ambitious conversion of the cutting edge arcade shooter that Nintendo didn’t dare attempt on the NES. The Master System was so ahead of the curve technologically that the hardware would be recycled in the handheld Game Gear five years later, and continued to receive support into the 21st century thanks to Brazil’s TecToy and dozens of hobbyist programmers.
Take it from someone who’s actually made a game for this hardware... it’s pretty keen. Hideki Sato finished what Texas Instruments started when he designed the Master System video chip, and where visuals are concerned, it’s as good as 8-bit gaming gets.
GAMECUBE AND KIN
It’s the game system so nice, Nintendo released it thrice! For sheer staying power, even the Master System (recycled into the portable Game Gear) can’t match the GameCube and its two successors, all using the same core PowerPC hardware. Originally appearing in late 1990s Macintosh computers, the PowerPC is the heart of the GameCube, and its successor the Wii, and ITS successor the Wii U.
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| Standout GameCube release Mario Kart: Double Dash still looks sharp some twenty years later. (image from The Next Level) |
The GameCube hardware hit its lofty peak with the Nintendo Wii, a game console with much of the same hardware, but a faster clock speed, an emphasis on motion controls, and surprisingly handy online features. (I used the News and Weather channels regularly in 2007.) It was well behind the Xbox 360 and PS3 in raw horsepower, and couldn’t even output a high definition video signal, but its audience of casual and lapsed gamers didn’t care. These days, the Wii is easily hacked, is a fairly capable emulation station, and makes a great stand-in for the GameCube, since it effectively is one.
The Wii U was a fridge too far for the GameCube family of systems, a TV and social network focused boondoggle with an oversized touchscreen/gamepad hybrid, and performance barely on the level of the Xbox 360. However, as a multi-core machine, it is the most powerful system in the GameCube lineage, and hackers swear that it’s fantastic for emulation. Personally, I think the Wii is the sweet spot for this hardware... it’s embarrassingly cheap, has an avalanche of homebrew software, and gives you progressive scan in your GameCube games without forcing you to buy a three hundred dollar cable first. What’s not to like?
(Aside from the waggle. That's something that hasn't aged well.)
SONY PLAYSTATION
The Playstation stomped Sega’s Saturn flat in America, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s incredibly powerful hardware for late 1994, when polygons were reserved for CAD programs and costly VR simulations. Hey, now you can get triangles pushed in your face in the comfort of your own home for three hundred dollars! You paid a tenth of that just to play Dactyl Nightmare with a friend at the state fair, and that kind of sucked!
It’s not just that the Playstation was powerful. It’s also supremely user-friendly, to the point where a software package called Net Yaroze let amateur game designers create their own Playstation titles. It was such a comprehensive package that one of the games designed with Net Yaroze was eventually released in stores as Devil Dice (aka Xi).
It’s important to stress that indie games on a video game console was unheard of in the mid 1990s. You just didn’t make an NES game or a Sega Genesis game... the resources and the knowledge weren’t available to ordinary people. You might as well have asked for a unicorn made of rainbows and cotton candy.
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| Early indie darling Devil Dice. I don't totally understand how this game works, but damned if I don't keep trying. (image from John God Games) |
All the good stuff seemed to come to the Playstation in the late 1990s, and it wasn’t just because it was powerful, or popular. Its future-focused, user-friendly hardware attracted developers; the Saturn, which was neither of these things, repelled them. The Saturn’s obstinate hardware, best described as dueling CPUs, didn’t lead to its doom outright, but it couldn’t have helped.
CLASSIC XBOX
The Xbox brand isn’t doing so hot now, but it started off on the right foot with the original Xbox. With a built-in hard drive and the specs of a mid-grade home computer, the Xbox smoked the competition in overall performance. Even its lesser games like Kakuto Chojin at least looked amazing, while killer apps like Dead or Alive 3 played as good as they looked. Years later, with the benefit of the Xbox Series’ upscaling, this magnificent versus fighter somehow looks even better than it did a quarter of a century ago, when it was first released.
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| Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki recently died, but he gained video game immortality with Dead or Alive 3, one of the high points of the fighting game genre. |
(Just be sure to snip the clock capacitor out of yours, if it has one.)
GAME BOY ADVANCE
GAME BOY evolved into GAME BOY ADVANCE! It’s super effective!
I’m probably doing that wrong. Anyway, the Game Boy Advance is the final step in the evolution of the Game Boy line of handheld systems, backward compatible with the previous models, but with a 32-bit processor and state of the art graphics that turns this boy into a Game Man.
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| German developer Shin'En knew how to put the "advance" in Game Boy Advance with showy shooters like Iridion II, shown here. |
Thanks to its robust feature set and a well documented ARM processor, the Game Boy Advance is as much fun to program for as it is to play. It provided more than enough power for a complete conversion of the arcade oldie GORF, including all five stages, several minutes of digitized speech, and even a bonus mode where the player could unlock images by completing challenges. The Game Boy Advance could do it all without breaking a sweat, in contrast with the original Game Boy from 1989, where everything seemed frustratingly out of reach. Now you’re playing with power... pocket power!
SONY PSP
Many portable game systems were released to challenge Nintendo’s dominance in the handheld market. Nearly all of them were quickly eclipsed by the Game Boy and its successors, but Sony’s PSP is the first handheld to present a serious threat to Nintendo’s stranglehold on the portable gaming market. With a MIPS processor similar to those in Sony’s home consoles, the PSP was designed to take handheld gaming to a new plateau, vastly superior to the already powerful Game Boy Advance and the recently released Nintendo DS. Americans were put off by the high retail price, but the PSP was a smash hit with in its native Japan. Living space is at a premium in this cluster of islands, and Japanese players yearned for a game system with the best possible performance at the smallest possible size.
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| The best PSP games approach a PS2 level of visual fidelity, and look even better with upscaling on emulators. Shown here: Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny. |
The only thing that held the system back was its sluggish UMD drive, and even that was addressed in later years, when the size of the PSP’s Memory Stick Pro was raised from 32 megabytes to 16 gigabytes and higher. When you can store your entire PSP library on a stick the size of a postage stamp and cut your load times in half as a bonus, the optical drive becomes a vestigial organ. You may have needed it once, but not anymore!
The PSP is remarkably future-proof, not just because of its solid state storage, but because the machine’s considerable power means that it can run every other console’s games through the magic of emulation. It only does everything... including some things Sony would prefer you didn’t do.
Genesis. It's an old car with a string engine. Might not be flashy but it gets around
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