Digital Gaming

This week we talk about Sony, Nintendo, and the Playstation.
We also discuss Grand Theft Auto, the 3DO, and digital dark ages.
Recommended Book: 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi
Transcript
The earliest video game consoles that were made to be used in the home, as opposed to being set up in an arcade, were hardwired like their arcade kin. That means rather than being able to play a bunch of different games, they were basically just single-game boxes: you would buy a machine that allowed you to play Pong, for instance, and if you wanted to play another game, even by the same maker, Atari, you would have to buy another whole console with its own screen, controls, etc, to do so.
That was the state of the art in the early to mid 1970s. By the late-70s, the concept of swappable games became reality with the introduction of what are called ROM cartridges. ROM stands for read-only memory and is a type of storage common in computers and other devices, which allows whatever you store on it to persist, which is a contrast to RAM, which is the type of memory that determines how much you can do on a device at any given moment, and which disappears when the device is turned off.
So these ROM cartridges were kind of like the portion of the hard drive that’s used to boot up your computer, storing the bare-basics of the system so it can be initialized and understand how to run all the other software that builds upon that baseline. And that memory was stored in durable, plastic cases that made them usable by ordinary, non-techy people. You could buy a game and handle the cartridge, popping it into your game console hardware and removing it, to make way for another game, over and over and over again, and that use would be unlikely to damage the ROM chip.
This same general format was flexible enough that it lasted through the mid-90s, the capacity of the ROM chip continuing to grow as the associated tech improved, and the capabilities of the central console hardware that used these cartridges became more sophisticated. Upgrades were slowly added to the innards of the plastic case, as well, including things like battery backups that enabled saved games, and the Super Nintendo’s Super FX chip, which enabled 3D graphics that would have otherwise been impossible with the contemporary state of the art.
The next generation of gaming consoles relied on another medium, though, and one that had several benefits over the long-lived game cartridge.
CD-ROM discs, which were flat, circular, and contained information that was encoded and read with lasers, had been around in some form since the late-1980s, and were even used in a few early gaming consoles, like the PC Engine CD-ROM, which barely anyone bought, and the Sega-CD add-on for the Sega Genesis, and 3DO consoles, which a few more, but still relatively few people purchased.
The release of the first Sony Playstation, now known as the PS1, in 1994 changed that, though, and this shift was partially the result of…