Even in the 70s and 80s they were coming up with cooler names for consoles, like the Magnavox Odyssey and the Intellivision. Atari named a bunch of their consoles after big cats, though they didn’t live up to their names. At least there was some imagination.
“Dreamcast” is probably the single best gaming console name of all time, too.
Retro Sega systems stand out with their cool, mystical/sci-fi sounding names: Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast.
They were unique and felt like they were telling customers that we’d be in awe when using their consoles.
(Master System and Sega CD were pretty boring though)
Most other big systems’ names seem so utilitarian and uninspired:
GameCube and Xbox are little boxy devices on your shelf that play games.
The Nintendo Switch can switch between handheld and docked.
All the PlayStations are stations that you play games on.
Yawn
Turbo Grafx was pretty cool tho.
NEC made an amazing system with the PC Engine/TG16. It would have been great if they followed it up with a next generation system
The PC-FX?
For some reason I thought the pcfx was adjacent to the PCEngine. Now I’m reading the wiki article on it and see i was wrong!
Thank you for the info
Even in the 70s and 80s they were coming up with cooler names for consoles, like the Magnavox Odyssey and the Intellivision. Atari named a bunch of their consoles after big cats, though they didn’t live up to their names. At least there was some imagination.
And yet Atari’s most popular console was just numbers, lol
“Video Computer System” definitely doesn’t sound as appealing lol
All three of those were some newfangled words in the 70’s.
Mega drive would have sounded cool when it came out, though it’s perhaps the most dated sounding name of the bunch.
It always sounded weird to me. The word drive always made me think of a disk drive or something.
I can only assume they were looking at PC Engine and wanted a similar name.