The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

I hate the names of video game consoles. Before I was born, everything was sensibly named vision, with Colecovision and Intellivision, or the names were really weird and original, like the Magnavox Odyssey and the Atari. So far, this was all fine. Then came the Nintendo Famicom, which was short for "Family Computer", which I guess is also fine, but why is it called a family computer if it's actually a games console? Was the idea to trick parents into buying it, thinking it was educational? Next came the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I have no real problem with the name, since it can be shortened to NES. Nintendo's next console, the SNES or Super NES, I also have no problem with.

Then Sega came out with the Master System. The MASTER system. It feels like Sega's way of saying fuck you to Nintendo, we have the best console, and it's the best console there will ever be, it is the master console, the one console to rule them all, the master of all.

But Sega didn't stop there. Their next console was the Mega Drive. Sega's plan was to add meaningless superlative prefixes to their console names, in the hopes the public was thick enough to believe a "Mega Drive" was better than an "SNES" simply because it had the word "Mega" in its name. Superlatives that Sega could have used but didn't include ultra, super, hyper, max, ultra-max, and extra-mega.

The Mega Drive was called the Genesis in North America. You would think Genesis means it was Sega's first console, given that "genesis" means "beginning". But actually, the Master System came before it, so they couldn't even get that right.

Then it seemed Sega might go with space-themed names for a while, with Sega Saturn. The code name for the Sega Saturn was Jupiter, and the code name for the Sega Game Gear was Mercury. There was also a Sega Pluto, which was never released. So it's clear Sega were simply going through the names of planets in the solar system. Would there have been a Sega Uranus?

Sega's final console was the Dreamcast, which, to be fair, is a good name. It's a nice name. And the code name for it was the Dolphin, which is an even nicer name. In the late 90s, before terrorism, everything was aspirational and hopeful, and things had "dream" in their names, like Dreamworks and Dreamweaver.

Sony entered the competition with a new console. One person at Sony said, "What shall we call the new console?" Another person said, "Well, it's like a station where you play, so let's just call it a PlayStation." And this was the beginning of a trend of shit, uncreative names of game consoles.

Next, Microsoft invented a new console. One person at Microsoft said, "What do we call this console?" The second man said, "Well, it's basically a box, ennit? But we can't just call it a box, we need to make it sound cool and mysterious. Let's call it an 'x-box'. Something like that, but better." But they couldn't think of anything better, so they called it the Xbox. I laughed in disbelief when I first heard the name. It's like a name a teenage boy would come up with.

Nintendo didn't even bother trying, and just called their console the N64. Because the console had 64 bits, the higher the number, the better the console. (Little did we know back then that 64 was the highest number of bits we were ever going to get. Even the latest consoles like the PlayStation 5 have 64 bits.)

Microsoft were aware of this, and you could literally hear them grinding their teeth with frustration in America because their Xbox only had 32 bits.

"Right, what do we call our next console?" said the Microsoft bloke.

"What about Xbox 2?"

"No, that's too simple. We need something that will blow people away!"

"What about Xbox... 3?"

"I like it, but the number should be higher. The higher the number, the better the console! We need to blow people away!"

"Xbox 100?"

"Higher!"

"Xbox 360?"

"Bingo! Let's go with that."

Xbox 360. Why 360? Why such a large, arbitrary number? Because there are 360 degrees in a circle? What does a circle have to do with a games console? It doesn't. 360 is just an arbitrary number designed to make the console seem better than it is, in the same way companies would randomly add 2000 and 3000 to the end of a contraption's name.

Meanwhile, Nintendo's next console was the GameCube. They must have spent 10 seconds thinking of that name: "It's cube-shaped, you play games on it, let's call it a game cube."

Their next name was even worse. The Wii. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a joke. Wii sounds the same as wee, which means urine.

What comes after Wii? A Wii 2? No, a Wii U. We. You.

But the worst was yet to come. Microsoft had a new console, and they needed a name. Their first console was the Xbox, and the second console was the Xbox 360, so what should the third console be? Maybe the Xbox 720? Keep adding 360 to the number each time? No, because that's too logical. Instead, they called it the Xbox One. The Xbox ONE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME. HOW DID YOU GET FROM 360 BACK TO 1.

Microsoft has a bad habit of calling things weird names. There was Windows 8 and Windows 10, but where was Windows 9? Answer: There was no Windows 9. They simply skipped it. Bill Gates must have said, "The people are thick, they even won't notice, just skip it."

After that, I lost track, but Wikipedia tells me the next consoles were called Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. And the X and the S don't even stand for anything. X is the more powerful, expensive option, S is the budget option, but where did the letters come from? Microsoft just picked them at random.

Did anyone stop to think that the name "Xbox Series X" might have too many X's? As if the more X's a console has, the better it is. Maybe soon they'll have a console called the Xbox XXX.

Microsoft have also said their latest consoles are simply called "Xbox". You can't just call it "Xbox". The first Xbox was called an Xbox, so you can't reuse the name. That's like the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters that was just called Ghostbusters. It gets confusing.

Meanwhile, Sony has continued naming their consoles sensibly, with PlayStation 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, so hats off to them. Well done, Sony, for being the only company with sensible console names.