From Arcades to the Cloud: The History of the Major Gaming Platforms

Where does a video game live?

Inside an arcade cabinet?

Under the television?

Inside a computer?

On a console you can slip into your bag?

On a phone?

On a server located hundreds of kilometers away?

The modern answer is fairly simple:

everywhere.

But it was not always that way.

For a long time, every new platform moved a boundary.

The arcade cabinet made gaming public.

The console brought it into the living room.

The computer gave players the tools to tinker and create.

The handheld console freed it from a fixed place.

The Internet freed it from distance.

The smartphone almost removed the need for a specialized machine.

Virtual reality placed the screen around the player.

And the cloud is even beginning to separate the game from the machine that computes it.

We often talk about platforms as a hardware question.

PC or console? Android or iPhone? PlayStation or Xbox?

But behind these sometimes slightly religious battles lies a much more interesting story.

Each platform invented a new way of being a player.

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A platform is not just a machine

Before going through the history, we need to clarify the word.

A gaming platform can be a piece of hardware:

an arcade cabinet,

a console,

a computer,

a smartphone,

a VR headset.

But it can also refer to an entire technical and software environment.

Windows.

Steam.

PlayStation.

Xbox.

Android.

iOS.

The cloud.

So the word eventually combines several layers:

the machine + the system + the controls + distribution + services + available games.

That is precisely why the boundaries can sometimes become strange.

A Nintendo Switch is a handheld console that can be connected to a television.

A Steam Deck is a PC that looks like a handheld console.

A smartphone can be connected to a controller.

An Xbox game can run inside a data center and then be displayed on a phone.

And a PlayStation VR2 headset can even be used on PC with the appropriate equipment.

The categories remain useful.

They have simply become much less well behaved.

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The arcade — when playing meant leaving home

Before video games colonized our bedrooms and living rooms, they lived in public places.

Bars.

Shopping centers.

Dedicated arcades.

Restaurants.

Fairs.

You did not necessarily own the game.

You went to it.

In 1971, Computer Space was among the first commercial attempts at a coin-operated video game. The following year, Pong achieved much greater success and helped launch the modern arcade industry. The Computer History Museum notes that Computer Space appeared in 1971 before Pong, tested in California bars in 1972, found genuine popular success.

Then came:

Space Invaders.

Asteroids.

Pac-Man.

Donkey Kong.

Galaga.

Defender.

Street Fighter II.

Daytona USA.

Dance Dance Revolution.

And thousands of others.

The cabinet influences the game itself

An arcade machine has to attract attention.

It has to be understood quickly.

It has to make people want to play again.

And, above all, you usually have to insert another coin to continue.

Those constraints profoundly shape game design.

Short sessions.

Visible scores.

Increasing difficulty.

Limited lives.

Rankings.

Audio and visual spectacle.

The famous:

“One more game.”

An innocent phrase that takes on a fairly precise economic meaning when every attempt costs money.

The arcade is also a social place

You watch other people play.

You wait for your turn.

You discover a technique by observing someone.

You compare scores.

Sometimes you play against the person physically standing next to you.

Video games are then a digital activity deeply rooted in a real physical space.

This model gradually loses its central position as home consoles become powerful enough to reproduce part of the experience at home.

But arcades never disappear completely.

In Japan and certain parts of Asia, arcades remain particularly visible.

Elsewhere, they survive in other forms:

gaming bars,

retro arcades,

specialized cabinets,

music games,

simulators,

experiences that are difficult to reproduce at home.

Arcades taught video games how to become a spectacle.

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The home console — when gaming enters the house

The gesture changes completely.

You no longer insert a coin into a cabinet.

You buy a machine.

Then you install it under the television.

Magnavox Odyssey.

Atari 2600.

NES.

Mega Drive.

Super Nintendo.

PlayStation.

Nintendo 64.

Dreamcast.

PlayStation 2.

Xbox.

Wii.

PS5.

More than half a century of different machines, but one common idea:

turning the family television into an interactive space.

We explored this evolution through the nine generations of consoles in the previous article. Here, what matters is what the “console” platform brings to the way we play.

The console standardizes the experience

On computers, configurations can vary enormously.

On a console, every machine has known hardware.

The same processor.

The same memory.

The same reference controller.

The same general environment.

For developers, that stability makes it possible to optimize games very precisely.

For players, it reduces friction.

You plug it in.

You insert the game — or today, you download it.

You play.

Well, there may first be an 87 GB update.

Progress sometimes has a very peculiar sense of humor.

The console also builds worlds

Nintendo does not only sell a Switch.

Sony does not only sell a PlayStation.

Microsoft does not only sell an Xbox.

Each manufacturer gradually develops:

accounts,

stores,

services,

subscriptions,

friends,

cloud saves,

franchises,

accessories,

an identity.

The home console has therefore moved from a machine that lets you play to a gateway into an ecosystem.

And while this battle occupied the television, another platform followed a much more chaotic path.

The computer.

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The microcomputer, then the PC — the platform that refuses to stand still

Apple II.

Commodore 64.

ZX Spectrum.

Amiga.

Atari ST.

MS-DOS.

Windows.

Computer gaming has a strange history because the machine was never designed exclusively for gaming.

A computer is also used to write.

Program.

Draw.

Work.

Communicate.

Make Excel spreadsheets that are profoundly less exciting than Doom.

And that versatility is precisely what changes everything.

Playing and making on the same machine

A computer player often has access to the environment in which the game operates.

They can explore files.

Change settings.

Install programs.

Create levels.

Program.

Add mods.

Host a server.

This closeness between consumption and creation becomes one of the major historical characteristics of PC gaming.

Communities form around moddable games.

Amateurs create maps.

Tools appear.

Mods sometimes become complete games.

Counter-Strike began as a mod for Half-Life.

Dota has its roots in a custom Warcraft III map.

Entire genres develop or explode thanks to this culture of modification.

The PC never really had generations

That is a fundamental difference from consoles.

There is no day when “the new PC” officially replaces the old one.

The platform evolves piece by piece.

New graphics card.

New processor.

More RAM.

New operating system.

New APIs.

New storage.

Players can own extremely different machines while still using the same platform.

The Computer History Museum also points out that the boundary between consoles and PCs has always been blurrier than we might imagine, since both industries grew together from the 1970s onward.

The Internet reinforces this identity even further

With networked games and then digital distribution, the computer also becomes home to:

Steam,

MMOs,

esports,

mods,

independent games,

free-to-play,

simulations,

complex strategy games,

experimental experiences.

And today, a funny new loop is appearing.

The PC, historically associated with the desk, now fits in your hands too.

Valve, for example, describes Steam Deck as an all-in-one portable gaming PC, capable of accessing the Steam library while offering an experience close to a console.

The categories are already beginning to blend.

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Handheld consoles — when the game stops waiting for you at home

There is a huge difference between:

“I can play at home”

and

“I can play wherever I want.”

Portable electronic games existed before the Game Boy.

Nintendo’s Game & Watch devices, dedicated electronic games, and various other machines had already explored the idea.

But in 1989, the Game Boy gave the concept a new dimension.

Nintendo combined a relatively simple machine, interchangeable cartridges, strong battery life, and an extremely effective catalog.

Tetris.

Super Mario Land.

Pokémon.

Nintendo notes that the Game Boy, launched in Japan in 1989, would surpass 100 million units across the entire family.

Portability changes our relationship with time

A gaming session no longer has to be organized around the living room.

You can play:

on the train,

in a waiting room,

in bed,

while traveling,

during a break.

Gaming starts filling the small dead spaces of the day.

After the Game Boy came, among others:

Game Gear,

Game Boy Advance,

Nintendo DS,

PSP,

PlayStation Vita.

Then the boundaries begin to move again.

The portable machine becomes hybrid

The Switch can be held in your hands and then connected to a television.

Steam Deck carries a PC library.

Other handheld PCs adopt the same form.

The old distinction:

home console / handheld console / PC

therefore begins to look more like a continuum than three separate worlds.

Portability is no longer a category of gaming. It becomes a property of the platform.

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Online gaming — when the platform also becomes a network

Online gaming is a special case.

It is not really a machine.

It is a layer that eventually crosses almost every machine.

Computers.

Consoles.

Smartphones.

VR headsets.

The network transforms an experience that was often local into a shared space.

First, connect the machines

The earliest multiplayer experiments rely on terminals, university networks, modems, and then local area networks.

MUDs — multiplayer text-based worlds — demonstrate very early that a game can become a persistent space inhabited by several people.

Later come:

Doom.

Quake.

Diablo.

Ultima Online.

EverQuest.

Counter-Strike.

World of Warcraft.

Multiplayer no longer simply means two people in front of the same screen.

It can mean thousands of players connected to the same world.

Consoles follow

Dreamcast experiments heavily with networking.

Xbox Live then structures the experience around an account, friends, identity, and centralized services.

PlayStation Network and Nintendo develop their own infrastructures.

The Internet eventually becomes so normal that we almost forget it is a platform in its own right.

And yet it profoundly changes the nature of games.

A world can keep going after you log out.

A game can be updated.

A competition can bring together players living on several continents.

A studio can fix, add, or remove content after release.

And gradually, a new idea appears:

a game is no longer necessarily a finished object.

Sometimes, it becomes a service.

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Mobile — when almost everyone owns a gaming machine

For a long time, gaming meant owning something designed — at least partly — for gaming.

An arcade cabinet.

A console.

A computer.

A handheld.

Then the phone arrives.

Early mobile games remain extremely simple.

Snake becomes emblematic of an entire era.

But the real transformation comes with smartphones.

Touchscreen.

Permanent Internet connection.

Sensors.

GPS.

Camera.

Application store.

And above all:

a machine already sitting in the pockets of hundreds of millions, then billions, of people.

In July 2008, Apple launched the App Store with around 500 applications. Ten years later, the company described that opening as a major transformation in the way users work, communicate, and play.

Mobile invents its own gestures

A touchscreen is not a controller.

No stick.

Not necessarily any buttons.

So games adapt.

Swipe.

Tap.

Pinch.

Tilt.

Play with one hand.

Sessions sometimes become shorter.

Design has to consider a player sitting on the subway rather than in front of a screen for four hours.

And above all, the business model changes

Free-to-play.

Advertising.

In-app purchases.

Gacha.

Energy systems.

Season passes.

Mobile becomes a gigantic economic laboratory.

Some of these mechanics later migrate into PC and console games.

Once again, the platform does not only change where we play.

It changes what a game becomes.

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Virtual reality — when the screen disappears around the player

Since the beginning of video games, we have essentially looked at a world through a window.

Television.

Monitor.

Handheld screen.

Smartphone.

Virtual reality attempts something different:

placing the window around us.

The experiments are old.

Military headsets.

Simulators.

Virtuality in the 1990s.

Nintendo Virtual Boy — which we will politely say did not exactly trigger the expected revolution.

Then modern VR accelerates with Oculus, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and various generations of standalone headsets.

VR changes the controls

Looking becomes turning your head.

Aiming can become physically pointing your hand.

Grabbing an object can involve an actual physical movement.

Leaning behind cover can mean… actually leaning behind cover.

The body becomes a much more important part of the interface.

Modern headsets add:

spatial tracking,

motion controllers,

haptic feedback,

3D audio,

eye tracking,

foveated rendering.

PlayStation VR2, for example, combines OLED displays, eye tracking, haptic feedback, spatially tracked controllers, and 3D audio to strengthen immersion.

But friction remains real

Price.

Bulk.

Comfort.

Motion sickness.

Required space.

Catalog.

Power.

Physical isolation.

VR therefore does not replace the traditional screen.

Not yet.

Maybe never completely.

But it explores something the other platforms cannot reproduce in quite the same way:

no longer observing the game world from the outside, but feeling as though you have been placed inside it.

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Cloud gaming — what if the machine were no longer in your home?

This is probably the strangest platform in this story.

Because it begins by removing… the visible platform.

With cloud gaming, the game does not necessarily run on the device you are holding.

It can run on a remote server.

The server computes:

the graphics,

the physics,

the AI,

the game.

Then it sends an interactive video stream to your screen.

Your commands travel in the opposite direction.

In theory, a relatively modest device can therefore display a demanding game without having the power required to compute it itself.

The old logic is reversed

Before:

Game
↓
Local machine
↓
Screen

With the cloud:

Game
↓
Remote server
↓
Internet
↓
Player's screen

The computing machine leaves the living room.

What matters becomes:

connection quality,

latency,

the data center,

the service,

the screen,

the controller.

Xbox Cloud Gaming illustrates this logic today by allowing games to run across several types of devices while preserving progression and the Xbox environment.

But the Internet becomes part of the controller

The problem is obvious.

If the connection slows down, the experience slows down.

If latency increases, the game responds later.

If the service disappears, access can disappear with it.

For a movie, a few hundred milliseconds go almost unnoticed.

For a fighting game or competitive FPS, they can decide who wins.

Cloud gaming therefore does not yet mean:

“no more hardware needed.”

It means rather:

“the hardware can be somewhere else.”

And that nuance could become extremely important.

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Eight platforms, eight ways to move a boundary

If we summarize this history, every major platform removes a different constraint.

But we have to resist one temptation.

Reading these as eight stages where the latest one replaces everything that came before.

Because that is absolutely not what happened.

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Platforms do not die: they blend together

Arcades still exist.

Consoles still exist.

PC still exists.

Handheld consoles have returned in new forms.

Mobile continues to occupy an enormous place.

VR is developing its own ecosystem.

The cloud is gradually layering itself onto the other platforms.

Nothing truly disappears.

Everything blends.

A Switch is both portable and a home console.

A Steam Deck is a portable PC designed with console-style controls; Valve explicitly describes it as a device that lets you take your Steam library with you while keeping a controller-friendly interface.

A smartphone can use a controller.

An Xbox can stream a game to another screen.

A VR headset can work with a console or a PC.

A game can offer cross-play between several of these devices.

This may be the biggest transformation of all.

For decades, people asked:

“What platform do you play on?”

The answer was supposed to be simple.

Today:

“PC, but sometimes Steam Deck.”

“PlayStation except for some cross-play games.”

“Switch on the train.”

“Mobile when I only have ten minutes.”

“Cloud when I am away from my machine.”

The answer becomes a paragraph.

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What platforms really changed

We could tell this story through a series of devices.

An arcade cabinet.

A console.

A computer.

A Game Boy.

A smartphone.

A headset.

A server.

But hardware is ultimately only the visible part.

What each platform really transforms is the context in which gaming becomes possible.

The arcade invents the public place.

The console creates the living-room ritual.

The PC brings the player closer to the creator.

The handheld turns dead time into gaming time.

The Internet turns gaming into a meeting place.

Mobile transforms an everyday object into a gaming platform.

VR transforms the body into a controller.

The cloud begins to separate the experience from the machine.

The history of platforms is the story of video games constantly searching for one more boundary to remove.

The boundary of the laboratory.

Then the arcade.

Then the living room.

Then the fixed machine.

Then distance.

And perhaps, eventually, the hardware itself.

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Tomorrow, will we still have to choose a platform?

Probably.

But perhaps not in the same way.

Hardware will remain important.

A screen is not the same size as a headset.

A mouse is not a controller.

A smartphone is not a PC.

A network connection does not magically replace a graphics card.

Physical forms will therefore continue to create different experiences.

But libraries, accounts, saves, cross-play, multiplatform engines, and the cloud are pushing in the opposite direction.

They are trying to make the game move.

From one machine to another.

From one screen to another.

From one place to another.

So perhaps the future will not belong to one platform defeating all the others.

Perhaps it will belong to video games becoming fluid enough to move from one to another without asking permission.

After all, it took a little more than fifty years to go from a cabinet in a bar to a server somewhere in the cloud.

Not bad for a medium that, at the beginning, was simply supposed to make a point of light bounce.