Middle ages

I have already wrote a bit about the middle-ages of video games in my last blog but i'll write more i guess.

The middle ages of video games to me is after the industry got up off its feet (Spacewar through to pong) but before games started to rival the film and music industries wich is about like 5 years ago to now when the Playsation 2 and stuff came out.

After pong, pac man, defender and space invaders were released Atari raked in the cash and decided to develop the first ever home video console that uses plug in cartridges, there were a few home consoles before that had a few games built in but these were expensive and unsuccesfull. Originally they had trouble finding a fast and cheap CPU that could be used to render the current coin-op classics, but then this MOS techno 6502 thing was released wich allowed Atari to push forward the Atari 2600 and make even more money.
The 2600 started to decline and the whole E.T thing happened, atari were already trying to get into the 8-bit home computer thing but the commodore Apple 2 and amstrads controlled the userbase and Atari had to realise there were other company's that could make money off video games.
During this time the NES was released with Mario brothers and Nintendo were now big in the video games industry the NES became dominant in the north american market and were the front runners until Nintendo released the Super famicom in 1989 this console pushed atari out the door and the only real competitor it had was the genesis, wich held on but never was as popular as the nintendo. During this time Arcades started to decline as equal or better graphics could be achieved at home instead of arcades being superior in technology.
The PC engine also had a large enough userbase to survive in the games industry but they were used mostly as tools, the Amiga was still popular in its newer forms.
Hand held video games made there debut and became increasingly popular through the nineties with the Nintendo game boy in pole posistion.
In 1994 Sony released the Sony playstation wich impressed the world with its 3d graphics and quickly dominated the video game market the sega saturn flopped and atari fell apart after the jaguar failed.
After a good while nintendo released its new 64 bit console the N64 wich boasted better graphics and 4 player support although this was popular in japan and sold a lot it didnt beat sony with its playstation as it was expensive and still used cartdridges.
The dreamcast was also released in this time but i feel its more within the PS2/gamecube generation than the playstation/N64 one.