Why are all these developers so ENTHUSIASTIC with BAD news?!

[A Black Falcon]

To be honest I don't see single game systems, including the portable variaty, as a seperate generation either. But, there really wasn't anything else to compare it to, except the Fairchild Channel F which was only out for a short time before the 2600 (and which, by all accounts, had terrible games), so they did at least dominate "home game systems" before the 2600 even came out.

Hey, you forgot the Odyssey 2... follow-up to the world's first videogame console, the Magnavox Odyssey... sure, it wasn't a success, but it was another second-generation videogame console. :)

Wikipedia has generation 1 being the Odyssey and the early Pong clones, 2 being from the 2600 to the Colecovision, and 3 being the NES... I don't agree with that. I still say that Wikipedia's "third" and "fourth" generations of consoles are one and the same... looking at it from a hardware standpoint, it's obvious.

(naming arguable first consoles of a generation)

Generation 1: 1972: Magnavox Odyssey
Generation 2: 1976: Fairchild Channel F
Generation 2/3?:1980: Intellivision (late gen.2 or early gen.3? ?)
Generation 2/3?:1982: Colecovision, Atari 5200
Generation 3?: 1983: Nintendo Famicom (1985 US release, but Japan in 1983... one year after the Colecovision came out and it's a whole new console generation?)

Then there's the 5200 (1982) and the 7800 (released in 1986 but developed and built in 1984)... two separate generations? Same generation? Whether the 7800 was actually more powerful is and arguable point, I think...

Oh, I also think it's important to remember that Sega did temporarily take over the industry for a while until the SNES really came into it's own. After Nintendo once again took over, it seems Sega had a hard time getting exclusive games, as I notice trying to find decent titles I want to actually get for my old Genesis at used game stores.

It sure helped that Sega kind of destroyed itsself with moves like the 32X, trying to support too many systems at once (Genesis, 32X, Saturn, etc) and then dumping them all for just the Saturn (big mistake... stopping development for your best system in the hopes that your next one will do as well? Backfired badly...), etc... Sega was ahead for a while, but they sabotaged themselves, and Nintendo did very well.

Of course in Japan the Megadrive was a minimal player and the Super Famicom had 80-90 percent of the market (with the PC Engine(TurboGrafx-16) doing better than Megadrive too...), which is why despite the close race in the US (with the SNES just pulling off a victory in the later years) the SNES crushed the Genesis worldwide. So really Sega just took over the US industry... but back then the US's interest in games was less overtly Japanese (just look at stuff like the US Kid Chameleon cover vs. its anime-styled Japanese cover...), and Sega did really well in Europe too (crushing Nintendo all along).