The earliest example of borrowing ideas comes from the 8-bit era. The Nintendo Entertainment System developed a renewed control interface for consoles that is still in effect today. With the advent of the NES, no longer did controllers offer poor designs and responsiveness like the joystick/numerical keypad devices of the past. The NES’s controller contained the first ever directional pad, or D-pad as it is most commonly referred to, which is still in use on every consoles’ controller today. Another revolution that Nintendo developed in controllers is more recent. The Nintendo 64’s controller was the first to incorporate an analog stick, which made exploring the vast 3D environments much easier.
Another early innovation is CD-based games, which first appeared in the 8-bit era as well. NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 had a CD-ROM attachment and was the first console to use CD-ROMs for its games. Since many people experienced the advances that could be made with CD-based games, other companies soon followed suit. The most notable CD-based console is, of course, the Sony PlayStation, which buried cartridge-based consoles for good.
With the usage of CD drives in consoles, Philips created the first all-in-one media center that Microsoft and Sony looked to for inspiration. This media center was called the CDi, and it played games, movies, and music, just like Microsoft and Sony’s current consoles.
In more recent times, the Sega Dreamcast provided a great deal of features that could be borrowed from. Sega’s business plan involved building an extremely advanced system and selling it at a loss with hopes to make the money back on first-party software sales. Microsoft followed in Sega’s footsteps with this business plan, but all three console companies will also follow this plan in the next-generation. The Dreamcast also featured an operating system-like interface that allowed the user to easily select what feature he wanted to use. All three current generation consoles have the same graphic interface upon booting the system. The Dreamcast also really paved the way for online gaming on a console. It featured Internet connectivity out of the box, and Sega had its own centralized server, which allowed for trouble-free use. This centralized server idea is used by Microsoft's Xbox Live and Nintendo. The most obvious use of a borrowed idea comes from Microsoft’s Xbox controller. The millions of dollars Microsoft spent on research and design of the controller can be seen by simply looking at a photograph of the Dreamcast’s controller.
The photos show in great detail Microsoft's millions of dollars spent on R&D of the Xbox controller. It must have taken millions to decide whether or not to put on an extra analog stick.
Sure some of the most common features are borrowed and rehashed console after console, but what makes things the most interesting is innovation. Nintendo, Sega, and Philips have paved the way for Sony and Microsoft’s consoles, and it is unfortunate that Sony and Microsoft push for less innovation and rather, more renovation by rehashing the same designs in their consoles.
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