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In 1993, Commodore-Amiga released the world's first 32-bit CD-ROM based game console at the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom. The CD32 is based on Commodore's Advanced Graphics Architecture chipset and has the basic insides of the Amiga 1200. In fact, many who purchased the device used 3rd-party devices to upgrade the CD32 with keyboard, floppy drive and mouse that turned the unit into a multimedia personal computer.

A hardware MPEG decompression module for playing Video CD was also available, however, as few as 400,000 consoles made it to market. Often regarded as a failure, the CD32 managed to secure over 50% of the fledgling CD-ROM market in the UK in 1993 and 1994 outselling the MegaCD, Philips CDi and even PC CD-ROM sales. The CD32 was released in the United States and Canada, but was not successful.

The main reason that Commodore could not meet demand was that the company was heading towards liquidation under chapter 11. Unfortunately, the success of the CD32 in Europe was not enough to save Commodore. Commodore International filled for bankruptcy in April 1994 caused the CD32 to be discontinued only months as the remaining Commodore franchises no longer had access to copyrights.

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In 1993, Atari released the Atari Jaguar after a seven year absence from the console market.

The Jaguar had a stunning supply of processors with a 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 and two 32-bit processors with the registers and busses operating at full 64-bit. However, software developers were lazy and did not want to spend the time to program code access so many processors. And to be fair, the cost to produce more advanced games would have come at a premium.

Games that became available for the console were most often ports of other 16-bit consoles. In fact, there were only about 60 cartridges ever made for the Jaguar before it was pulled from the market in 1996.

In 1995, Atari released a CD-ROM add on capable of accessing the 700 megabit format and retailed the device for a modest US$150.00. The CD-ROM could play video games, Audio CDs, CD+Gs and full motion video at 24 frames a second. Had Atari released this item a few years earlier, the outcome might have been different.

In 1996, Atari restructure and put an end to development of game consoles.

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In 1995, Nintendo released their 64-bit game console called the Nintendo 64. This was a bit of a surprise for many reasons:

1) Nintendo never released a 32-bit game console that left many wondering if Nintendo was going the way of Atari and if they could come back with a new console.

2) Nintendo had also decided to stick to the cartridge format to reduce load times and because cartridges were less prone to piracy.

The second surprise had many doubting the end product as many game developers walked away from development fearing that the cartridge would not have sufficient storage to produce high quality 3D games.

While the console did produce some top selling titles, the cartridge format did prove limiting. There was little room for voiceovers, let alone full motion video. While these were significant issues, Nintendo had a deep selection of game series to pull from and enhance of the 64-bit platform.

As a result, the console sold over 30 million units before being discontinued.

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In 1998, Nintendo released the Game Boy Colour, which went on to sell over 50 million units by 2004.

The Game Boy Colour offered backward compatibility with previous game boys and thus provided access to an already large inventory of games. This gave Nintendo a significant advantage over its competition as none of them provided backward compatibility with previous units.

The Game Boy Colour was eventually succeeded by the Game Boy Advance in 2001.

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In 1994, Sega released the CD-based Sega Saturn game console in Japan for US$100.00 less that SONY?s Playstation.

However, SONY entered the market with a large budget and managed a strong and successful marketing champagne, amass the attention of many large developers and secured exclusive rights to many game titles.

Sega did manage to produce a large selection of 2D shoot-en ups, beat-em ups and Hentai titles. Despite their moderate success, the Sega Saturn could not compete against the Playstation and only managed to sell 10 million units compared to SONY?s 100 million units.

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In 1994, and after much fan fare and marketing hype, SONY released the Playstation game console. The device was an immediate success in every major market it entered and very quickly became the number one selling game console.

In fact, by 2006, SONY had sold well over 100 million consoles, a number far higher than any other game console ever made.

The Playstation had an advanced graphics processing unit along with several engines responsible for creating fast and dynamic games and very quickly developed a huge library of video games including some huge hits like Grand Tourismo, which was often reason alone to buy the console.

However, not all of the credit comes in the form of the architecture. As can be seen by many other devices, having superior graphics is not enough to garner success in the video game market. SONY was aware of the video game market and had spent much time researching in to what worked and what had failed. They had also looking into a joint venture with Nintendo, which eventually fell apart. However, this information proved enough to get SONY on the right track.

Even with the replacement of the Playstation with the Playstation 2, the original console continued to maintain strong sales.

Only time will tell if SONY can continue to replicate its success formula with each successive game generation.