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EverQuest opened on March 16, 1999, presenting a fantasy world in first-person 3D and organizing play around groups. Its subscriber numbers exceeded every internal forecast, and its habits shaped online games for years.
Three-dimensional persistent worlds moved from novelty to substantial business. The conventions it settled, group roles, scheduled raids, guild organization and long-term progression, became the vocabulary of the genre, and its commercial performance convinced publishers that subscriptions could support development on a large scale.
The Dreamcast reached American stores on September 9, 1999, nearly a year after its Japanese debut, with a dial-up modem included as standard equipment. Well reviewed and briefly successful, it was Sega's final machine.
A console shipping with networking as standard equipment established the expectation that online play is a property of the platform rather than an accessory. Its failure, despite strong reviews and a promising start, also showed how much a hardware launch depends on retailer and publisher confidence rather than on the product itself.
The GeForce 256 went on sale on October 11, 1999, marketed as a graphics processing unit because it handled geometry and lighting work the main processor had previously done. The term outlasted the product by decades.
A category name entered general use and stayed there, describing a component that grew from a game accessory into one of the most consequential pieces of computing hardware in the world. Moving geometry and lighting onto dedicated silicon also set the architectural direction later consoles and modern parallel computing both followed.
Maxis published Will Wright's domestic life simulation on February 4, 2000. Players furnished houses and managed the moods and careers of ordinary people, with no score to chase and no way to win.
Commercial success on this scale, from a game with no enemies and no ending, undercut the assumption that the medium belonged to young men who liked competition. It widened the market and gave publishers a reason to fund projects aimed at people the industry had ignored.
Sony's second console reached Japanese buyers on March 4, 2000. It played original PlayStation discs, doubled as a DVD player at a competitive price, and went on to become the best-selling home console ever made.
Bundling a media player with a game console changed the argument a family had to make about buying one. It also demonstrated the value of carrying a previous generation's library forward, and it set an installed-base record that shaped where developers spent their money for most of the decade.
After years of losses, Sega confirmed on January 31, 2001 that it would stop making the Dreamcast and sell its games on other companies' machines. A hardware rivalry that had defined the previous decade ended.
One of the two companies whose rivalry had shaped console gaming in the early 1990s stopped making machines entirely. The exit showed how quickly hardware losses can become unsustainable, and it left the field to Sony, Nintendo and a newcomer from the software business.
Nintendo's new handheld went on sale in Japan on March 21, 2001, with a wide color screen and a 32-bit processor. It handled the kind of games that had required a home console ten years earlier.
The gap between what a handheld and a home console could display narrowed sharply. Portable play stopped being a compromise made on a bus and became a legitimate place to release substantial games, which kept Nintendo profitable through a difficult stretch for its living-room hardware.
Optical discs, in a small proprietary format, replaced cartridges when Nintendo's fourth home console reached Japan on September 14, 2001. Housed in a compact box with a carrying handle, it was capable but finished third in its generation.
A technically sound console with strong first-party games can still lose, and this one demonstrated why: third-party support and general-purpose media features had become as important as the hardware. The lesson pushed Nintendo away from specification contests and toward the differentiated design it adopted next.
Microsoft's first console went on sale in North America on November 15, 2001, with a hard drive, an Ethernet port and Halo: Combat Evolved, the game that gave it an identity.
An American company re-entered console manufacturing for the first time since Atari's collapse, and did so with hardware built around networking rather than around a disc format. The control scheme Halo settled on became the default for console shooters and remains largely unchanged today.
A paid network service opened in North America on November 15, 2002, one year after Microsoft's console. It combined a persistent identity, friends lists, matchmaking and voice chat, all designed for broadband.
Online multiplayer stopped being a feature of individual games and became a property of the platform. That shift turned consoles into service businesses with subscription income, identity systems and social graphs, which reshaped how the companies behind them compete.
Valve released Steam on September 12, 2003, at first as a way to patch its own multiplayer games and combat cheating. It grew into the dominant storefront for computer games.
Digital distribution moved the computer game business away from boxed retail within a decade. For small developers it removed the hardest barrier, which was getting shelf space, and it made continuous updating and long tails of sales a normal part of how games are released and maintained.
Nokia put the N-Gage on sale on October 7, 2003: a mobile phone shaped like a game handheld, with cartridges and online play. It sold poorly and was withdrawn within a few years.
Failure here is instructive rather than trivial. The N-Gage identified the right destination years before anyone reached it, and its collapse showed that hardware convergence fails when it compromises both functions. The lesson shaped how later companies approached games on phones.
Half-Life 2 shipped on November 16, 2004 with mandatory Steam activation, even for copies bought on disc. The requirement angered many buyers and quietly established account-based ownership as the norm.
Tying a physical purchase to an online account was the moment digital rights management became unavoidable for mainstream computer games. It also gave Steam the installed base it needed to become a storefront, using a single highly anticipated release to accomplish what years of marketing could not.
Nintendo released the DS in North America on November 21, 2004, with a touch-sensitive lower screen, a microphone and local wireless play. It became one of the best-selling systems ever made.
Choosing an unusual interface over raw power worked, and it brought in an audience that specification races never reached. The DS demonstrated that the way a person touches a game can matter more than what the hardware can draw, an argument Nintendo would make again with its next home console.
Blizzard opened World of Warcraft on November 23, 2004. Forgiving solo progression, a familiar setting and unusually reliable service pulled a genre that had been niche into the cultural mainstream.
A genre confined to enthusiasts became a mass-market product, and subscription revenue from one game became a major business in its own right. It also gave researchers, journalists and the public a concrete example of a large, functioning virtual society.
Sony's PlayStation Portable reached North American stores on March 24, 2005. A wide bright screen, proprietary optical discs and music and video playback made it the first credible challenger to Nintendo in years.
For the first time since the early 1990s a competitor took real share in portable gaming, and it did so by treating the handheld as a general media device. That framing, along with the later disc-free model, previewed how phones and download stores would remake the category.
Harmonix and RedOctane released Guitar Hero on November 8, 2005, packaged with a guitar-shaped controller and a set list of licensed rock songs. Living rooms filled with plastic instruments for the next several years.
Music games briefly made playing a video game a group activity that non-players joined without embarrassment, and they gave the recording industry a genuinely new channel at a moment when it badly needed one. The rise and fall together form one of the clearest business lessons of the decade.
Microsoft put the Xbox 360 on sale in North America on November 22, 2005, a full year before its competitors. High-definition output, a mature online service and a digital marketplace defined it.
Timing beat specifications. A year of exclusive presence in high-definition living rooms, combined with an online service nobody could match, turned Microsoft from a newcomer into a peer of Sony and Nintendo. It also established digital storefronts as central to console economics.
Sony's third console launched in Japan on November 11, 2006, carrying a Blu-ray drive and an unusual processor. A steep price and difficult development tools cost it years before it recovered.
Hardware that is difficult to program for loses ground regardless of its theoretical power, a lesson Sony applied directly to its next console. At the same time, using a games machine to win a consumer format war proved effective twice, showing how console installed bases influence markets well beyond games.
Motion control arrived in North American stores on November 19, 2006. Nintendo's Wii shipped with a remote that sensed movement and a pack-in sports collection, and it reached households that had never wanted a console.
The largest expansion of the console audience in the medium's history came from a machine that was deliberately underpowered. It proved that interface and price can outweigh graphics, and it briefly made playing games something grandparents and toddlers did in the same room.
