Welcome to the Hardware Devices wing of the 2023 Shacknews Hall of Fame class. This category celebrates platforms, computers, and other devices that have influenced the course of video games.
When you're finished, use the Table of Contents links below to visit other areas of the Shacknews Hall of Fame Class of 2023.
The launch of the iMac was the beginning of Steve Jobs' plan to turn around Apple in 1998. Apple was in dire straits when the company acquired NeXT a year earlier. Jobs had been away from the company he cofounded with Steve Wozniak for over a decade, and iMac was the beginning of the technology and design revolution inside Apple that birthed the iPod and many more successful products
iMac looked different. It featured translucent plastic casings, some decent built-in WiFi, I/O for peripheral devices, a keyboard that users could plug a mouse into, and yeah, the iMac sure did have a mouse. "i" Branding became a core part of Apple's marketing campaigns for the better part of 20 years, leading up to the iPhone. In the late 1990s, Mac market share was in the dumps, and the release of a product like iMac that looked different and cost $1,299.
While the first iMac wasn't perfect, it began a shift in design at the company that created a group of very loyal customers that appreciated the style and function of Apple products. Schools and colleges would have a couple of iMacs in computer labs, and over time people really seemed to like Apple products. There are probably more iPhones than people on Earth these days, but the Shacknews Hall of Fame Council remembers a time when Apple was the little guy. iMac kicked off a set of events that ultimately turned things around in an unprecedented path to becoming the largest company on Earth with a multi-trillion dollar market capitalization.
iMac is being inducted in its first year of eligibility as it represents a key moment in technology history. Welcome to Canton.
Before physics became a standard part of engines such as Valve’s Source, a Swiss company called NovodeX AG wrote a simulation engine designed specifically to advance physics in video games. That company was acquired by Ageia, and the experiments made with the engine thus far resulted in The Stalin Subway, a title exclusive to Russia and released in 2005. The engine was commodified as a dedicated card that Ageia called PhysX; the card’s purpose was to shoulder the burden of physics calculations and free up the CPU to handle other processing tasks.
It didn’t take long for Ageia to attract the attention of Nvidia. The company’s engineers integrated PhysX, into their GeForce graphics cards, and discontinued the dedicated cards. Nvidia released the technology’s source code in 2015, making it open source. Throughout this history, PhysX tech informed some of the most popular gaming technologies in extant. It was utilized by engines such as Unreal and Unity, and the driving force behind physics in megahits such as Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Knight and CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3.
Commonly referred to as the 3DO, Panasonic’s 3DO Multiplayer console was a meaty platform that outweighed competing platforms such as the Super NES and Sega Genesis. It had only one problem: The exorbitant barrier of entry.
Designed by The 3DO Company, a studio created by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, the 3DO Multiplayer was released in 1993 and an early adopter of technologies that defined gaming consoles for the rest of the ‘90s. Games ran on compact discs instead of cartridges, promised cutting-edge graphics and audio, and charged game developers a $3 royalty rate on software sales, much more palatable compared to royalties charged by Nintendo and Sega.
Issues mounted quickly. The 3DO Company didn’t have the manufacturing or distribution resources to develop and ship a console, so Hawkins planned to outsource it to large consumer electronics companies. He courted Sony and Panasonic, but Sony had already committed to the PlayStation. Former Sega of America executive Tom Kalinske was interested, but was deterred by the high costs of manufacturing. Those costs weighed down the console, eventually distributed by Panasonic: the machine cost around $700, and games cost upwards of $100.
Despite those and other issues, the 3DO console was among the first to run games on CDs as well as position itself as both a video game console and home entertainment system with its ability to play music discs. Its port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo was nearly arcade perfect, and its catalog grew to include a wide array of genres, such as ports of id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Sega’s second entry in the 32-bit era—behind the ill-conceived 32X attachment for Sega Genesis—has a dubious reputation. The idea behind the 32X was to offer players a cheaper entry into the 32-bit era. This would buy Sega time to build and ship the Saturn, the console it hoped would compete with Nintendo’s as-yet-unannounced successor to the Super NES and Atari’s Jaguar. Unfortunately, that ended up being the first of many missteps with the doomed Saturn.
The 32X launched in November 1994 at roughly half the cost of the Saturn. When 32X failed to get a foothold in the market over several months, Sega shuttered it and threw its weight behind Saturn. That likely frustrated developers who had committed resources to it, and players who had received or purchased one over the holidays. Sega’s blunders continued when it announced a launch date of September 2, 1995, for the Saturn, only to ship it to select retailers nearly four months early. This stunned and upset retailers that hadn’t received a shipment, putting them at a disadvantage against competitors. Sega’s reasoning was sound: Sony’s PlayStation was taking ground from Nintendo and Sega, and the Saturn was viewed as the company’s chance to catch up. That failed to pan out: PS One and Nintendo 64 duked it out from 1996 for the next few years, leaving Sega a distant third.
Despite the misfortune of the Sega Saturn, bad decisions by Sega did not change the fact that Saturn hosted several excellent games. Virtua Fighter 1 and 2 were nearly arcade perfect, Nights into Dreams was a beautiful and dream-like platforming experience that offered an alternative to Sonic the Hedgehog’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-speed, Sonic R was a kart racer that stood toe-to-toe with Mario Kart, and Panzer Dragoon Saga remains one of the best RPG’s of its generation.
Time and distance have been kind to the Saturn. Although its hardware couldn’t match Sony and Nintendo’s offerings, historians and collectors take every opportunity to extol the virtues of its software library.
Very few platforms were granted as many stay of executions as Nintendo’s Game Boy. Despite going up against colorized handhelds such as Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear, the black-and-green portable found new life thanks to Pokemon, and Game Boy Color gave the platform a third wind. Game Boy Color released in November 1998, nearly 10 years after the brick-sized Game Boy and Tetris planted Nintendo’s flag in the fresh soil of handheld gaming. Nintendo’s smartest move was making it backward compatible: Your Game Boy library carried over without a hitch. Certain titles such as Metroid 2, Super Mario Land 1 and 2, and Pokemon Red, Blue, and Yellow had Color-exclusive palettes that made playing them feel fresh and new.
If backwards compatibility wasn’t enough, the Color’s panoply of brand-new titles provided ample reason to upgrade. Games such as The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening received new releases that painted them in vivid colors and, in Zelda’s case, added new dungeons so players didn’t feel like they were paying for little more than a prettier face. Pokemon Gold and Silver kept Pokemon fever running hot, and Nintendo’s strongest third-party developers such as Capcom supported the platform with droves of new games.
By the time Game Boy Color passed the scepter to Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, the library contained a massive 536 games between Color exclusives and titles released for the original Game Boy. The Game Boy’s release cycle—original unit, first upgrade, and second update—set a template Nintendo followed for the GBA, DS, and 3DS line of portable consoles, and remains one of Nintendo’s strongest libraries.
You’d be forgiven if you took one look at the title and mistook the NES Satellite for one of Nintendo’s early, online-enabled services such as the Satellaview for Super NES. The Satellite is much simpler, but was invaluable to those who had one: It’s a multiplayer adaptor that accommodates up to four players in select NES games. Surprisingly that catalog numbers over a dozen: Gauntlet II, Bomberman II, R.C. Pro-Am II, Smash TV, Nintendo World Cup, and the underrated A Nightmare on Elm Street supported up to four players, making for multiplayer fun that Nintendo popularized with its Nintendo 64 console in 1996.
It's not surprising that more developers abstained from supporting the NES Satellite. After all, gaming hardware is only as good (and as profitable) as the software designed for it. Despite that, the Satellite is noteworthy as a demonstration of Nintendo’s willingness to experiment with new ideas rather than coast on a platform’s early success.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, journalists, players, and developers referred to the NES as the “Nintendo.” Fans of Neo Geo can relate. When players talk about the Neo Geo series of hardware made by legendary coin-op and fighting game developer SNK, they usually mean the Neo Geo MVS or Neo Geo AVS, two flavors from the same carton of ice cream. Neo Geo MVS (Multi Video System) was arcade hardware that ran on cartridges, just like a console. This was a significant departure from the conventional method of developers “burning” game code onto chips and soldering them to boards that were installed in cabinets. Any arcade operator who owned an MVS could swap cartridges, saving them the hassle of ordering new cabinets and wiring new boards.
The AES, short for Advanced Entertainment System, was the flip side of the Neo Geo coin. Its hardware was identical to that of the MVS, which means any ports of MVS-supported arcade titles it received were not ports; they were the arcade versions, meeting the lofty definition of “arcade perfect” long before ports of games such as SoulCalibur for the Sega Dreamcast. At home and in arcades, games such as The King of Fighters, Metal Slug, Fatal Fury, and Samurai Shodown stood out from crowds with gorgeous visuals and dulcet sounds. Neo Geo games played just as great at home—if, that is, you could afford them.
Neo Geo AVS struggled to gain traction due to its exorbitant price. Compared to sub-$100 systems like the Super NES and Sega Genesis, a new AVS cost $650 and most games cost around $200. Those prices put the Neo Geo family far outside the range of most consumers. That said, SNK’s hardware and software have stood the test of time, offering definitive versions of some of the world’s most popular and beloved games, especially one-on-one fighters.
When SSDs arrived on the scene, their price started at around $1000. Fast forward to the early 2020s, and SSDS came standard in the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5, and are considered essential for PC gaming. SanDisk was an early pioneer in solid state drives. In 2006, it shipped what one of the first mass-market SSDs. It offered a whopping 32 gigabytes (GB) of storage and, at $699, was considered affordable to enthusiasts who wanted to wring every last drop of performance out of their PCs.
The drive’s PATA (short for parallel AT Attachment) interface, developed by Western Digital and adopted by manufacturers the world over, was instrumental in positioning the drive to consumers. PATA typically refers to the cables that allowed users to easily connect additional storage devices such as floppy disk drives, hard disk drives (HDDs), and, of course, SSDs inside their computers. Today, it’s common for gaming computers to contain a minimum of two SSDs, if not more. Such configurations can be traced back further than SanDisk’s SSD with PATA, but that hardware is the one that made those configurations accessible.
It’s easy to reach in your pocket, pull out a mobile device of your choosing, and pull up a song you want to hear nowadays, but back in 1998, that kind of accessibility was a dream that was only starting to come true, and it all started with the MPMan. The Eiger MPMan F10 is widely considered to be the world’s first solid state portable digital audio player (or portable MP3 player).
The MPMan was first developed by South Korean tech company SaeHan Information Systems for distribution in Asia in 32 MB and 64 MB models. Eventually, it was also imported to North America by Eiger Labs and rebranded to the Eiger MPMan F10 and F20. In original models, the flash memory could be expanded, though the F10 had to be sent to the manufacturer to be upgraded from 32MB to 64MB. The F20 could be upgraded by SmartMedia flash memory cards.
In both cases, if the user could convert their music into MP3s, they could then load that music onto the MPMan through a docking station with a parallel port. This was groundbreaking as far as music storage and listening went. At the time, MP3 players weren’t widespread. Many enthusiasts still had CD players like the Sony Discman as the most portable and popular option available.
The MPMan presented an opportunity that would catch on like wildfire throughout the tech industry. Numerous companies over the next years would rush to create their own consumer portable media players. It eventually led to the iPod, which served as a precursor to the iPhone among a variety of other form-factor options like the screenless iPod Shuffle. Other groups also tried to advantage, such as Microsoft with the Zune MP3 players and SanDisk with the Sansa.
More than that, MP3 players like the MPMan lit a fire under the music industry, especially as programs and online shops caught on that allowed users to download singles and load them onto these devices. There would be contentious debate for years over digital music rights (some of which still remained contentious in 2023), but the MPMan started a revolution, and it would lead to changing the way we think about music interaction and storage for decades to come.
Back in the 1990s, having a CD player, Bluetooth connectivity in your car to be able to connect mobile devices, or connectivity to online services like Spotify wasn’t a given. If you had a tape deck, as many cars of the time did, you could only play cassette tapes or the AM/FM radio. That is… unless you had a special little device: a CD cassette adapter. With this, you could plug a wire into your favorite CD player, slip the cassette tape on the other end of the wire into your tape player, and play any CD you desired. At the time, it was a revolutionary workaround that allowed millions of drivers to enjoy CDs on old and otherwise outdated hardware.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd (which eventually became Panasonic) filed patents for the first models of the CD cassette adapter in 1997, which were then accepted in 1998. Panasonic would produce the first commercially available versions of the product, but once it did, the floodgates opened. Numerous tech companies and third-party accessory companies worked to produce their own version of the cassette adapter, with RCA being a particularly prominent contributor to products in the market.
The idea behind the operation of the CD cassette adapter was quite simple. You plugged a 3.5mm audio jack into your CD player, put the cassette tape in your tape player, leaving room for the wire, and then started the tape like normal. You would then turn on your CD player and start the CD, the result being playing your CDs through your vehicle sound system (although you could also do this with a tape deck on home sound system).
The CD cassette adapter was undoubtedly a podunk solution to the transference from cassette tapes to CD in popular audio formats. However, it was a widespread one, as evidenced by the sheer amount of versions out of numerous tech companies of the time. It allowed CDs and CD players to continue to their rise to prominence without leaving many audio enthusiasts behind in the transition. If only that wire wasn’t often 10-feet long and entirely unwieldy…
