5 HUGELY Important Video Game Consoles (You Haven't Heard Of)

It’s quite well-known in gaming circles that Nintendo were responsible for the creation of Sony’s PlayStation, every generation of which has outsold their equivalent creations bar the Wii.

Having contracted their fellow Japanese electronics manufacturer to create a CD add-on for the SNES, they pulled out of the deal and went to Dutch company Philips instead. Said add-on would never come to fruition and Sony would use the technology to enter the market themselves, rising to the top of it whilst their counterparts stuck rigidly to cartridges for another decade and a half.

Philips would also make use of their work to launch the CD-i, but all that remains known for today is a slew of absolutely abysmal Zelda knock-offs.

The first move to introduce the compact disc to a gaming console did not come from either party, however. Instead it came from another Japanese company bubbling on the edge of the marketplace throughout the late 80s and early 90s – Hudson Soft (now owned by Konami).

Hudson released no fewer than seventeen different varieties of their Turbografx-16 console, otherwise known as the PC Engine, between 1987 and 1994, undoubtedly confusing customers that they were already deceiving by using the number 16 when they had just an 8-bit CPU. A CD attachment for one of these was worked into the 1989 release of the Turbografx-CD, the first console to make use of the disc medium that would become ubiquitous across music, films and games.