Earlier I wrote about how “Xbox” has come to be used as a generic term for videogames. After I noticed the phenomenon once, I started to see it everywhere, like in this news article from earlier in the week:
The glamorisation of crime has been condemned by Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione, who cited everything from Xbox games to television crime dramas and Hollywood movies as “abhorrent”.
Xbox is not the first brand to rise to this position of prominence; it only dethroned PlayStation sometime within the current console generation, and in the 1990s Nintendo was king. The dominant brand changes over time, but digging into the history is difficult, as the phenomenon is rarely remarked upon and examples are hard to find with a web search. I asked the other writers at RKD what they could remember about the names people came up with for videogames in their younger years.
Evan Stubbs recalled that console platforms have always been more divided than computer platforms:
My crowd started on the Spectrum, the Commodore, the Apple, and later, the PC. We always referred to console systems by their names – “NES”, “Famicom”, “Genesis”, etc. – but games on the Mac, the Apple II and IIgs, the 286 and 386, the Spectrum and so on were all “computer games”.
Harry Milonas related his experience to growing up in a first-generation Greek family:
I’d say the generic catch-all terms are more predominant in parts of the world where English is a second language. I personally remember the days between the 8-bit and the 16-bit systems, where my parents would refer to the SNES and NES as “Nintendos”, and Mega Drive and Master System as “Segas”. My family overseas still do in some respect.
It’s funny though that I’ve never heard the PlayStation range referred to as “Sonys”, or the Xbox line as “Microsofts”. Probably due to too much non-videogame history behind those brand names.
Tristan Kalogeropoulos noted a cultural gap in naming between those who were into games and those who weren’t:
Nintendo was always the name synonymous with videogames as far back as I can recall, although as kids we were always very specific when speaking about games and their systems. It’s outsiders that like a general term.
It’s kind of like the way most refer to people as speaking “Chinese”, when in fact there are numerous languages and ethnic groupings in China – beyond the most widely known Cantonese and Mandarin.
There does seem to be a tendency for people to use more specific labels the younger they are. The children at my niece and nephew’s primary school are incredibly specific when they talk about games; if someone mentions playing a Nintendo DS, say, or a PSP, kids will interrupt to check which model they mean – “DS Lite or DSi”? – whether or not it’s relevant to the game. And it’s often noted that all the footsoldiers in the ongoing platform war between dedicated fans of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo seem to be teenagers. Perhaps the general tendency of older game enthusiasts to consider all games as simply either computer games or console games, or even “videogames” without distinction, is not so different to my father calling every videogame a “Nintendo” in the mid-90s.
I’ll leave you with this anecdote from Harry Milonas, who proves that truth is stranger than The Wizard:
I remember this one kid in primary school who’d call the NES the “Now You’re Playing With Power” – because that’s how the ads ended. Thank goodness he never saw the localised ones.
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Tags: brands, cultural, marketing, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox
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