The video game market bottomed-out in 1984. Against the odds Nintendo resuscitated things in 1985 with the NES. Like "Atari" a few years ago, "Nintendo" became synonymous with home gaming. Atari wanted that title back and hoped the Atari 7800 would be their savior.

Unlike the 5200, this new incarnation could play Atari 2600 games without an adaptor. I guess that was nice and all but it did virtually nothing to sell the system. The 2600 had been dead for two years, an eternity for a game system. The 7800 looked crude compared to the NES but Atari thought their past reputation would carry it. The 7800 never managed any impact on the gaming market, I found mine sitting on top of a dumpster if that's any indication.

The 7800 wasn't the only console to be crushed by Nintendo in the mid to late 80s. Sega's Master System was the second runner-up to the NES. Despite some outstanding titles, like Phantasy Star, it didn't make a dent in Nintendo's market share.

Sega knew their only way to win was to produce a system that absolutely blew away the NES. The 16-bit Sega Genesis was their successor to the ill-fated Master System. It was launched with an accessory called the Power Base Converter that allowed it to play the entire library of Master System games, even the obscure chip games. The Sega Genesis used the CPU from the Master System, the Z80, as a sound processor so a simple cartridge adapter did the trick. It was a good strategy for Sega, very few people owned a Master System but were aware that a few great games existed for it. The Power Base Converter gave them a some new games to try while the Genesis library ramped up. Once the Master System was dead and buried, in the United States at least, support for this attachment was dropped.

Nintendo wasn't going to be left behind and released the 16-bit Super Nintendo two years after the Genesis. It was a long two years, the Genesis had gathered a ton of momentum and many wondered if Nintendo could catch-up. Nintendo almost certainly considered whether to make the Super Nintendo backwards compatible. By this time the NES established a game catalog larger than anyone else ever had, could they really leave it all behind? The Super Nintendo CPU itself was backwards compatible the original NES CPU but the video chips were not. This is something that the hardware wizards at Nintendo could have worked out but they decided against it.  

If hardware compatibility wasn't an obstacle then what was Nintendo's motivation? Their concern was likely that if the NES was alive then publishers would still release games for it rather than shift to the Super Nintendo. Famicom versions of Final Fantasy II and III were sitting in Japan just jonesing to be translated. Had the Super Nintendo been backwards compatible it's possible, perhaps likely, we would have seen these two games in the states. The Super Nintendo could have been in the unenviable position of having to compete not only against the Genesis but against it's little brother as well.  

The next wave of systems represented a setback for backwards compatibility. When early pictures of the Saturn surfaced, rumors abounded that it was backwards compatible with the Genesis because of the cartridge slot. I personally recall hearing (uninformed) grumblings that the Saturn was a Genesis/Sega CD/32X combination or at least backwards compatible with them.

The Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 weren't backwards compatible either. The Playstation one goes without saying I guess. Nintendo already established with the Super Nintendo that they weren't interested in consoles being backwards compatible. I'm sure some saw the d-pad on the controller and experienced a fleeting hope that Nintendo made some kind of dream system that played it all. Keep the faith, I'm sure some pirate system that does is in the works.

While all these systems battled something was brewing in the background. In the mid-90s computers were getting powerful enough to emulate classic consoles and arcade games. Yeah, it seems like an old 33mHz Intel 386 should have been able to emulate a 6mHz game system but it wasn't until the 100+mHz Pentium that emulators became accurate. Usenet and crappy Geocities pages served as the initial distribution mechanism for the actual game roms. Even over a 28.8 modem you could download a huge collection of 8-bit games in no time (so I've heard). 16-bit emulators weren't far behind.

By 1999 a Playstation emulator called bleem! was on retail shelves. The seemingly impossible task of emulating a modern, complex system was a reality. They even figured a way for the Dreamcast to emulate the Playstation, at least a few games. Since the Dreamcast was (relatively) simple to develop for it became a target system for a slew of homegrown emulators. Sega themselves created a Genesis emulator for the Dreamcast near its final days; Nintendo created NES and N64 emulators for the Gamecube. The rise of emulation would redefine how backwards compatibility could be achieved. It also sent a clear signal to game companies that people actually wanted to play old games. If a simple, legal option wasn't in place they'd take their chances on whatever they could download from questionable sources.

That brings us back to today. The first entry in this generation's battle was the Xbox 360 which is backwards compatible with the original Xbox through emulation. The downside to the emulation approach is that some games aren't yet playable, some might never be. Every few months a new patch is released but you have to figure at some point Microsoft will stop caring about supporting this feature. I don't know Microsoft's exact reason for offering any backwards compatibility. I presume the popularity of the Halo series was a key factor. Someone looking to play the first Halo games today would be inclined to buy the newer Xbox offering since it will be around for a while.  

The Nintendo Wii, due to a similar architecture, is natively compatible with Gamecube games. It fits in perfectly with their Wii strategy. The system is aimed at families and non-traditional gamers. Having a back catalog stocked with Mario Party and Mario Kart games helps appeal to this segment. Being in third place for the previous generation means they have less to lose by offering backwards compatibility. It's not like publishers are going to forgo the Wii to develop new Gamecube games.

The Playstation 3, in the United States, offers backwards compatibility by nature of essentially having a Playstation 2 embedded inside. In Europe, and presumably down the road everywhere else, they opted for the emulation route. Of the three, Sony is the most harmed  by the strength of their previous generation console. At the time of this writing the Playstation 2 is outselling the Playstation 3 by a wide margin while the Gamecube and Xbox don't even register on the radar. It's not a big selling point to say "it can play Playstation 2 games" when everybody owns one. Therein lies the challenge for Sony. Backwards compatibility helps the Xbox 360 and Wii because their predecessors weren't a fixture in every home. The Playstation 2 outsold the Xbox by a 4:1 margin and the Gamecube by even more. Someone deciding between a Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 might reason "if I buy the Xbox 360 I can get all those Xbox games I never had for cheap." This didn't happen for the Playstation 2 because it's only initial competitor, the Dreamcast, had yet to make a significant impact. The Xbox 360 managed to get off to a much better start than Sega's final system which puts Sony in a tough position. The Playstation 3 will need some "killer apps" if it is to see the dominance of its previous incarnations. "God of War II" could have been one of those titles, but the publisher opted for a Playstation 2 release instead. Perhaps this is the exact situation Nintendo feared when they decided to rapidly kill-off the NES.



So what have we learned today? Backwards compatibility is a nice way to help launch a new system assuming you didn't own the previous generation. For the Sega Genesis, and more so the Xbox 360, it helped get the console off to a good start. Nah, it wasn't the major selling point but it brought some people in who saw it as buying two new systems in one. It didn't hurt the Playstation 2 but couldn't have been very helpful either. It's hard to imagine anyone buying a Playstation 2 that didn't already have a Playstation, at least not in the early years. For the Wii and Playstation 3 it's still a little too early to tell. As of this moment it seems to be hurting the Playstation 3 and slightly helping the Wii.

As to why do all three of today's major consoles offer backwards compatibility? Simple answer, it's what consumers want. You can thank the Playstation 2 for this. It was a widely adopted system that was backwards compatible with it's predecessor. It made backwards compatibility an expectation instead of a feature. From a consumer standpoint, there was no way Sony could break that in the Playstation 3. Although beating them to market by a year, Microsoft was really following Sony's lead. The Wii, on the other hand, definitely wasn't following anyone and was backwards compatible because it was technically simple and part of their overall vision for the console. Without great third-party support coming out of the gate they needed a way to quickly inflate the library.