Why did they become so immensely popular?

Video games are very popular and the reasons for this should be pretty obvious. What is not so obvious is why playing with a console is such a popular option. This approach has clearly won out over playing at an arcade or on your PC but the question is just why is this? The answer has a lot to do with the technology that is available.

The reason that video games are so popular is that they are a lot of fun, this part is easy to explain. Somewhat more difficult to explain is why gaming consoles became so popular instead of games that were played on a PC. The main reason in the early days is that few people had PC's. When Nintendo introduced their console in the mid eighties computers were not all that widely used, it wasn't until the mid nineties when the internet gave people a reason to buy one that most people started to own a computer.

Even now when virtually everybody does have a computer gaming consoles remain very popular, the reason for this is that they do offer several advantages over playing games on a PC. The main one is that it is virtually impossible to play games that involve more than one player on a PC, they are just not set up for this. It is much more practical with a gaming console. Since a big part of gaming is the social activity the fact that you can play multi-player games a lot more easily is a major benefit.

The other big advantage that a gaming console offers is that there are no compatibility issues. When you try to play games on your computer you have to make sure that you have it set up in just the right way for the game to work properly. This can be a real hassle and in some cases is not even possible. With a gaming console there are no issues, since the game is designed to work on the console you know it will work. All you have to do is plug the console in and start playing.

Because the games are being written specifically for a console they can be much more sophisticated than they would be for a PC which is another reason for the popularity. PC's have a variety of different hardware, if you were to try to write a game that could be played on all of these different systems your default would have to be the slowest one. When you write a game for a console however you know exactly what the hardware is capable of, that means that you can create a game that takes advantage of it to its fullest. The result is that games that are of a much higher quality than anything that you could get for your computer.