A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go!
That beautiful feature fell away when consoles joined the Internet. Suddenly there were servers to sign in to and updates to download and a whole bunch of hoops to jump through before you even got to play a game. Now, those early generations of Internet-connected consoles are becoming retro, and that’s introduced a whole new set of problems now the infrastructure is dying or dead. Boot up and play? You must be joking!
I think the part that people miss when they make this argument is that consoles have always been cut down PCs. The NES and the Apple II both used MOS 6502 processors for instance. The main difference is how improved hardware capabilities have lended to software generalization across hardware platforms, which hasn’t been unique to the console market.
I don’t think that’s really so. The difference between game consoles and desktop computers historically has been the input peripherals and also the dedicated hardware built into said consoles specifically for video game functionality. These were architectures built specifically around video games, not general purpose computing. It’s not good enough to say that an Apple II and an NES have the “same” processor when the Apple lacks the hardware tile mapping functionality, independent background layer support, hardware sprite transparency, screen scrolling registers, etc. Nobody figured out how to hook an actual NES controller up to a home computer until much later, either. The NES could also have the Zapper, the Power Pad, the robot. Not so much on your PC or Apple. Hell, the original Apple 2 barely even supported color.
But regardless of all of that, editing to clarify my main point here: The Apple II is not a PC. It is a home computer, but it’s not an x86 PC.
The 386 had just come out around the time of the American launch of the NES in 1986, and remember that the Famicom hardware itself dates back to 1983. The 286 was the hot ticket at that time and I don’t doubt a 286 machine would be better at running your spreadsheets, but certainly not action video games. They’re different machines that are purpose built for different applications.
Home computers desperately tried and failed to match the inherent gaming capability of consoles for quite some time. Remember that it was a big deal at the time that John Carmack managed to make “NES-like” scrolling happen on an IBM PC clone in Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement (the foundation of which later went on to become the Commander Keen games) but its scrolling was still multipixel and choppy and ugly compared to what the humble NES could do in its sleep. (One exception to this may have been the Amiga, which had rather Genesis-like architecture including hardware sprite support.)
It really took the Pentium to get the PC platform in particular in parity with consoles of its era, and that was accomplished through raw computing power up until the time that dedicated gaming oriented graphics cars became prevalent. At that rate the PC was “better” in several respects, see also the entire debacle with trying to get Doom working acceptably on the various 16 bit and early 32 bit consoles, but at the cost of… literally, cost. A PS1 cost $299 on launch day in 1995. A similarly capable PC, not just any random budget desktop, would run you somewhere between $2500 and $3500 in total.
Things got flip-flopped by the time of the advent of the original XBox, and certainly by the 360 and the PS4 on upwards. Desktop computing power had become cheap and accessible enough that it was trivial even at the time to just grab a processor and GPU of the same architecture and capability as was in the OG XBox (or much better!) and just slap it in your computer. In fact, by that time I already had.
I’m a bit confused by your argument. Home computers from Commodore, Coleco, Apple, and Atari all had controller ports and many were compatible with those that came with their console offerings. Coleco even had an Adam add-on for the ColecoVision. That doesn’t even begin to touch on what Sharp was up to in Japan or the MSX line.
Also, you are a bit off in your pricing, and forgetting that PlayStations didn’t include TVs in the box:
Ooh, a 486-66. Yeah, you’ll be playing a ton of 3D games on that… I owned a Pentium 60 back when — yes, even one of the ones with the floating point division bug — and it could play Doom very nicely but couldn’t quite hack it for Quake and without some manner of hardware acceleration it was absolutely inadequate for any of the PS1 game ports that came out shortly thereafter.
The crux of it is that I think you’re doing quite a bit of conflation here between the PC (i.e. the Intel x86 compatible platform) and home computers, which indeed historically used all kinds of different architectures. Yes, the MSX and Commodores and Amiga and Sharp X68000 and all the rest of them were things that existed, and I find all of those equally interesting as old consoles because by and large they were all doing their own things and were not just yet another PC clone.
The Playstation beginning from the 4 on upwards and the XBox since its inception (literally “Direct X Box” initially) meanwhile are just low-rent x86 PCs. Using parts and hardware anyone could buy and put togther, if they felt like it. To each their own, but I don’t see any appeal there at all.
And for the record: Yes, I am well aware that the oodles of 8 bit home micros from the '80s and so forth had various joysticks and gamepads. I owned several and I still have a few of them. As far as game input goes, of them are without exception absolute crap compared to a simple NES pad.