Trigger Happy
AFTERWORD
Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation2 console, which launched in the U.S. and Europe in late 2000, did not represent the instant big bang that some were expecting, and only served to demonstrate the point that an increase in processing power does not instantly entail better gameplay. It took until the summer 2001 launch of state-of-the-art driving game Gran Turismo 3 for PlayStation2 really to take off in sales terms. After the death of Sega’s Dreamcast console in the spring, when the venerable Japanese hardware giant cut its losses and reinvented itself as exclusively a software designer, 2001 became notable mostly for excited anticipation of more new consoles—Microsoft’s Xbox console, which launched in the U.S. on November 15, 2001, and Nintendo’s GameCube, which arrived three days later. And yet, despite all the next-generation hype, the most successful videogame phenomenon of the new millennium was running on hardware by now nearly twelve years old: the Game Boy.
This phenomenon was PokÉmon, the game of nurturing and training pocket monsters that became an
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