Visit here frequently for comparison media, screen shots and audio samples for the games the video game market has passed by.  Console History compares popular journalist written histories such as  'Game Over' and 'The Ultimate History of Video Games' with game journalism from the time as well as newer interviews available online.  The Game Lists will contrast everything with whatever facts the games bring to the table.

     To comment on the new website, request a comparison or an old segment to be revisited, check out the Forums link and choose which forum suits your interests. You may also send an e-mail, but priority will always be placed to those gamers who actually take part in discussion on the topic.  Otherwise keep an eye on the Updates page for what has been recently uploaded.  Gamepilgrimage is only as thorough as conversation between gamers, and stands as a challenge to journalists and executives who write history exclusively from the perspective of sales.

     The games in the Library page and the Notable Games list will be updated as their release year is covered in Console History.  All screenshots, videos and audio samples are taken from the actual consoles by the exact same video capture device.  The color counts listed for each screenshot have been tested for reliability.  Modern software has made it possible to correctly capture how many colors are produced by the consoles' outputs.  These color counts stand as a corrective to the idea that consumers could see the actual chip outputs on a standard definition television in the 1980s or '90s.  The console outputs are selected based on the highest quality common to all consoles available to consumers at the time.  This will generally break down to Composite output for consoles released before 1993 and S-Video until the new millennium.

     Composite Color Count Discussion    

     It is historically true that debate over the importance of maximum color counts affected the 16-bit consoles more than any other generation, just as it is true that game consoles and their games targeted consumers.  The vast majority of consumers in the US did not have televisions with RGB or S-Video inputs by 1992.  So we can assume that the Composite outputs represent a "best case" scenario for what consumers could actually see at the time.

     This approach allows for the subjectivity by which games were, or were not, judged "more colorful" to be measured using standard statistical analysis. As a less pointed side effect one can see how many colors can actually be counted by modern software and subjectively compare that to how many colors are apparent to the human eye.  No standard multiple exists between say 45 colors from the chip output to 61000+ colors from the Composite outputs. Based on these numbers however, one of three conclusions may be observed as more software is "polled" for Composite color counts. Each systems' game library may be shown to have roughly the same range of colors actually displayed. Some systems may be proven to generally display more colors than other systems by a consistent multiple. Each system may be shown to display totally different color count ranges with no obvious correlation to other systems.

     As it stands today it appears as though the TG16, Genesis and SNES library typically output colors in the same range.  Scenes in the low 1,000s represent static screens of mostly one or two colors for text and a flat color background.  Whereas screenshots counted in the 100,000s are typically full bore action sequences with detailed backgrounds, more than three character sprites with simultaneous special effect sprites. Most gameplay related scenes linger in the 20,000-80,000 range. No game so far displays more than about 150,000 Composite colors by this method.  Other forms of compression, and video filters boost the measurable colors significantly but uniformly.  This implies that the Composite outputs of each system did in fact "normalize" the system's color outputs, but further data (not to mention other test methods) may prove otherwise.