Game consoles
Placed0
In a row0
Order by the year each console launched. Drag or tap it onto the line
Hardware
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Hardware
Game consoles
Order by the year each console launched. You place all 50 cards on one timeline, one at a time. You start with three lives, and ten right in a row wins a lost one back.
50
Cards
3
Lives per run
release years and dates
Ordered by
Cards only
Card reveal
How to play the game console timeline
Each card is a piece of gaming hardware, mostly home consoles and handhelds plus a few VR headsets and handheld PCs, and you place them by launch year. The manufacturer is printed under the name. One console is already on the timeline with its year visible. From then on, you pick a gap for every card. A correct pick reveals its year, and a miss moves it to its real slot and costs one of your three lives.
The deck covers the whole history of the business, from wood-grain pioneers through the cartridge wars and the disc era to today's hybrids and headsets. Generations overlap, and handhelds launched alongside home machines muddy things. Knowing a maker's own lineup is half the job, since the order within a family is usually easy; pitting rival companies' machines against each other is where it gets close. Each machine goes by its first launch anywhere, not its arrival in your country.
Want a longer game? On the deck tree you can tick this deck alongside any other one measured in release years and dates, and they shuffle into a single timeline together.
How players are doing
This deck has been played 378 times. An average run places 8.5 cards, and 74% of all placements land in the right spot. Only one run has ever placed every card.
The cards players get wrong most often:
- Analogue Pocket missed 89% of the time, usually by about 4 places
- Fairchild Channel F missed 50% of the time, usually by about 2 places
- Magnavox Odyssey missed 49% of the time, usually by about 3 places
The safest card is PlayStation 4, placed right 96% of the time.
What's in the deck
Here are 28 of the 50 cards you might be dealt, with 22 more in the deck. Their values stay hidden until you place them.
- Magnavox Odyssey Magnavox
- Fairchild Channel F Fairchild
- Intellivision Mattel
- ColecoVision Coleco
- Sega Master System Sega
- Atari 7800 Atari
- Sega Genesis Sega
- Neo Geo AES SNK
- Super Nintendo Nintendo
- Atari Jaguar Atari
- PlayStation Sony
- Virtual Boy Nintendo
- Game Boy Color Nintendo
- PlayStation 2 Sony
- Nintendo GameCube Nintendo
- Xbox Microsoft
- PlayStation Portable Sony
- Nintendo Wii Nintendo
- Nintendo 3DS Nintendo
- PlayStation Vita Sony
- Wii U Nintendo
- Xbox One Microsoft
- PlayStation VR Sony
- Nintendo Switch Lite Nintendo
- Oculus Quest Oculus
- Xbox Series X Microsoft
- Steam Deck Valve
- Meta Quest 3 Meta
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